Publisher

Unlike most MMORPGs TERA servers are not maintained by single company. Developer Bluehole has licensed game to several companies that maintain game on their servers.

Reason for that might be that Bluehole Studio was founded to develop TERA and had no experience, money or global reach to offer game on all continents.

Bluehole gave rights to TERA in Korea and Japan, where the game was first launched in 2011, to NHN (Hangame). Studio itself founded En Masse Entertainment to maintain game in North America. Publishing rights in most European countries, Arab countries and Turkey were awarded to Frogster Interactive, already bought by Gameforge, which name Frogster operations took later. North American, European and Taiwan servers were opened in 2012.

TERA was opened in China 2014 by Kunlun Games. However, Mainland Chinese servers were closed in 2016.

Russian version opened in 2015 by Destiny Development.

Game was also out for Playstation 4 and Xbox One in 2018. Console versions were handled by En Masse. Later Krafton/Bluehole closed EME and took publishing of console versions to themselves. North American PC version was given to Gameforge.

Southeast Asia servers were opened in November 1st 2018 by Playwith SEA. SEA servers are intended for Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.

European publisher Gameforge has bought rights to TERA in Southeast Asia from Playwith and is taking over those servers in 2020.

Gameforge opened Russian server in June 2020. In November 2020 Gameforge took over the NA servers.

Japan and Korea situation goes like this (info accordingly LordMurasama on old EME forums):
 * Hangame (NHN Entertainment) was originally a huge PC game portal in Korea and they also had subsidiaries in other regions. Back in the 2014-2015 timeframe, Hangame decided to shift primary focus away from PC MMO's to mobile games (because that is where the venture capital and investment money was going to for development and portals); this is also why K-TERA shutdown for a short period since they were originally published by NHN Hangame in Korea.

Nexon picked up the publishing rights of TERA in Korea in January 2016. As of 2021 Bluehole/Krafton took over self-publishing TERA in Korea.


 * J-TERA was published by the Japanese subsidiary of Hangame (which continued handling PC and mobile games). Hangame Japan is pretty much mostly a portal now so they continue to front-end J-TERA while the company actually servicing the game is Pmang (previously known as Game On which absorbed Neowiz Japan; a subsidiary of Neowiz Korea). Pmang is actually the name of Neowiz Korea's portal site (but is also used in Japan). Hangame runs other promos and associated portal related events (which is probably where differences are seen depending on which front end a player looks at).

(JTERA website is IP blocked, you can't even read their portal from outside Japan.)

Original published in Taiwan was OMG Digital Entertainment, which closed the game in November 2015. According to the official announcement, an agreement could not be made with developer Bluehole Studio, and a new publisher will operate TERA. OMG mentioned it will preserve player data for the new publisher. Since 2015 Taiwanese published is MangoT5 (https://tera.mangot5.com whose parent company is HappyTuk).