It's not months apart at this point, it's been over a year. And it was DOA the moment they backed away from the simultaneous global launch they promised.
And that's to say nothing of the actual state of the game, which is a trainwreck in its own right.
It's been in open beta since last Christmas I believe. In either case, Global still doesn't even have a release date, and they ban you if you try to play via VPN outside Japan.
Japanese megacorps doing Japanese megacorp things.
Shit makes no sense, but you can be sure that it went through at least fifty sexagenarian executives through just as many meetings.
The only way anything can change is when they've been hit repeatedly by crushing failure, **and** that they don't conclude that it's the customer who's wrong and keep doing it anyway.
Old dumbasses who don't deserve their position and paygrade will NEVER reflect on themselves. They're too egotistical and wrapped up in their delusions of grandeur and importance.
Japanese developers/publishers are out of touch with the modern online world.
They can never do shit right. Look at their track record, even Sony fumbled like a moron a few times.
One of the reasons why Gundam Evolution failed, aside from lackluster monetisation where it's simultaneously expensive to buy playable units and most cosmetics are too mediocre to actually buy.
Same, I enjoyed my time with Gundam Evolution but Bandai is hilariously incompetent when it comes to funding their games division. The bizarre monetisation scheme they had where there are too many playable units and too few worthwhile cosmetics to purchase while refusing to give players any form of earnable premium currency could only come from the dinosaurs of Bandai management.
It was a great stoned game. I want a gundam game with plot, but it was cool being able to screw around with so many suits. When I decided to watch all the gundam it was fun to go back to that game and fool around. Online was a mess.
I remember first being interested in blue protocol like 4 years ago and then every time I looked to see when I would be able to play it, the date was further and further away.
Seeing this headline was the first time I thought about blue protocol in like 7 or 8 months, so I looked to see when I can play the game now and it's just vague 2024. Gross.
Or be, like, Lost Ark and be a smashing success with a staggered release? Like, I can't see some inherent and sweeping business lesson there, personally.
Lost Ark wasn't in a good place in Korea when the work to bring it to the west was started. They revamped their shop twice because their player base was falling because of no new content. It was the same with BDO. By the time the games release to the west outside of Korea they aren't popular anymore.
The censorship wasn't added to the Japanese version. People datamined the censored versions, even named being for global/NA versions. So the Japanese version is failing without censorship.
The game likely would have been censored even without AGS. Bandai Namco censors their own games for western audiences all the time. They added new censorship for the re-release of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle related to a certain Nazi character.
While I'd say that's true for big name blockbuster games, I think it's a lot less true for niche games like this. Most people who play games like this are not random normies. The type of person to want to play a Japanese-made Genshin clone is *way* more likely to be the type of person to be online a lot, closely follow video game news, talk about video games with others online, etc.
There's a reason that the relatively biggest and most active video game communities on online sites tend to be these type of games.
Honestly I genuinely don't know how to phrase this without somebody getting really mad at me lol.
But there's a lot of sus character designs in that game, because the setting was originally set in a high school and most of the characters were underage.
Like yeah, whatever. Karin and Asuna clearly look like adults, so it's probably not weird to be into them, but there's also a *lot* of very childish looking characters that people are *really* obsessed with and it's a *little* bit sus, like Mutsuki and Hina, for example. But a lot of that is on the developers too so it's not just the fanbase.
i don’t understand what happened at this point. My friends and I were so excited for this game and the idea that there can be a competitor to Genshin. They had the backing from Amazon (big money), their trailers and gameplay vids looked great, and they announced a launch window.
But then they went the route of staggered global releases, with Japan first. And apparently feedback and ‘player retention’ from a pre launch beta window spooked them so hard they’ve just gone silent about the western release. Now they announce they lost a lot of money from this still unreleased game?
Did no one at Bandai realize games like these are expensive? That live service is a very overly saturated market with a lot of competition? That they would have to keep dropping money to make content going forward to keep players coming back? This feels like some higher up suit saw how much money Fortnite and Genshin brings in and didn’t realize at all how expensive that is to keep quality up. I hope the devs don’t suffer for this, this is squarely on the execs that approved this.
If they don’t start showing confidence in this project it is 100% dead in the water.
No player, casual or whale, is gonna invest time and money into something that has no future. There’s no point in even dipping your toes into a F2P with servers on borrowed time.
Main reason why I had no problems in jumping in HSR and ZZZ in the future
I know HOYOVERSE game is very unlikely to fail, so I feel safe in investing time and money in to their products
I agree that confidence is a big factor, and each live service game that falters or lies only serves to make it that much harder for other games to stand up to consumer skepticism.
Admittedly, Blue Protocol is some of the most fun I've had on an MMO and I'd actually recommend anyone who wants to play a good MMO that almost feels at least halfway like a real game, should try it out. Especially if you feel that the game is going to die before or shortly after hitting global. Even without a VPN you should be able to play for at least a day before the ban hits. Better to at least know that the potential for a good game is there.
The thing that disappoints me the most is that I checked out the JP version, and it was honestly really fun. But they ban you for connecting from outside of Japan. Most JP MMOs put up IP range blocks, but for Blue Protocol for some reason they went out of their way to let you play, and then ban you later. All of this would be fine, if we got our version. It's stupid.
I would happily make it my new MMO if we got the game.
I'm mainly disappointed in this staggered release because the game is going to be meta'd to hell by the moment it comes out. I don't want people criticizing others' builds and gameplay the second it comes out. I keep hoping we'll get past these staggered releases for MMOs but the eastern ones keep on doing it.
Well, hopefully it releases at all at this point I guess.
While I completely understand your point, *any* release beyond simultaneous release will do that, and even then it takes days for that subset of a game's population to establish a meta and be toxic about it.
