Valofe Announces Closure Of MMORPG Kritika: Zero

Kritika is cursed when it comes to global releases. Every company that has released it, that was not the original developer, has gotten the idea that "they can fix it," so made significant changes to the game. Although in every case, they were very wrong. It was fine as it originally was, it was just a niche game, if they just left it alone, and released the final version of Reboot, with minor well thought out adjustments, it would still likely be active, and cost them far less than their efforts to completely remake the game would have. Once Kritika was no longer one of their listed top games, which was around November 2024, they just largely left it alone, so people watching it, have been expecting this announcement for months already.

This identifies the main issue I have with Valofe these days. They used to be just life support for dead Korean online games, where they would leave them as they were, then just cycle through some in-game events, and cash shop offerings every so often. Although starting about two years ago, they got it in their heads that they can be the developer for all their games, and right now, they have over twenty of them. There's no way a company their size can actively develop over twenty games, so they only focus on the two, or three making them the most money. Although beyond that, as a developer, they just suck, as a common thread I've seen in the games they've altered, is they add more grind, pay to win, and bugs. All you have to do is look at their launcher, which unless has improved SIGNIFICANTLY since I last looked at it, is easily the worst game launcher out there. People often accused them of using it to crypto mine, as the damn thing is so badly coded, it tended to consume about 40% of your CPU, and GPU while it was running, which makes it more demanding than likely most of their games.


Also please note that Kritika was effectively removed from Steam back in August 2024, so that had nothing to do with the shutdown notice. According to Valofe, some people were abusing the Steam refund policy, Valofe wasn't happy about that, so removed it from download on Steam. This also seemed to mark their general soured view of releasing on Steam, as one of their current focused games, MU Legend:EVO, has not been released to Steam, even though it had been released six months ago already. Then near as I can tell, since August 2024, they have not added any games to Steam.


Another thing is that the basic history, and possible future of Kritika for global releases is that first En Masse picked it up as a publisher. Next the original developer, ALLM, took over. After that ALLM seemed to have encounter financial difficulties, so they sold the company to Com2uS, which of course included all their games, like Kritika. After that, Com2uS sold all the ALLM games to Valofe. The only region that seemed to receive Kritika Zero well, was China, and Valofe just put out a press release that they partnered with a Chinese game developer to work on one, or more future games in the Kritika IP for PC, although it's possible these may be only aimed at the Chinese market. There were similar talks from about a year back, where they were looking to partner with a Chinese mobile game developer to make new Kritika mobile games, I can't remember if they referenced the same Chinese company.