Online RPG Blue Protocol Shutting Down, Western Release Cancelled

Why are studios pouring so much money into online only games when it’s clear that people don’t want them?

@Arkham24601 because people do want them otherwise who's playing Genshin, ZZZ, Helldivers 2 and the others?

well they set the bar pretty high if they wanted to satisfy ALL of us xD

Sad to see a game I was planning to check out not come out.

@Arkham24601 because they did when the games went into production, now when they're ready the market is saturated and no one is going to jump from a title they've sunk hundreds of hours into already

Another one bites the dust. Cool.

@Arkham24601 The issue isn't that people don't want them, just look at FFXIV to name one example of a game that just keeps attracting users. The issue is that there are too many of them and the market can't sustain them all.

My question is why they had an english version a year ago for testing and then didn't even try to release it. thats a lot of time and money wasted on something they were clearly never going to release even if the game stayed online in Japan.

Pretty wild. Amazon is a real dud so far in the games business.

@riceNpea The market is full it's almost impossible to get into and it costs tons of money. The only way you will get into this ia if you have a big IP or insane funding. Let's be real even for a company like Sony it's a massive check every month to keep it alive.

It's a shame they felt they couldn't compete with what's out there.
The market for this type of title is huge so they must of done some focus testing which delivered them some pretty bad results to decide to write off this development cost.
I would have liked to see what they cooked up! No chances of that now...

No surprise there at all. From what I heard the Japanese playerbase was VERY negative towards this game.

This is why i always prefer offline single player games over online only games. With online only games, not just you didn't own the game but you can't played it anymore once the publisher decided to kill the server.

@Flaming_Kaiser you're right, it's a big commitment to create a GaaS but the risk/reward is huge. Having said that, all the games that are successful are that for a good reason, people want to play them because the game is engaging, and gamers don't feel like a commodity. The market isn't full, devs keep making games people don't want because publishers have decided they know best.

These kind of games are huge timesinks so it's vital not to disenfrachise the target audience. The industry is littered with games like that. These games fail when gamers feel like a commodity. Helldivers 2 is not a big IP and it's a massive success, and that's because the publisher let the devs make an undeniably fun game that doesn't feel like it's GaaS.

It’ll forever be remembered as the MMO that banned Asmongold lol.

Hopefully Throne and Liberty or New World can find a PS5 audience this fall. The New Workd beta was actually rather fun.

@Arkham24601 Tfw you realize you had no idea how big online games were xD welcome to 2024 dude

@ScottyG Both are mostly pvp mmo. Blue Protocol is a pve mmo.

Pack it up already Amazon. Stay out of the games market.

This is why online only games need to die off asap. You pay a fortune and then one day they just switch it off. Liver service games are killing this industry unfortunately. Maybe a better industry emerges from the asses.

I actually really like MMORPGs, it's my favourite type of games to play. Unfortunately I haven't played a good one in years. My all time favourite is Iris Online.

if they could, they should release the game as a singleplayer game and take all microtransactions of the game

Sad. This was my most anticipated game. I guess I'll have to see how throne and liberty does.

The real reason this is happening all over the place is the fact the corporate overlords dictating the direction and longevity of these projects aren't gamers and are funding them to coax over player numbers from the core sector of gatcha and live service addicts to their new products. Despite the increasing database of evidence that the ship of getting a successful amount of that market share has sailed.

The other major issue is the fact that those addicts aren't gamers plain and simple. They are a completely different beast altogether and should be considered as such.

Trying to present your scheme as a game to gamers just isn't going to work when they aren't the target audience and what they are peddling is no game. Most of us see this garbage for what it is and won't be fooled.

For that pot of gold of lost souls sucked into these things;. Its like trying to get an addict to fundamentally change from a Drug they are already addicted to, toward another drug that does the exact same thing but is a different color. Despite the first drug having been used for so long and the receptors in the brain so used to it for the responses it's now a crutch for after years of use.