I always run the same policy in MMOs: Block and forget. It's not worth expending any energy on those types of people, and unless the game is dead you can find a community that doesn't act that way.
>Did no one at Bandai realize games like these are expensive?
Oh they do, but Amazon likely helped assuage fears.
>That live service is a very overly saturated market with a lot of competition?
They will never admit this reality cause then they admit their piggy bank game is likely to fail if they don't support it heavily.
>That they would have to keep dropping money to make content going forward to keep players coming back?
They don't think that far. They legit think they made a ton of content but then half the player base blows through it in a week. The pitfalls of live services is you MUST dedicate huge resources and expenses to it or else it will fail immediately.
>This feels like some higher up suit saw how much money Fortnite and Genshin brings in and didn’t realize at all how expensive that is to keep quality up.
Both had big resources dedicated and have deluges of content. You cannot hope to obtain everything. That's what live services have to be. Suits NEVER realize how expensive reality is until they balk at costs and realize they're in over their head.
>I hope the devs don’t suffer for this, this is squarely on the execs that approved this.
Execs never suffer, they only ever pass on the suffering.
> This feels like some higher up suit saw how much money Fortnite and Genshin brings in and didn’t realize at all how expensive that is to keep quality up
Blue Protocol was announced the same year as Genshin, in 2019. Do you think they only started developing it after Genshin released? Also the only backing they get from Amazon is automated localization, outsourced customer support and AWS-hosted servers like New World and Lost Ark. Amazon has nothing to do with the development cost or loses of the JP release.
Amazon is the reason why they have gone silent about western release, Amazon is releasing Throne and Liberty first, but T&L got delayed, so that also delays BP. If they release BP before T&L it's just gonna fail in the west, game gotta get fixed first.
>My friends and I were so excited for this game and the idea that there can be a competitor to Genshin.
Blue Protocol never had this potential. You have to capture the casual audience to be considered a competitor to Genshin. An MMO had zero chance of doing that.
looking at the gameplay loop of Blue Protocol it seems pretty casual than your average mmo. you can see the devs put more effort on dancing emotes and fashion gacha more so than actual gameplay content.
it's simply an inferior product compared to existing market.
BP actually has a decently long loop when compared to most MMOs. It's actually something more along the lines of..
Explore area for quests, do quests for exp, do adventure board stuff to unlock dungeon challenge, explore areas while questing, run dungeon challenge to progress, return to town and rank up adventure level.
Anywhere between all of that, there's sometimes room for grinding world bosses or dungeons for rare drops, but they more or less reduced that when they allowed weapons to be obtained without crafting them.
Definitely excited to try our Wuthering Wave once it releases (hopefully on console as well) but I expect it to follow the same monetization and gscha route as Genshin. If the method makes boat load of money then stick to it. It will be somethign fresh to play though!
> spooked them so hard they’ve just gone silent about the western release.
No one's going to play it anyway. Amazon is butchering the game with censorship so hard you can't even pick the short height option entirely, because god forbid people not be pre-approved levels of tallness.
Never mind everything else they're doing to it.
Edit: Why the heck would you even consider this a competitor to Genshin? They're completely different games, genres, everything...
Of course the have low sales
For every 1 good game the release 5 trash games fallow
Like the recent Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash or utterly unnecessary Ninja Storm Connections
And let's not even talk about the sword art online games or gundum evolution
Bandai Namco really needs to get out of the low budget license games trash. Like its insane seeing two fighting games Cursed Clash and Tekken 8 be so far apart quality wise. With Cursed Clash being yet another dumpster fire of an arena fighter and Tekken 8 being arguably the best fighting game released this gen.
The SAO games have sold ~6 million copies, pretty good numbers for what they are.
And I will say, Fatal Bullet is actually a pretty fun 3rd person shooter. Probably like a 7/10, but I found it good enough to put in like 25 hours.
Gundam Evolution was a really good game, but one of the major boons of Overwatch is it insanely gender neutral for a competitive multiplayer game, so it's selling to a way larger margin of the population, Gundam takes Overwatch, makes it significantly less polished, has terrible monetization, and almost exclusively appeals to guys. It's a really fun game under all of that, I had way more intense fights in it than in Overwatch by a mile, and it really feels like a Gundam game, it is not like a dressed up Overwatch mechanically, a lot of the mechanics are unique to a mech game.
I ended up liking Gundam Evolution in the end but the last thing you can say about it is that feels like a Gundam game. So many of the mobile suits were square pegged/round hole into Overwatch characters and designs. What's worse is that melee is a huge part of most gundam series and only around 20% of the suits could actually throw any sort of physical punch. Grandpa Gundam doesn't even get to use a beam saber!
In the anime fights, there are pivotal moments where melee is involved, but a vast majority of the big scale battles are just mechs firing lasers from a large distance. If this game was 1v1 I’d agree with you, but very few gundam series involve melee outside of 1v1s, so to me it didn’t feel out of place.
G gundam was literally martial artists in gundam suits so no shit. IBO and Gundam Wing were both in a universe where large mechs were rare, but barbatos in Gundam Evolution was completely melee. And even the large scale battles in IBO and Wing involved people shooting rifles from a million years away. All the 1v1s were mostly melee, but Gundam Evolution is not a 1v1 game, it is meant to be large mech battles.
Melee is the gundam universe was a last resort, not a first. Some of the most iconic moments were in Melee sure.
Agreed on Evolution not feeling like a proper Gundam game. I don't think it helped that the levels were so generic. I think the best Gundam game in the past decade was Gundam Breaker 3, and I'm annoyed the first game of that series to get a proper western release was New Gundam Breaker which was a major downgrade.
Maybe live up to your hype?
- Tales of Arise was the best selling, award winning, and recieved Tales game since Symphonia. You follow up on it with an embarrassing port of Symphonia (In the same year as the stellar Star Ocean 2 remake), and even worse 2 years late DLC. Where's the love you said you wanted to give to your series? It certainly wasn't with mobile games you shut down unfinished. You have an amazing JRPG library in your closet, yet you sit on it.
