Bandai Namco's ill-fated MMO Blue Protocol is shutting down in January - killing Amazon Games' Worldwide release at the same time

Bandai Namco's ill-fated MMORPG Blue Protocol has officially had a tombstone ordered on its behalf, as the company has announced it'll be ceasing service in January 2025.

What that means in basic terms is that the servers will be shut down and the game will die, but what's particularly interesting here is that Bandai Namco has also announced that the worldwide port of Blue Protocol - which was being handled by Amazon Games - is also dead. That version of the game was never actually released, quietly shifting its summer 2024 release date to a vague 2024 window earlier this year.

It's a sad end for a game that unfortunately didn't bring in the anticipated revenue Bandai Namco was looking for. In a financial report, the company vaguely hinted towards the game's lacklustre performance, before promptly never mentioning it in such a capacity in future reports. Amazon Games, which was behind that planned western release, has been absolutely silent about the game for nearly a year. As mentioned above, the game was initially targeting a release window for... now. However, it was quietly pushed back, and now is firmly cancelled.

There are two interesting points here that aren't covered by Bandai Namco's statement. The first is that the game's subpar reception is peculiar. It proved popular in previews, and had a decently-sized playerbase. It seems that, in spite of this, the game just didn't generate the revenue. We interviewed franchise lead Mike Zadorojny at Amazon Games last year about the monetisation - a part of the game Amazon was tinkering with to make it more palatable for a Western audience - but it looks like even the nastier money-generating elements didn't generate enough!

The second part is...Amazon Games appears to potentially have had the rug pulled out from under it a bit here. If we look at Lost Ark - the last big MMO Amazon ported over for a Western release - it's clear that the team did some serious work on that game. The publisher tweaked the monetisation, and had QA testers, a translation team, and a live team all working on it at various stages. Amazon Games as a company invested resources into Lost Ark, which is why it obviously took a cut from sales and transactions for it.

A similar arrangement was likely in place for Blue Protocol. By the time we played it last year, it had had translation work done on it, and Zadorojny was one senior lead of a whole team working on it. It would have received the same treatment as Lost Ark, but was mysteriously pushed back from its release window. If Bandai wanted extra money, and Amazon obviously wanted to get paid, why push the release window back? Amazon hasn't shied away from releasing games in need of work - New World took a lot of patches and elbow grease to get into the good position it is in today. So why was Blue Protocol quietly swept under the carpet?

Putting all of that to the side, pour one out for the Western fans on the Blue Protocol Reddit, who are currently quite sad about the whole affair. It's one thing to have an MMO you've played shut down, but an MMO that didn't even come out? That's tragic.

Were you excited for Blue Protocol? Let us know below, as well as why you reckon it didn't do well.