Just look at the very few that have managed to garner a decent release window audience and be considered successes on sites like this. Ie hell divers, The Finals, The First Descendant, palworld. The player Numbers have completely dropped off a cliff as the addicts go back to there drug of choice, or actual gamers having been lured to try the new trending drug due to peer pressure. All. The while Bg3 a single Player GAME that came before them all has a higher daily engagement now than they do a couple Months after their releases. Hopefully games like Wukong show these scumbags that making actual games can still be massive financial Successes.

It's just not gonna happen for the vast majority of these new drugs being peddled, Oops I mean games, nope wrong again,... Corporate schemes.

@yohn777 You all are missing the point. There are live service games and people play them, but the market is saturated. There isn't room for more.
Throwing money at the wall hoping it sticks is not gonna work. People have limited time and don't want to part with their digital goods to start over elsewhere.

That's a shame, been looking forward to trying this out since it was first shown off, it looked better than Genshin Impact to me.

@Nem That was that the point @Arkham24601 was making, which was who I was responding to. They insinuated that nobody has any interest in online games & it's plain & obvious that's not even kind of true. Several people commented to say they wanted to play this game lol. Online games are extremely popular & it's not a mystery to me as to why companies keep doing this: because the people CEOs use to make a game are of no consequence to them once they get wrung dry from putting years of work into an online-centric game that will likely flop. The millionaires in charge of these things do not care that they burn through money & some talented studios/employees because of the very small chance they have of making it big. For them, it's completely worth it for that chance to become mega successful like the other online games that don't evaporate in less than a year. Some get lucky but it's honestly no different than any other video game at this point, you kinda have to go all or nothing with what you're doing or there's probably not gonna be that many people that will play a half assed game. & if these big wig producers have the money to do what they want, it's not surprising they would try for the online multiplayer market since it is indeed massive.
The claim "there's no room for more" online games is completely wrong & ridiculous to assume. I wonder how much money ZZZ & Helldivers 2 pulled this year, too bad there wasn't any room for them hahaha

End of Service? out of the blue didn't see this one coming NGL
Had always remembered this first and foremost an MMO than a Jenshin contender.
Project Mugen on the other hand ...

In other news, Nikki has gained yet another million of grown men since PushSquare's article, easy does it 💪👍🤭

@yohn777 i guess we will see if they are. There is having a successful launch with lots of tourists but it's in the long term that you see it's staying power.
Still even if those two were to be long term sucesses, how many failed? I can think from high profile games of suicide squad, concord, and this blue protocol just recently but no doubt there were many more just this year. There is no guarantee you're gonna get a hit at all.
Even if there were people in the comments that wanted to play it, this game bombed.
The logic of throwing stuff at the wall until you get a hit assumes you will get a hit eventually and that is far from guaranteed.
You can't just keep wasting money and sinking the company and the investors money. The risk is way too high.
You may think the strategy is viable but reality disagrees when you look at the number of failures. This strategy is a recipe for disaster.
Oh and "hahaha" as i look at all the corpses of failed live services and money lost. 🤷‍♂️

@Nem You're missing my point. The people in charge don't care. They are almost never the ones who suffer the consequences because for them it's all an investment. The higher ups for places like Activision/Blizzard & Sony or most publishers stay employed for years, sometimes decades, despite any financial failures.
I'm not laughing at the failed games over the years, I'm laughing at your ineptitude to comprehend what I'm trying to explain to you. Your insinuation about what I'm laughing at doesn't even make sense in that context since I then named two modern & successful online multiplayer focused games.
I don't think it's a viable strategy, I think that in our modern consumerist society it makes perfect sense why it's playing out this way. That's all I was saying lol. Online games are massive & will stay that way for the foreseeable future. I'm saying this as someone who basically only plays Splatoon or Fall Guys sometimes, I pretty much only like single player games so this crap isn't even my demographic. But I'm not blind so I can at least recognize how big the market is for online games. It's so massive it's a black hole eating itself! Every dev that goes into a studio that starts developing and/or making contracts to develop online games knows the risk of throwing all their resources into a game that needs a live service model to function. Plus people obviously do enjoy games that work like this so I don't see the harm necessarily in games that try to make their own variation. But I digress, none of that stuff appeals to me anyway. I won't fault a huge portion of gamers just because I think they like repetitive games