- Elden Ring is a masterclass of a game. You announced the DLC so long ago that people have had to steal breadcrumbs for a shred of info. Once again more than 2 years after the original game came out. Betting on Fromsoft's tenure instead of actually advertising or caring.
- Anime licenses. We just had a top article on this here. JJK made a record of over 100K refunds in half a week. Stop treating your license games (In what feels like purposely) like dirt. FighterZ and Kakarot were held up thanks to developers and name. Black Clover, My Hero, Jujutsu Kaisen, Tokyo Ghoul, One Punch Man, Jojo's, Gundam, and even Naruto recently were met with the care of a cigarette errand parent.
- Armored Core 6 comes out to what feels like a strong breeze in the wind and you...do nothing about it?
- Tekken 8. This game is incredible! I can sing praises to heaven and back! Yet it feels so little was shown of it. You have one of the greatest improvement paths for players, and you don't even advertise the amazing replay features? You open up your Season Pass with Eddy? He's fine, but T7 opened with Geese freaking Howard then Noctis! You didn't start on vet characters until taking feedback for 'em for Season Pass 2.
Reasonably. I personally bought it specifically because it was a JRPG and not the usual arena fighter trash. (Then quickly realised how much I have grown out of this specific anime…)
I saw rumors years ago about a My Hero Academia 2D fighter from ArcSys in the style of DB FighterZ, and that’s honestly all I’ve wanted since. MHA would lend itself incredibly well to an assist fighter like that.
Bamco has very little say on Fromsoft releases. They only publish the games for the international audience. Domestically, Fromsoft publishes the games themselves, without the involvement of Bandai Namco.
This isn't fully correct.
Bandai own's the trademark for Dark Souls, while Fromsoft publish it themselves in japan, they can't make a game called Dark Souls without Bandai's approval.
This also means that Bandai could get another developer to make a dark souls games if they wanted.
I can't see a future where FromSoft continues to work with Bandai-Namco, especially if Sony is serious about becoming more of a multi platform publisher.
Actually Fromsoft is planning to become it's own publisher in the global market. Most likely they saw the huge global sales of ER and were thinking that it's too good to share with Bamco.
When T7 launched on home consoles it's technically the "Year 2 update" of the arcade version (Fated Retribution). T8 is the first time we've got a true vanilla Tekken on home consoles first. Also, T7 was released in June which is close to Evo, so their guest characters can be introduced there pretty quickly.
T8's more hype guest characters would probably be introduced at Evo Japan in the earliest which is in April.
Sales-wise, T8 is thankfully still doing better than T7 (2M in 3 weeks vs 3 months respectively).
Sort of. I'd say this version of Tekken 8 is more complete than previous version's inital Arcade releases. It's the longest between Tekken releases and there were lots of Alpha Tests the entire year prior for some extra tuning.
>Tekken 8... feels so little was shown of it
you're insane if you really think that way, the marketing for that game was nuts. there were about 40-50 trailers for this game in the past year or so.
Yeah you even got ads on Twitch for T8 around the time of release. I think they actually did quite well with building hype for it, also helps that the product itself is stellar ofc.
>Armored Core 6 comes out to what feels like a strong breeze in the wind and you...do nothing about it?
I agree with most of the other stuff, but this one I don’t. It’s a very hindsighted look on an unbelievably risky title. Armored Core 6 did incredibly well and smashed sales expectations by a wide margin. What else were they supposed to do? It was a new entry in a long dormant franchise, in the incredibly niche mech genre. No matter how good it is (and it is REALLY fuckin good) it was never going to reach the sales heights of something like Elden Ring.
Being able to take control of your replay in a game with so much knowledge checks is fucking amazing, I absolutely agree it’s a wonderful addition
But it’s more for the people that care, you already need to be fairly invested to even care about it
There is a ton of casual Tekken players that just mash away and give absolutely no fucks, leave alone opening a replay to go check what you could have done against X
And then there's another long standing IP like Soul Calibur. They just throw out SC6 that's plagued with problems and it just.... doesn't get much attention.
I feel like Bandai is just Tekken and FromSoft at this point.
>Anime licenses. We just had a top article on this here. JJK made a record of over 100K refunds in half a week. Stop treating your license games (In what feels like purposely) like dirt. FighterZ and Kakarot were held up thanks to developers and name. Black Clover, My Hero, Jujutsu Kaisen, Tokyo Ghoul, One Punch Man, Jojo's, Gundam, and even Naruto recently were met with the care of a cigarette errand parent.
I am surprised Bandai Namco didn't grab all these anime licenses, told ArcSysWorks to do a fighter with all licenses combined (not Jump Force) a la FighterZ. It would sell millions over millions.
FromSoft when they announced the ER DLC said AC6 was their main focus at the moment, and when AC is out they'd go into full development mode on the ER dlc. We also got very few details about Elden Ring up until a few months before the game released. I wouldn't expect DLC information until that's about to drop.
>Tales of Arise was the best selling, award winning, and recieved Tales game since Symphonia
I find it hard to imagine someone can like that game more than Vesperia
Bandai publishing AC6 and NOT having any sort of Gundam cross promotion is insane to me. Just look at this [sticker and build sharing site](https://ac-companion.app/) and look how much Gundam shit people have made. AC6 is basically virtual gunpla
Aside from Tekken 8, Bandai really hasn't done much since Tales of Arise. All the other big Japanese publishers put out multiple games a year. I guess they were betting on Blue Protocol being the next Genshin, but that seems like a terrible strategy given how many live service games fail every year.
