Mobile game developer Clover Games said on April 10 it submitted a corporate bankruptcy petition to the competent court on April 9.

The company said it judged it could not survive independently as accumulated deterioration in management and a depletion of funds overlapped. All games in service are set to end as of 11 p.m. on May 9.

Founded in 2017, Clover Games is a small and mid-sized mobile game company that built a user base with titles including "Lord of Heroes" and "Ayakashi Rise". But a management crisis began in earnest after its new title "HeavenHells", launched in South Korea in February, delivered results that fell short of expectations. The company carried out restructuring that let go of a significant share of development staff about a week after launch. It later sought a turnaround by additionally launching a global version in early last month, but failed to recover.

According to the company, Chief Executive Yoon Seong-guk (윤성국) tried to secure liquidity by injecting more than 3 billion won of personal funds over the past 3 years to keep the service going. Even so, it fell into a state of complete capital impairment as the cash depletion reached its limit, ultimately leading to the bankruptcy filing.

Ahead of the bankruptcy filing, Clover Games preemptively blocked in-app payments for all games on April 6 to minimise user harm. Rather than ending services immediately, it decided to keep servers running for about a month until May 9. It said early termination is also possible if external server providers move to block access at their discretion under their terms and conditions as the bankruptcy process proceeds.

Yoon said, "I did everything I could to continue the service, but I apologise for having to deliver this painful news after all, without being able to provide full service to the end."