It has been confirmed that Neople, a subsidiary of Nexon, has reassigned a large portion of the development team for its AAA action-adventure game “The First Berserker: Khazan,”, which launched ambitiously in March last year but underperformed commercially.

According to the gaming industry on the 8th, Neople held an internal briefing this afternoon and informed employees of the decision.

“Khazan” launched globally in March last year and at one point reached nearly 30,000 concurrent players on PC, but sales later declined and ultimately fell below market expectations.

With this measure, a significant number of the roughly 100 developers on the Khazan team have been reassigned internally to a transition unit called the “R Team.”

While Neople stated that this does not mean the Khazan development team has been dissolved, DLC releases and potential ports to other platforms that were initially expected are now effectively uncertain.

A Nexon official stated, “As the roadmap of the large-scale Khazan project has entered its final stages, we decided to separate personnel into those who will focus on completing the remaining tasks and those who will be reassigned to other projects that require concentrated organizational and human resources.”

The official added, “We plan to actively support the reassignment of personnel who gained expertise in completing a global AAA title through the Khazan project, so they can apply their experience and capabilities to other projects.”

Nooooooo, whyyy? :( The game is so good and it did so well on paper. What’s with all these constant studio closures after such little time to prove themselves? Just another symptom of a sick game development industry, I guess.