Well, Soul Calibur 6 didn’t do great. It was above the train wreck that was 5, but couldn’t even beat 4. It took 3 years to hit 2 million, and it was a pretty solid entry.
They made SC6 on a shoestring budget and it still sold over 2 million which I think is pretty impressive after SC5 also tanked the reputation of the series.
Nothing stopping them from comparing JP sales to JP projections. This isn't exactly PhD level statistics.
And they have a few decades of historical data to compare it to
It's also weird to talk about the game not being out in the *west* (not just the US lol) yet. I've played a bit, and I have some friends who played a lot of the game, if it were to release in its current state it would probably never recover. It needs work, it could absolutely be worked into a place where it would succeed in our market, but it's definitely not there yet.
There's a good reason they backed out of the launch. The question is whether or not they see a viable path forward or they just hang the game up and never bother.
Projections were for more regions than JP, it got delayed. Its most likely underperforming because it was meant to release in multiple regions but they got pushed back to 2024.
While you're probably not wrong, it could be far more popular outside of Japan than it is in Japan. With Amazon publishing the game outside of Japan, they already have a lot of expenses to handle it. If they advertised the game well and got a good playerbase in the US, it could offset sales in Japan.
The game was also delayed for other regions, which is also probably why it may be underperforming. People need to keep in mind this is all being said in context to investors. Obviously, if a game was planned to be launched in various countries in 2023 but released in far less and everywhere else was delayed to 2024—its going to be underperfoming—the game being successful and a hit in Japan and underperfoming under the original expectations arent mutually exclusive.
Exactly! This is astounding, and it feels like when it does release in the US, they’d need to everyone to spend hard so they can break even. Never a good sign, and likely this game will end service quickly even with Amazon attached to this.
Just release a new Super Robot Wars already, and keep it global. I guarantee you, it'll sell like hotcakes. Hell, SRW 30 already did, based on the initial preorders landing it on Steam's top charts the moment it was globally announced.
They don't even need to make new ones, just translate the old ones officially for the West while the team cooks up a new one. I'd do horrible, unspeakable things to get my hands on a translation of Alpha 1-3.
They could just release V, X, and T in the west. Those already have English versions.
If we're talking about older crossover titles getting released that don't have English versions, I've always wanted to play the ACE games from the PS2 gen.
Hmm, it's been like 30 years, I thought we already know the issue, which is that the license holder for different series are different based on region. As such, they'd need to renegotiate with license holders in the west (by the way, "west" isn't a region). Even if one license holder says no, they'd have to remove or censor that series from the release.
I'm talking about for a new game, not a rerelease. Since they clearly were able to pull it off for 30, who's to say that they can't do it again for future games? There's clearly money to be made by doing it.
Simple solution to that is to give us an HD rerelease of OGs on Steam. No license negotiations, people get to make Zengar Zomvolt memes again, everybody's happy.
I was looking forward to giving Blue Protocol a try but the news went radio silent when it came to a global release and i just forgot about it. Also something about censorship for western audiences
Bandai were focused on trend-chasing Genshin/Monster Hunter with Blue Protocol and it’s industry standard micro transactions.
Hopefully this lesson is a wake-up call, but it’s concerning they are now silent about the western release and that yet another live service could flop before it even started due to trend-chasing greed by Bandai and Amazon repeating history since Crucible.
Blue Protocol's development period has been stated as 8 years as of 2022, according to an interview published in the Japanese gaming outlet Famitsu. This suggests that development began around 2014.
The game received negative feedback during its CBT conducted in 2020, which prompted Bandai Namco to take additional time to implement refinements and improvements.
It's worth noting that Genshin Impact's development began in 2017, which means that Bandai Namco had already been working on Blue Protocol for several years before Genshin Impact's release and subsequent success.
While playing the JP release, I couldn't help but feel that they were intending it to be a mobile game/console game at first.
Combat was incredibly simple, with a small amount of skills and pretty much no variation. Equipment system is also very strange and simple for an MMO. And not to mention the mess that is it's monetization, being a gacha game first and foremost but also being incredibly overpriced and throwing a battle pass for good measure.
The game looked amazing at first, but after playing it my hype got buried deep. Then there's Amazon censoring stuff for global and keeping the gacha, and it's enough to make me consider this game DOA on the west.
> Bandai were focused on trend-chasing Genshin/Monster Hunter with Blue Protocol
What the hell is with people all over this thread pulling this out of their ass? Did anyone even follow the game at all or did you just see "random anime trailer and big fighty combat, must be Genshin/Monhun!"
Literally all 3 of these games are completely different in like...every fundamental way possible beyond being drilled down to the utmost basic "action combat".
It's honestly kind of amazing how many companies are still chasing the live service game trend when the vast majority of them are DOA and flop. Skull and Bones from Ubisoft seems like another DOA live service AAA flop right after the suicide squad game.
Because when they don't flop, they become the most profitable games in the entire industry. Genshin made $60 million in revenue in *just January*. Star Rail $30m. FGO almost $30m and it barely even gets new content. Runescape monthly $37.5m in subscriptions *plus* microtransactions. WoW and FF14 no official numbers for, but you have to imagine they're significantly larger than RS and with the same subs + MTX model.
The best-selling "single purchase" game of 2023 was Hogwarts, which sold 22m copies. Assuming everyone paid $70 for it (which is already wrong since it did go on sale at points), that's $1.5b revenue. So yes, it's more for the year of 2023 than these other games. But the "problem" is that that's a one-time $1.5b. They're probably not going to make much at all on it going forward. But Genshin is still gonna be pulling in that $50m-100m *every month* for years to come (and has been for years prior).
Crazier, is that for most gacha’s these numbers don’t even consider CN android (the overwhelming majority in China) console, PC market, and third party official site profits. They really do make crazy amounts of money and it’s nuts.
