Blue Protocol, an action MMO comparable to Hoyoverse mega-hits like Genshin Impact, is available in Japan thanks to developer Bandai Namco. A global version of the game was supposed to launch earlier this year, but developer Bandai Namco and publisher Amazon Games have been reticent. Last night, it was revealed why: Blue Protocol has been canceled in Japan, and western release plans have been put on hold entirely.
“We have worked hard to prepare for release; however, we have come to the conclusion that it will not be possible to provide a service that satisfies all of you,” reads the English statement on the game’s website.
Blue Protocol was in development for nearly eight years, popping up here and there at events as an upcoming anime-inspired online game. In 2022, Amazon announced that they would release the game in North America, starting with a beta in 2023. The beta came and went, accompanied by criticism of empty worlds and missing content that the team at Bandai Namco promised to fix, and there has been radio silence since then. The cancellation should come as no surprise to Japanese fans of the games, as they found the game’s online updates to be too little and too late at the same time.
This puts Blue Protocol in a bad light compared to competitors like the aforementioned Genshin Impact, which boasts over 66 million active players. Hoyoverse’s latest game, Zenless Zone Zero, was downloaded over 50 million times in its first month. The market for these types of games is definitely there, but it seems Bandai Namco expected to incur greater losses if it continued to try to launch Blue Protocol in North America rather than simply canceling the game altogether.
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That major publishers like Bandai Namco and Amazon are giving up before they fight speaks to a rather unhealthy attitude towards games as a service in the industry. While this is probably a financially responsible decision, it implies that there is simply no recovery after certain stumbles. Amazon’s other MMORPG, New World, has had modest success since its launch after initially coming out of the blocks strong, and looks to be the company’s main focus in the near future.
