Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
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When Crimson Desert was first announced back in 2019, it was positioned as an MMO and explicitly marketed as a kind of "spiritual successor" to BDO/BDO 2. Fast forward to now, and it's been completely reworked into a single-player, Soulslike-adjacent experience. The pivot alone says a lot.
Pearl Abyss has a clear pattern at this point: they keep trying to branch out into whatever genre they think will make them the next Blizzard-style mega-studio, instead of doubling down on what they actually excel at. The first big example was Shadow Arena in 2020, which was transparently chasing the PUBG/battle-arena craze that peaked years earlier. Nobody played it. Even when they gave out free keys, peak concurrency barely cracked 5,000 players. When it finally launched on Steam a few months later, peak users were around 900 (yes, nine hundred) and it never recovered before being shut down entirely.
So what lesson did Pearl Abyss take from that failure? Apparently none. Instead of reassessing their strategy, they just went trend-hunting again. Soulslikes blow up after Elden Ring? Great! Let's morph Crimson Desert into that. Five years of development later, it's finally about to ship, and given the history here, it's hard not to expect a buggy, unfocused mess that doesn't fully satisfy anyone.
Then came the Palworld-style monster-collecting survival craze around 2022-2023, and surprise! - Pearl Abyss announces DokeV, their own take on that genre. This has become their trademark move: copy whatever's hot, but release it years after the moment has passed, when the market is already saturated or burned out.
On top of that, they picked up the EVE IP, which has been bleeding money for years. From what's been reported, they've been quietly shopping it around to cut their losses, and now it looks like one of their development studios may be shutting down, very likely the one tied to EVE.
All of this is just depressing, because Black Desert Online still has, by a wide margin, the best combat system any MMO has ever had. It's not even a close comparison. And yet, instead of building intelligently around that strength, Pearl Abyss keeps making one short-sighted decision after another, chasing trends they're always late to and neglecting the one game that actually proves what they're capable of.