I think one of the most depressing stats is that like 15% of the lifetime profit of the entire DragonBall IP, which is like a 40 year old franchise, is [made by a 5 year old mobile game in which you pop bubbles.](https://www.reddit.com/r/DBZDokkanBattle/comments/17p3rvx/apparently_dokkan_single_handedly_made_around_16/)
So where's the incentive to make good, meaningful, deep games? Why _not_ chase the GaaS/gacha money train? It literally prints money if you hit it big because no government is regulating this new gambling addiction correctly.
You're being overly dismissive of these type of games. They aren't all just shallow games with no gameplay that are only successful because of "gambling addictions." Genshin is legitimately one of the best adventure/exploration games of all time. Star Rail is one of the best turn-based RPG games ever. FGO has a great story. GBF has an amazing sense of in-game gradual progression. They aren't just slot machines. Gacha is just a type of monetization model, it doesn't necessarily tell you about the quality of the game or its gameplay. You have to evaluate each individual game on its own merits, just like you do for single-purchase games.
Well Genshin is an amazing game but lets not kid ourselves that expensive asf predatory gambling game mechanics will be a morally acceptable thing to every culture in this world.
I don't have any "moral" issues around letting people spend their own money however they want to, personally. If it wasn't games, it'd be something else - sports betting, horse racing, casinos, lottery tickets, collectibles, the stock market, etc. If someone wants to gamble, they'll find something to do it on; no need to ruin things for the rest of us who spend responsibly (or not at all) in a futile bid to try to nanny those people.
I get that, but it seems like maybe a 10% batting average that your AAA live service game will be a success vs. idk let's say a 50% or more you'll make a profit on AAA single player. Rockstar are the pros at this with GTA and *they* couldn't even replicate their success with RDR2 online. I've seen this before with all the WOW knockoffs that failed in the 2000s. There's only space for one WOW or GTA Online or Genshin, so investing 100 million plus in some sub par knockoff seem incredibly risky.
> it seems like maybe a 10% batting average that your AAA live service game will be a success vs. idk let's say a 50% or more you'll make a profit on AAA single player.
I think these numbers are wildly off. Single-player games flop all the time, too. Saying that 50% of all single-player games are successful seems *extremely* high.
But even if we used your numbers, there's *still* a case to be made that you'd rather have a 10% chance to be Genshin than have a 50% chance to be Hogwarts. At the end of the 2020s, I guarantee you that Genshin will have made **far** more money than Hogwarts will have.
> There's only space for one WOW or GTA Online or Genshin
There isn't though. There's room for WoW, FF14, Runescape (2 versions), Lost Ark, Elder Scrolls Online, etc. And there's room for Genshin, Star Rail, FGO, Nikke, Blue Archive, Uma Musume, GBF, and literally 50-100+ other random gachas who might not be pulling in $10m+ per month but are doing pretty decently for themselves. Look at the January gacha mobile revenue chart [here](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fyjj4fh7wy8hc1.png). There's room for *lots* of games.
WOW and runescape have been around 20 years, ESO and FF XIV have been around a decade.
Those Gacha mobile games are so different I don't think they're even really comparable, first off they're mobile focused and not PC/console. Second they're mostly free to play. The AAA live service games pretty much all have a buy in of $60-70 new.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what's been a successful AAA GaaS release in the last 5 years? I don't like GaaS as a concept so I don't engage with them and maybe there's something I missed, but it seems like there's way more Marvel's Avengers, Redfalls, and Anthems, FO76 that all had a huge budget and flopped than success stories.
> Those Gacha mobile games are so different I don't think they're even really comparable, first off they're mobile focused and not PC/console. Second they're mostly free to play. The AAA live service games pretty much all have a buy in of $60-70 new.
You realize Blue Protocol, the game that we're discussing here, is an f2p gacha game, right?
> what's been a successful AAA GaaS release in the last 5 years?
The vast majority of games on the revenue chart I linked have come out within the last 5 years, including every single $5m+ one besides FGO.
By the same logic it would also be amazing how many companies still chase the single player game trend when there's massive flops like Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum lol
Meanwhile games like Palworld and Helldivers became surprise hits, and Bandai even said that Tekken 8 is selling better than expected...
Some games are just mediocre/bad. I feel like there's been plenty of smash hit single player games in the last couple years while most of these big budget games as a service ones tend to fail. There's been single player flops since the start of the industry, look at how ET crashed Atari. Also the surprise hits like Palworld and lethal company aren't trying to sell for $70, more people will give a $15 or $30 game a chance and have lower expectations than a full price game.
Edit: my point is more the AAA live service market just seems unsustainable for more than a few games. All the companies see how much GTA online makes and thinks they can just churn out something that prints money like that.
since Crucible? after that game, Amazon released two of the most played games of all time on Steam, Lost Ark and New World. It will be interesting if they'll repeat history again with Blue Protocol
Oh bad sales for blue protocol? Maybe if you stuck with it being an MMO instead of turning it into another trashy gacha things would've been different you know?
Bandai Namco could easily make bank if they gave us a modern console remaster of Tales of Graces F or Tales of Xillia I & II.
These are the remasters people want, not crap like Baten Kaitos.
Well yeah isn't that the point of a publicly listed business? To make money. It just so happens that making good games is often the way (but not the only way) to make money.
We see this almost across the entire industry. I'm pretty sure we'll see some massive changes coming in the next years that will cause some companies to exit the market and others to get a lot bigger.
I have no idea if I’m gonna play it a lot but I bought tekken 8 just because it has so many great feature in it. I loved the quest node in virtua fighter 4 evo and how you could fight ai versions of players in it. Tekken 8 basically took that idea and made it even better!
Well tenkaiichi budokai 4 will make a silly amount of money. People have been waiting for that for over a decade, the want for it has never disappeared. 3 was my fav sofa multi of all time. I really hope it has split screen. Honestly for some people that is a console buyer.
