TERA‘s always been in sort of a weird spot in the West. From a bustling beta and launch month in 2012 to nearly dead servers just a few months later, the game’s future was uncertain. Fast forward to today and it’s one of the biggest free to play MMORPGs in the West, thanks to its 2013 shift to free to play and reasonable monetization.
Anyone who played TERA for any prolonged period during its subscription days knows exactly how badly the game was doing. Server populations had already dwindled to a fraction of their previous numbers just three to four months after launch and content updates were slow. Anyone could see that if it didn’t shift to free to play, it wouldn’t survive another year.
Less than a year after launch, TERA went free to play and changed to TERA: Rising — and has done spectacularly.
From the outside, TERA just seems like what some people call a “Korean grinder”; and in some ways it is. But past that is a community of oddballs looking not only to compete with one another, but to have fun. It has the very real ability to draw in certain types of people and never let go. I can say without a doubt I am one of those people.
TERA is now Steam’s biggest MMORPG, as of its Steam launch earlier this month. That may not seem like much because the current MMORPG selection on Steam is lacking, but at the time of writing TERA is also within the top 15 games on the platform with over 19,000 players logged on and playing via Steam alone. Non-Steam players are surely more numerous.
With the above all in mind, I want to congratulate and thank En Masse Entertainment for continuing to support the game and push its presence in the West forward. What was once considered to be a lost cause of a game is now a huge success, and that is something to brag about.
