Hello everyone,

I emailed Smilegate yesterday with some stats – regarding how many people visit the website etc.

I asked them to give us an official response to whether Turfbattles will be coming back.

Here’s the response:

Dear TB fans

We really appreciate your keen interest about TB.

We are sure that TB will be serviced again in US version.
Unfortunately we cannot tell you when we exactly start to open TB service in US at the moment.
When we are able to give the information or press release to you, I’ll send it to you.

Again we thank you very much for your interests.
Hope to see you soon in TB.

Best regards

Smilegate Team

You can discuss this in this forum thread: http://www.turfbattles.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=313

Interesting article found by Giga at http://www.koreagamewatch.com/wp/2010/09/13/smile-gate-knocks-the-gate-to-publishers/

Interesting bits have been highlighted

A star developer of China-capturing FPS Cross Fire, Smile Gate now breaks into the monopolistic online game publishing market. On September 10, Smile Gate informed that its brand new publishing and sourcing division, led by pre-NHN Investment (NHN’s venture capital subsidiary) director Park, Jung-Pil, will go into hunting online games of any genre, be it casual or MMORPG. Smile Gate had already acquired the publishing rights for e-Magic’s MMORPG Sephiroth and laid the foundation as a service company. Hereupon, whether this medium-sized promising developer will become a successful publisher draws public attention.

Director Park, originally one of Cowell venture capitalists, vertically rose into a star publisher after launching Special Force at Neowiz and Dragonfly, Sudden Attack at CJ Internet, and FPS games at NHN. Such fickle movement among rival companies game him disgrace  – “migrant.” However, such stigma did not matter for Smile Gate’s urgent metamorphosis into a publishing company: All Smile Gate needed was Park’s experiences and intuitions accumulated from publishing FPS masterpieces. That is, Smile Gate had to seize back the torn apart Cross Fire benefit to China-publishing Tencent and Global-publishing Neowiz Games.

Besides a countermovement to the publishers’ oligarchy, transformation into a publisher is a part of Smile Gate’s long-term (namely 4 to 5 years) master plan. In order to diversify its Cross Fire-dependent revenue structure, Smile Gate decided to source the game developing functions. Recently, Smile Gate acquired My New Children, a developer of My New Café serviced at NHN, into its subsidiary. Further acquisition of Go! Fishing’s developing team and renewal of Sephiroth will pile up know-hows for future product development. Smile Gate’s steps resemble the past growth of Dragonfly and Gamehi, now major companies grown on the basis of a single hit (Special Force and Sudden Attack, respectively) – except that both the games were successful in domestic market. Here, popularity in Korea remains a pending question for Smile Gate’s next big leap.

This confirms that Smilegate are well under way with development on their games. Whether we’ll see any specific news relating to Turfbattles soon or not is another thing unfortunately.

As I didn’t hear any reply from Smilegate last week, I emailed them on Friday asking for any update. They replied this morning.

The only news is that they are still sorting things out their end, and for us to be patient basically.

I wish I could give you a better update, but that’s all I have.

We’ve added a forum games section to the forum – if you want something to do, go have a browse around there!

Also, a few members are getting the wiki back up at http://wiki.turfbattles.co.uk and i’m sure they’d appreciate your help!

Aeriagames has removed the entire Turfbattles forum, website and wiki from their servers.

It looks like this is officially the end of Turfbattles for Aeriagames.

If you know of any players who had not signed up to the forums at turfbattles.co.uk, tell them they have a home here now that the Aeriagames site is down.

As I said in my previous post, I will post an update in regard to the game as soon as I get one.

On Friday June 18th, 2010, the Aeria Games Turf Battles servers were taken down.

Now we’re in the week following the Aeria Games Turf Battles closure, we hope to continue our conversations with Smilegate.

We’re going to have to play the waiting game now. The ball is in their court – we’ve just got to wait for them to make a reply. This could happen any time from now onwards.

I’ll post on the forum and the website as soon as I get any further correspondance from Smilegate.

Until then, notify all the players you know to sign up to the forums and post their interest in the game. Without a substantial amount of support, we won’t be able to get the game back.

Currently, this is how the support for Turfbattles looks:

Total signups to the forum as of 21st June 2010: 93

Average daily views on the site: 210

Breakdown of views by continent:

Asia: 66.5%
Europe: 20.5%
America: 13%

As far as i’m aware, none of the asian players have signed up to the forum or posted their interest in donating to the game.

Here’s a message for the Chinese players:
如果你想要玩TurfBattles,那么就来论坛注册吧。