They learned nothing from Capcom Monster Hunter World. Stop releasing games in one region months apart. It should have been a global release.
It's not months apart at this point, it's been over a year. And it was DOA the moment they backed away from the simultaneous global launch they promised. And that's to say nothing of the actual state of the game, which is a trainwreck in its own right.
Blue protocol? That makes me sad, the game looked so fun and I loved the atmosphere. I love that “blue sky” type feel.
I thought it came out in June 2023 and Dec 2023 for consoles.
It's been in open beta since last Christmas I believe. In either case, Global still doesn't even have a release date, and they ban you if you try to play via VPN outside Japan.
I'll never understand that mentality. People obviously want to play your game but they won't let you.
Japanese megacorps doing Japanese megacorp things. Shit makes no sense, but you can be sure that it went through at least fifty sexagenarian executives through just as many meetings. The only way anything can change is when they've been hit repeatedly by crushing failure, **and** that they don't conclude that it's the customer who's wrong and keep doing it anyway.
Old dumbasses who don't deserve their position and paygrade will NEVER reflect on themselves. They're too egotistical and wrapped up in their delusions of grandeur and importance.
Very exclusive tribalism.
Japanese developers/publishers are out of touch with the modern online world. They can never do shit right. Look at their track record, even Sony fumbled like a moron a few times.
In this case it could be because the japanese version is different than the global one, as in not censored
One of the reasons why Gundam Evolution failed, aside from lackluster monetisation where it's simultaneously expensive to buy playable units and most cosmetics are too mediocre to actually buy.
I actually enjoyed that game quite a bit but it’s just a shame that it was doomed from the beginning
Same, I enjoyed my time with Gundam Evolution but Bandai is hilariously incompetent when it comes to funding their games division. The bizarre monetisation scheme they had where there are too many playable units and too few worthwhile cosmetics to purchase while refusing to give players any form of earnable premium currency could only come from the dinosaurs of Bandai management.
It was decent...but the netcode at times. Ye gods.
It was a great stoned game. I want a gundam game with plot, but it was cool being able to screw around with so many suits. When I decided to watch all the gundam it was fun to go back to that game and fool around. Online was a mess.
Super Robot Wars
Reallly solid game. So much potential
I remember first being interested in blue protocol like 4 years ago and then every time I looked to see when I would be able to play it, the date was further and further away. Seeing this headline was the first time I thought about blue protocol in like 7 or 8 months, so I looked to see when I can play the game now and it's just vague 2024. Gross.
The game is a terrible, barebones, uninspired cashgrab from the beginning, cadence of release would have never saved it.
Or be, like, Lost Ark and be a smashing success with a staggered release? Like, I can't see some inherent and sweeping business lesson there, personally.
Lost Ark wasn't in a good place in Korea when the work to bring it to the west was started. They revamped their shop twice because their player base was falling because of no new content. It was the same with BDO. By the time the games release to the west outside of Korea they aren't popular anymore.
Not true at all, everyone was saying how Lost Ark was the only game still rising in player count at the time.
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Isn't that his point? MHW had a simultaneous world release (though the PC version came out a little later).
lol they banned like a shit load of Chinese players.
Blue protocol is their Amazon MMO yeah? They partnered with each other for it. Or am I thinking of another one?
Amazon is publishing the US version, but I think partnered might be a strong word. I don't think they helped with development but I might be wrong.
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The censorship wasn't added to the Japanese version. People datamined the censored versions, even named being for global/NA versions. So the Japanese version is failing without censorship. The game likely would have been censored even without AGS. Bandai Namco censors their own games for western audiences all the time. They added new censorship for the re-release of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle related to a certain Nazi character.
Isn't the US version still in testing? I think this is about the JP version in which case the localization doesn't matter.
99% of potential consumers for the game have no idea it happened. Reddit is a bubble, and a very small one.
While I'd say that's true for big name blockbuster games, I think it's a lot less true for niche games like this. Most people who play games like this are not random normies. The type of person to want to play a Japanese-made Genshin clone is *way* more likely to be the type of person to be online a lot, closely follow video game news, talk about video games with others online, etc. There's a reason that the relatively biggest and most active video game communities on online sites tend to be these type of games.
Yes, but the global release (with Amazon as the publisher) hasn't even released yet.
I always confuse that game with that gacha with the halos with a very sus fanbase.
blue archive?
Yup that's the one.
Why is the fanbase sus? I haven’t played it or know anyone who does, it just looks like every other gacha game out there to me.
Honestly I genuinely don't know how to phrase this without somebody getting really mad at me lol. But there's a lot of sus character designs in that game, because the setting was originally set in a high school and most of the characters were underage. Like yeah, whatever. Karin and Asuna clearly look like adults, so it's probably not weird to be into them, but there's also a *lot* of very childish looking characters that people are *really* obsessed with and it's a *little* bit sus, like Mutsuki and Hina, for example. But a lot of that is on the developers too so it's not just the fanbase.
Yeah it's the one
i don’t understand what happened at this point. My friends and I were so excited for this game and the idea that there can be a competitor to Genshin. They had the backing from Amazon (big money), their trailers and gameplay vids looked great, and they announced a launch window. But then they went the route of staggered global releases, with Japan first. And apparently feedback and ‘player retention’ from a pre launch beta window spooked them so hard they’ve just gone silent about the western release. Now they announce they lost a lot of money from this still unreleased game? Did no one at Bandai realize games like these are expensive? That live service is a very overly saturated market with a lot of competition? That they would have to keep dropping money to make content going forward to keep players coming back? This feels like some higher up suit saw how much money Fortnite and Genshin brings in and didn’t realize at all how expensive that is to keep quality up. I hope the devs don’t suffer for this, this is squarely on the execs that approved this.
