Sorry for the necro, but I feel like I have to clear a few things up.
Ymir will not create metin3, simply because Ymir doesn't exist. It has become Webzen.
I have to agree, the metin IP is definitely dead, and its no surprise.
Metin2 has never been massively popular outside of poor Eastern Europe and arguably Korea.
Most of the private servers truly are in better shape nowadays and for a while now than the official servers, which are laughable.
Interestingly, there may have been idea for metin3 in webzen, they have sued Laniatus for Metin3 copyright which Laniatus tried to take.
It may have been been purely out of pride, but perhaps back in 2013 plans for metin3 were real, as the game was still fairly popular in eastern europe and turkey, however it continued to fall off, and it became increasingly more clear that metin cannot stand up to new competitors in the MMO space, especially as the genre has been dying for a while even back then.
Ultimately, I do not believe metin3 will ever happen.
Metin2 might as well have just shut down production, the game is dead, yet they are still milking it putting almost nothing back.
Metin3 would be a huge financial investment for a company that does NOT have sufficient experience in trying to pull off a game as big as metin especially in today's gaming environment.
Furthermore, metin3 would be coming to a world where MMOs are not desired. MMO genre as a whole is less and less popular.
If they managed to somehow make this game, by some miracle, they definitely wouldn't want it to be associated with metin2, so it would not be metin3 but a brand new MMO.
Why? Because it makes no sense. It would only finish off the practically already almost dead metin2, while at the same time bringing metin2's ugly pay2win and bad game support reputation.
There is literally nothing to gain by releasing metin3.
