Is Nexon Cancelling Moonlight Blade?

I’ve played Moonlight Blade quite extensively. Both Wiggy and I had a series going where we played through until level 40-something, if I recall.
The game was stunning, offering us beautiful character creation tools, gorgeous scenery, and pretty engaging combat.
I know that there are a lotta people that are.. disinterested in these kinds of games purely because they’re not into martial arts and thus the setting just doesn’t appeal to them.
But to those of you that are.. well, I know how much you’re looking forward to this.

Now, before I get into this video, I do want to state that you can still play Moonlight Blade in Chinese right now.
To play it though I do recommend using a VPN – I personally use ExitLag which I link to in the description of every video. This helps reduce lag and makes the game much more manageable.

So, back in 2018, Nexon revealed that they had acquired publishing rights to Moonlight Blade in North America and Europe.
Naturally, people were ecstatic, and mass hysteria ensued. “We’re finally getting Moonlight Blade!,” “It’s finally coming, they’re actually doing it!”
People had a 100% confirmed Western release – at last, after years of seeing the game and longing after it.
The one issue we found was that it was Nexon publishing it, and Nexon has a bit of a… well, a long history of making their games heavily pay-to-win.
But that wouldn’t be too big of an issue for a lot of people because they’d still be able to play the game fully translated in English.
Even I figured, regardless of how Nexon planned on monetizing the game, it would probably be worth trying because the game is a lot of fun, even if they opted to go the pay-to-win route.

Fast-forward to the end of 2019, Nexon has not updated us in any capacity as to the progress made localizing Moonlight Blade.
However, Nexon did announce the closure of several North American subsidiaries, such as Nexon M, and revealed that they are in fact cancelling a large sum of their games.
The closure of subsidiaries is unfortunate, as there is going to be quite a few people without a means of supporting their families while they look for a new means of employment.
The cancellation of games is unfortunate for both the teams working on them, and for us as consumers. Because that means the games they’ve been working on won’t see the light of day, meaning we won’t ever be able to play them.
But also that the teams that have spent months, or even years working on them will now no longer have a stable game to work on.
Nexon stated the reasoning for this is that they’re merging all of their mobile, PC and console teams into one single unit – cutting costs and also the team size by quite a sizable margin.
I spoke about this in greater detail in my “Peria Chronicles is cancelled” video, so I won’t rehash my thoughts in yet another video, but I hope you all find a new home that appreciates your work!

Regarding Moonlight Blade, Nexon has made their intentions known for a long while now: They aren’t very concerned with PC MMORPGs – or, heck, even PC games in general anymore.
South Korea knows the mobile market is where the money’s at, Nexon included. And even though they cancelled a sizable number of mobile games, this bodes significantly worse for PC games, such as Moonlight Blade.
No mention of the game in over a year? Absolutely no information released at all, and a large focus-shift to the mobile market?
I’m not claiming that Moonlight Blade is cancelled. I’m merely stating what a lot of us are thinking: And that is that we might not end up getting Moonlight Blade in the West anymore.
Especially not with Nexon’s ongoing internal issues.
Now, there is the possibility of me being very, very wrong. Nexon might not be cancelling the game and they might have made quite extensive progress towards releasing the game over here.
But I just don’t see that being the case.

Moonlight Blade was supposed to give us fans of the genre a place to fly through the air on swords, challenge one another to kung-fu battles and make beautiful, Asian-themed characters.
And while we technically still can due to being able to play the Chinese version, I doubt we’ll ever be able to officially in the West.
But, there are other games in the works that may get picked up like the upcoming Justice Online MMORPG, which, honestly, looks beautiful as well.