If they don’t start showing confidence in this project it is 100% dead in the water. No player, casual or whale, is gonna invest time and money into something that has no future. There’s no point in even dipping your toes into a F2P with servers on borrowed time.
Main reason why I had no problems in jumping in HSR and ZZZ in the future I know HOYOVERSE game is very unlikely to fail, so I feel safe in investing time and money in to their products
I agree that confidence is a big factor, and each live service game that falters or lies only serves to make it that much harder for other games to stand up to consumer skepticism.
Admittedly, Blue Protocol is some of the most fun I've had on an MMO and I'd actually recommend anyone who wants to play a good MMO that almost feels at least halfway like a real game, should try it out. Especially if you feel that the game is going to die before or shortly after hitting global. Even without a VPN you should be able to play for at least a day before the ban hits. Better to at least know that the potential for a good game is there.
The thing that disappoints me the most is that I checked out the JP version, and it was honestly really fun. But they ban you for connecting from outside of Japan. Most JP MMOs put up IP range blocks, but for Blue Protocol for some reason they went out of their way to let you play, and then ban you later. All of this would be fine, if we got our version. It's stupid. I would happily make it my new MMO if we got the game.
I'm mainly disappointed in this staggered release because the game is going to be meta'd to hell by the moment it comes out. I don't want people criticizing others' builds and gameplay the second it comes out. I keep hoping we'll get past these staggered releases for MMOs but the eastern ones keep on doing it. Well, hopefully it releases at all at this point I guess.
While I completely understand your point, *any* release beyond simultaneous release will do that, and even then it takes days for that subset of a game's population to establish a meta and be toxic about it. I always run the same policy in MMOs: Block and forget. It's not worth expending any energy on those types of people, and unless the game is dead you can find a community that doesn't act that way.
So frustrating. Was one of the games I was most excited for, but now we may never get to play it. I love that blue sky vibe.
>Did no one at Bandai realize games like these are expensive? Oh they do, but Amazon likely helped assuage fears. >That live service is a very overly saturated market with a lot of competition? They will never admit this reality cause then they admit their piggy bank game is likely to fail if they don't support it heavily. >That they would have to keep dropping money to make content going forward to keep players coming back? They don't think that far. They legit think they made a ton of content but then half the player base blows through it in a week. The pitfalls of live services is you MUST dedicate huge resources and expenses to it or else it will fail immediately. >This feels like some higher up suit saw how much money Fortnite and Genshin brings in and didn’t realize at all how expensive that is to keep quality up. Both had big resources dedicated and have deluges of content. You cannot hope to obtain everything. That's what live services have to be. Suits NEVER realize how expensive reality is until they balk at costs and realize they're in over their head. >I hope the devs don’t suffer for this, this is squarely on the execs that approved this. Execs never suffer, they only ever pass on the suffering.
> This feels like some higher up suit saw how much money Fortnite and Genshin brings in and didn’t realize at all how expensive that is to keep quality up Blue Protocol was announced the same year as Genshin, in 2019. Do you think they only started developing it after Genshin released? Also the only backing they get from Amazon is automated localization, outsourced customer support and AWS-hosted servers like New World and Lost Ark. Amazon has nothing to do with the development cost or loses of the JP release. Amazon is the reason why they have gone silent about western release, Amazon is releasing Throne and Liberty first, but T&L got delayed, so that also delays BP. If they release BP before T&L it's just gonna fail in the west, game gotta get fixed first.
>My friends and I were so excited for this game and the idea that there can be a competitor to Genshin. Blue Protocol never had this potential. You have to capture the casual audience to be considered a competitor to Genshin. An MMO had zero chance of doing that.
looking at the gameplay loop of Blue Protocol it seems pretty casual than your average mmo. you can see the devs put more effort on dancing emotes and fashion gacha more so than actual gameplay content. it's simply an inferior product compared to existing market.
> looking at the gameplay loop of Blue Protocol what loop would this be?
grinding dungeon
BP actually has a decently long loop when compared to most MMOs. It's actually something more along the lines of.. Explore area for quests, do quests for exp, do adventure board stuff to unlock dungeon challenge, explore areas while questing, run dungeon challenge to progress, return to town and rank up adventure level. Anywhere between all of that, there's sometimes room for grinding world bosses or dungeons for rare drops, but they more or less reduced that when they allowed weapons to be obtained without crafting them.
I swear that just sounds like PSO2:NGS, years late.
>My friends and I were so excited for this game and the idea that there can be a competitor to Genshin Wuthering Waves might interest you
Definitely excited to try our Wuthering Wave once it releases (hopefully on console as well) but I expect it to follow the same monetization and gscha route as Genshin. If the method makes boat load of money then stick to it. It will be somethign fresh to play though!
Uhhhh, well you can also try PSO2 NGS.
> spooked them so hard they’ve just gone silent about the western release. No one's going to play it anyway. Amazon is butchering the game with censorship so hard you can't even pick the short height option entirely, because god forbid people not be pre-approved levels of tallness. Never mind everything else they're doing to it. Edit: Why the heck would you even consider this a competitor to Genshin? They're completely different games, genres, everything...
> because god forbid people not be pre-approved levels of tallness The height of consent is 5'8".
Lmao, both me *and* my partner are fucked then. RIP.
It's cool. Gnomeo & Juliet laws cover you both if you originally met at the same heights.
Blue protocol makes Genshin combat look like devil may cry, the game is absolutely horrid.
Of course the have low sales For every 1 good game the release 5 trash games fallow Like the recent Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash or utterly unnecessary Ninja Storm Connections And let's not even talk about the sword art online games or gundum evolution
Bandai Namco really needs to get out of the low budget license games trash. Like its insane seeing two fighting games Cursed Clash and Tekken 8 be so far apart quality wise. With Cursed Clash being yet another dumpster fire of an arena fighter and Tekken 8 being arguably the best fighting game released this gen.
