Riders of Icarus

Riders of Icarus was a free-to-play fantasy MMORPG built around one very specific idea: tame the creatures of the world and fight from their backs, mid-air included. Korean studio WeMade developed it, launched it at home as Icarus Online in 2014, and brought it West in July 2016 under Nexon, where it passed a million accounts within months. The Western service shut down on May 15, 2025, so it's a game that only gets talked about in the past tense now.

Taming was the heart of the game and the one thing that set it apart from any other Korean theme park. Almost anything that moved could be captured —bosses included— through a reflex-based minigame: wear the beast down, climb on, and hold on through the sequence until it was sealed. The payoff was a collection of more than three hundred mounts and familiars, from horses and wolves to griffins and dragons, with every flying mount carrying its own set of airborne combat skills.

Everything built around that system was far more conventional: five classes, zone-by-zone progression, quest chains and dungeons, with ground combat that was competent but short on personality. The overall feel was that of a classic Korean MMORPG with a flight engine and a collector's itch bolted on — and it was that itch, going out to hunt the one mount you were missing, that kept people logging in.

It was pure free-to-play from the Western launch on: a free download on Steam and on the publisher's own client, with no subscription and no box price. The money came from a shop selling cosmetics, mounts, enhancement seals, inventory expansions and random boxes, plus optional founder packs during the Nexon years. Nothing was strictly required to see the content, but gear enhancement pushed hard toward the box.

In May 2022 the publisher bolted a crypto play-to-earn layer on top: an in-house token, redeemable on an external blockchain, that collapsed to around ten cents within two months. By 2023 the token was gone from that chain and the currency was quietly relaunched as an internal-only coin, with no real cash-out for anyone who had put money in. In-game purchases were switched off on February 13, 2025, days after the closure announcement, and there were no refunds beyond what the storefront's standard policy required.

The shutdown was announced on February 11, 2025, days after the publisher announced — and then cancelled without explanation — a merge of the North American and European servers. Purchases went dark on February 13, an unexpected final content patch landed in April, farewell events ran at the end of that month, and the servers went off for good on May 15, 2025. The decline had been running for years: from a million accounts in 2016 down to fewer than 200 daily players by 2022, with only a small bump when the game changed publishers in 2019.

Be skeptical of population trackers that still show thousands of active players: those are automated estimates for a game with no official servers left. The only living thing is the community-run private server scene, with everything that implies — no support, no guarantee it stays up, and no connection to the studio. There's also a Korean mobile title spun off from the same brand, but it's a different game and no substitute for this one.

If collecting beasts and fighting in the air is your thing, Riders of Icarus did something almost nobody has attempted with the same ambition since, which is why people still remember it fondly. The caveats pile up fast, though: heavy grind, new content arriving further and further apart, a shop that squeezed hardest at the gear-enhancement step, and an ending preceded by a crypto experiment that left players stranded. There is no official way to play it, and any alternative you find depends on third parties that could vanish tomorrow. As a piece of Korean MMORPG history it's fascinating; as a game to start today, it simply isn't available.