Developer Jokers, a company founded by former Sega staff, announced on December 22 that it has halted development of Code of Jokers Evolutions, a blockchain mobile game it had been working on under official license from Sega.
Originally announced in March this year, Code of Jokers Evolutions was unveiled as a digital card game based on Sega’s arcade trading card game IP. The arcade version of Code of Jokers was in circulation from 2013 to 2019, and it received a short-lived mobile version called Code of Jokers Pocket (also developed by Sega) in 2017, which ended services the following year.
The new Code of Jokers Evolutions was announced as a revival of the franchise, inheriting key features of the original Code of Jokers while integrating new gimmicks like user-to-user trading using blockchain technology. Development was originally underway with an international release planned for 2025 and a domestic release planned by the end of 2026. However, in its new announcement, developer Jokers says it has decided to cancel the title “after considering recent changes in the Web3 game market environment.” While the company doesn’t go into the details, the decision seems consistent with current tendencies in the Japanese game industry. While it happened a bit later than overseas, Japan’s NFT game fad appears to be fizzling out even in the eyes of the people making them.
As mentioned, Jokers is a game company founded by former Sega staff Yasuhiro Nishiyama (producer of the original Code of Joker, Sangokushi Taisen) and Wataru Sato (Bakugan producer at Sega Toys). With the announcement of Code of Jokers Evolutions’s cancellation, the developer says it will be accepting buybacks from users who purchased the collaboration NFT pack released ahead of the game’s launch via this portal.
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