Bandai Namco disappointed with performance of “new online game” (meaning Blue Protocol)
On February 14, Bandai Namco Holdings released their 9-month Financial Report for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024. The company reports 772,035 million yen in net sales (3.9% year-on-year increase) and 60,398 million yen in final profits (a 28.5% year-on-year decrease). Bandai Namco also mentions that the new online game title released in this period fell short of forecasts – likely referring to Blue Protocol (via GameBiz).
Blue Protocol is a free-to-play MMO released by Bandai Namco Holdings in June 2023 for the PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X❘S. The game is currently Japan-exclusive, but has releases by Amazon Games planned for North and South America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
In the period leading up to its release, Blue Protocol was highly anticipated by Japanese users, and after going through several delays, it had a successful launch, immediately gathering over 600,000 players. For a time, Blue Protocol was the fastest growing title in the history of Bandai Namco’s online game business, and this popularity was likely due to the fact that it was a rare instance of a made-in-Japan MMORPG, with the added factor of anime-style graphics and a big company backing the project.
But what happened to Blue Protocol? The hype around the game died down quite rapidly, as Japanese users started pointing out issues such as insufficient content updates, long-term negligence towards serious bugs, bad balancing decisions and overall lack of engaging features. Compared to initial figures, the number of players dwindled significantly.
It seems that this contributed to Blue Protocol significantly underperforming in terms of Bandai Namco’s financial forecasts. With overseas releases for the game planned for 2024, it remains to be seen what measures Bandai Namco will take to appeal to players.
Amber V
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Blue Protocol will not do well in the West either sadly. The issue comes down to the fact Bandai Namco let Amazon Games publish and make creative control decisions for the West which has soured users expectations with the advertising and forced pandering to what they think will sell and it ends up being the things that do poorly, because fans here think we had an inferior experience compared to Japan. Bandai should have not done that.
Also it’s not a bad looking game at all and it has effort with the gameplay i like action games with depth and complexity, but it seems like in Japan it had no clue what it wanted to be and was so new on pushing out updates the audience moved on.
I do think F2P is a good idea with Bandai Namco though, but they need a foundation that knows what it wants to be, it has addictive elements and gameplay loops that are engaging otherwise people get bored easily and move on. Xenoblade Chronicles series and even Palworld would be the best example of this despite those games not being F2P. Anyone can keep going back to those games and keep playing them over and over again.
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That guys comment.
The game has a lot of potential, but the problem is that they quit when the pandemic hit. That was a bad idea. The main problem is that they released it over there and not here.
I’ve seen this many times, it happened with BnS(blade and soul) and it happened with pso2(phantasy star online 2).
Pso2 actually released new Genesis which helped out for time being and they delayed with content around lvl 30 so the game died again. Now there’s a new Genesis 2 which makes no difference.
They should have never released the game only in Asia first then a year or two later in the West.
Because this will happen with blue protocol, probably shouldn’t call it protocol anymore because it took too long. Bandai games do get a lot of attention on steam, let’s not push that out the window. Can the game be maintained with consistent content is the question. A grace period for a new patch for an mmo is a month. No news before that and people start migrating to other games.
The main thing I want to say is that companies overseas should focus on global launches and stop launching in their country only first. Because if you hype the game and we see that hype, we expect that same hype or more.
If you’re not going to deliver that energy you first came out with, don’t even bother us ? with your drama.