Riders of Icarus

Autopsy Report

Riders of Icarus solved one of the great unfulfilled fantasies of MMO gaming: taming and riding dragons into aerial combat. Then it wrapped that fantasy in the most generic MMORPG it could find and hoped nobody would notice. They noticed.

Developed by Korean studio WeMade and published in the West by VALOFE (after transitioning from Nexon), Riders of Icarus launched on Steam in July 2016 with a genuinely unique hook. The mount-taming system let players capture and ride hundreds of fantastical creatures — including massive dragons — by leaping onto their backs mid-flight and breaking them like aerial broncos. It was thrilling, visually spectacular, and unlike anything else in the MMO market. The 7,068 positive reviews frequently cite the mount system as one of the best features in any MMORPG.

But mounts need a game to ride through, and the game surrounding them was a paint-by-numbers Korean MMORPG. Tab-targeting combat. Linear quest chains of “kill 10 boars.” A gear-score treadmill endgame. Pay-to-win enhancement items in the cash shop. Every complaint Western players had been lodging against imported Korean MMOs since 2010 applied in full force to Riders of Icarus. The 3,635 negative reviews (34%) document this exhaustively.

The 66% Mixed review score sits painfully close to the 70% “Mostly Positive” threshold — close enough to tantalize but not close enough to escape the Mixed label’s deterrent effect on the store page. With 10,703 total reviews at 90.2 per month and an estimated 1-2 million owners, the game attracted substantial initial interest. The dragon hook worked as marketing. It just couldn’t work as retention.

The publisher transition from Nexon to VALOFE was the death signal the community recognized. Nexon, for all its controversies, was a major publisher with resources. VALOFE was a smaller operation that typically managed games in their decline phase — a hospice publisher. Under VALOFE, content updates slowed, communication decreased, and the already-thinning community accelerated its departure.

Guild Wars 2’s Path of Fire expansion (September 2017) added insult to injury by introducing its own mount system — one that was specifically praised for making mounts mechanically interesting and deeply integrated into gameplay. Riders of Icarus’ core differentiator was being done better by a competitor with a decade of content and a polished combat system. When your one unique feature gets absorbed by a superior product, there’s nothing left to stand on.

Key Failure Factors

• One Great Feature, Generic Everything Else: The mount system was genuinely innovative — 7,068 positive reviews confirm it. But combat, questing, and endgame were generic Korean MMO fare that Western players had seen (and rejected) dozens of times. One feature couldn’t carry the full MMO experience.

• Publisher Downgrade: The transition from Nexon to VALOFE correlated with accelerated decline. From an estimated peak of thousands of concurrent players to 1 current player, the publisher change signaled reduced investment that became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

• Saturated F2P MMO Market: Launching in 2016 against Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, Black Desert Online, and dozens of other F2P MMOs, Riders of Icarus needed more than one differentiator. The 1-2M owner count shows people tried it; the 1 current player count shows nobody stayed.

• 66% — The Wrong Side of Mostly Positive: At 66% positive, the game carried the “Mixed” label permanently. Just 4 percentage points from “Mostly Positive,” this gap kept the game out of Steam’s recommendation algorithms and added a persistent warning to the store page.

Lessons for Developers

1. One great feature can’t save a mediocre whole. The mount-taming system was praised universally. Everything else was criticized universally. An MMO is a holistic experience — a great mount system in a generic MMO is like a gourmet dessert after a bad meal: memorable but not enough to bring you back.

2. Publisher transitions signal death to observant players. When a game moves from a major publisher to a maintenance-mode publisher, the community reads the writing on the wall. MMO players invest time expecting long-term support; a publisher downgrade destroys that confidence.

3. The Korean MMO formula needs aggressive Western adaptation. Korean MMOs that succeed in the West (Black Desert, Lost Ark) adapt for Western preferences. Those that port the Korean experience unchanged — tab-targeting, linear quests, gear-score treadmills — consistently fail. The 66% Mixed score reflects a Western audience tired of the formula.

Related Deaths

• Bless Online — Another Korean MMO that launched in the West with hype around specific features and died when the generic foundation couldn’t sustain interest.
• Revelation Online — F2P Korean MMO that launched around the same time with similar Mixed reviews and population decline.
• ArcheAge — Korean MMO with innovative features (naval combat, player housing) undermined by pay-to-win monetization, following the same pattern of good ideas in generic wrappers.