@yohn777 You are going to lengths to strawman me. I did not say every online game = stupid and bad. I said the room in the market for more is precarious and it's incredibly dumb and arrogant to think breaking into the market is easy. I said the market is saturated and i stand by that, which is why there are far more failures than successes coming out now. The market is established with the giants taking the lion share of the players. I didn't say the games are bad. Players just can't play all of these live services at once (time is finite) and player population is vital for these games to succeed.
So, dumb execs can try all they want. Chances are it will fail, studios will close and the strategy will have to change. They are still under the impression that if they throw enough to the wall one might stick. My argument is that no, it likely won't. They will eventually come to accept that with enough failures and no hit.

@Nem Good for you. Next time you have a point to make, respond to a commenter that actually says something relevant to what you're trying to talk about. My original comment was just responding to someone else entirely saying they were silly for not realizing how popular online games are. Even you admitted "player population is vital for these games to succeed", & there are online games new & old that have achieved this. So please, stop responding to me. Have a nice day.

@yohn777 That's the thing. You and others didn't understand what he said. That was not what he said.
If you check the post he points out how companies are spending money on games people don't want. Notice that is different from saying the games are bad or that they don't want the live services they are already playing.
He is saying the market is saturated as i pointed out to you and it's a waste of money to be betting on this throw it to the wall until it sticks approach because players are already invested on the games they are playing and it's very difficult to compete with them.
You are quite rude btw. If you aren't willing to defend your position and will just get defensive maybe don't post? There will be debate on comment sections.

@yohn777 No "bro". You are. There is no need to believe. The guys post is right up there and the article proves him right.
You are cherry picking and ignoring countless cases of failure due to the rare sucesses. You want to ignore reality, you do you.
Here, a quick Google can give you 15 recent high profile live services that tanked. https://gamingbolt.com/15-live-service-games-that-were-complete-failures
I don't care what you say indeed. We all have limited time. You can want 10 live services if you want. I don't care. You won't have time to play them all. That is reality. Sucess in one place comes at the cost of failure in another. That means the market is satured. Sorry that you uncappable to understand this obvious fact.
You can't tell me or anyone that 2 cases of sucess supercede a dozen failures. You just can't. We are done here.

@riceNpea That is true I play Gems of War I played it 2460 hours started on the PS4. With the amount of time and effort in need to put in I just don't have the time for something else. The daily task, the missions it's to much.

And lets be real here it's almost impossible to make that instant hit that people will keep coming back to. But i agree I played so many GAAS games were i know they would be more fun without the F2P restrictions.

But i agree they should start trying making a fun game before making a timesink instead to try to keep them hooked.

That Square-Enix exclusive game Foamstars that game failed for one reason OMG that game is more insufferable then having a a terrible job.

The game could be fun but they really made it a mission to make it as painful to play as possible. But why make it so so monetized with almost no content and everything is walled off. I got terrified looking at it.

@Flaming_Kaiser agreed. It's why Hoyoverse games are doing well. There's so much content to get your teeth into, the gameplay is engaging, and they've listened to the community and are more generous than they were with 5 star characters and the grind to get them without paying.

I played Genshin for a while, didn't pay a things, and easily got as much fun and content from it than a full priced game.

There is definelty a place for well crafted GaaS games, and in the case of games like Helldivers, it was easy to fair the credits required to purchase the DLC each time it came out.

If anything we should be turning our annoyance at games like FIFA that release EVERY year for full price with hardly any really substantial differences (sometimes the game is even worse than the year before) AND still they monetise it and concentrate on funneling people to UT and away from offline modes. Games like that are worse than even F2P mobile whale farming games.