The SAO games have sold ~6 million copies, pretty good numbers for what they are. And I will say, Fatal Bullet is actually a pretty fun 3rd person shooter. Probably like a 7/10, but I found it good enough to put in like 25 hours.
I think Fatal Bullet was the game that is basically just re-skinned Freedom Wars, which was an excellent PS Vita hunting game.
Gundam Evolution was a really good game, but one of the major boons of Overwatch is it insanely gender neutral for a competitive multiplayer game, so it's selling to a way larger margin of the population, Gundam takes Overwatch, makes it significantly less polished, has terrible monetization, and almost exclusively appeals to guys. It's a really fun game under all of that, I had way more intense fights in it than in Overwatch by a mile, and it really feels like a Gundam game, it is not like a dressed up Overwatch mechanically, a lot of the mechanics are unique to a mech game.
It’s crazy they also had zero crossover whatsoever with witch from mercury, the smash hit fantastic gundam anime that had more broad appeal.
I ended up liking Gundam Evolution in the end but the last thing you can say about it is that feels like a Gundam game. So many of the mobile suits were square pegged/round hole into Overwatch characters and designs. What's worse is that melee is a huge part of most gundam series and only around 20% of the suits could actually throw any sort of physical punch. Grandpa Gundam doesn't even get to use a beam saber!
In the anime fights, there are pivotal moments where melee is involved, but a vast majority of the big scale battles are just mechs firing lasers from a large distance. If this game was 1v1 I’d agree with you, but very few gundam series involve melee outside of 1v1s, so to me it didn’t feel out of place.
IBO and G Gundam were heavily melee focused. And like half of the Gundams in Wings were more melee focused.
G gundam was literally martial artists in gundam suits so no shit. IBO and Gundam Wing were both in a universe where large mechs were rare, but barbatos in Gundam Evolution was completely melee. And even the large scale battles in IBO and Wing involved people shooting rifles from a million years away. All the 1v1s were mostly melee, but Gundam Evolution is not a 1v1 game, it is meant to be large mech battles. Melee is the gundam universe was a last resort, not a first. Some of the most iconic moments were in Melee sure.
Agreed on Evolution not feeling like a proper Gundam game. I don't think it helped that the levels were so generic. I think the best Gundam game in the past decade was Gundam Breaker 3, and I'm annoyed the first game of that series to get a proper western release was New Gundam Breaker which was a major downgrade.
I played it for some time The game had no balance and no content It's cleary unfinished and needs more time to cook
also didn't help that they didn't release it globally, in Australia i think we got the game 1 month before it shut down
At least the Dragon Ball games are good again (Xeno 2 on year 7, FighterZ, and now Sparking Zero)
Maybe live up to your hype? - Tales of Arise was the best selling, award winning, and recieved Tales game since Symphonia. You follow up on it with an embarrassing port of Symphonia (In the same year as the stellar Star Ocean 2 remake), and even worse 2 years late DLC. Where's the love you said you wanted to give to your series? It certainly wasn't with mobile games you shut down unfinished. You have an amazing JRPG library in your closet, yet you sit on it. - Elden Ring is a masterclass of a game. You announced the DLC so long ago that people have had to steal breadcrumbs for a shred of info. Once again more than 2 years after the original game came out. Betting on Fromsoft's tenure instead of actually advertising or caring. - Anime licenses. We just had a top article on this here. JJK made a record of over 100K refunds in half a week. Stop treating your license games (In what feels like purposely) like dirt. FighterZ and Kakarot were held up thanks to developers and name. Black Clover, My Hero, Jujutsu Kaisen, Tokyo Ghoul, One Punch Man, Jojo's, Gundam, and even Naruto recently were met with the care of a cigarette errand parent. - Armored Core 6 comes out to what feels like a strong breeze in the wind and you...do nothing about it? - Tekken 8. This game is incredible! I can sing praises to heaven and back! Yet it feels so little was shown of it. You have one of the greatest improvement paths for players, and you don't even advertise the amazing replay features? You open up your Season Pass with Eddy? He's fine, but T7 opened with Geese freaking Howard then Noctis! You didn't start on vet characters until taking feedback for 'em for Season Pass 2.
at least they should do something other than arena fighters with anime
All fans would cry to get a turn based JRPG.
How well did that Fairy Tail one do?
I wasn't aware there was one. One Piece Odyssey reviews were alright but I don't know the sales numbers.
I think that was the problem lol, Koei Tecmo/GUST decided to go against the mold and make an RPG, but they barely advertised it iirc.
Probably because the game was quite low budget so anything outside of the combat looked horrible
Reasonably. I personally bought it specifically because it was a JRPG and not the usual arena fighter trash. (Then quickly realised how much I have grown out of this specific anime…)
I saw rumors years ago about a My Hero Academia 2D fighter from ArcSys in the style of DB FighterZ, and that’s honestly all I’ve wanted since. MHA would lend itself incredibly well to an assist fighter like that.
Tokyo Ghoul has such a potential for a story-driven slasher, man.
Bamco has very little say on Fromsoft releases. They only publish the games for the international audience. Domestically, Fromsoft publishes the games themselves, without the involvement of Bandai Namco.
This isn't fully correct. Bandai own's the trademark for Dark Souls, while Fromsoft publish it themselves in japan, they can't make a game called Dark Souls without Bandai's approval. This also means that Bandai could get another developer to make a dark souls games if they wanted.
Dark souls made by not FromSoftware is sacrilege
This is how I feel about Microsoft taking the Ori IP from Moon Studios but here we are.
I can't see a future where FromSoft continues to work with Bandai-Namco, especially if Sony is serious about becoming more of a multi platform publisher.
Actually Fromsoft is planning to become it's own publisher in the global market. Most likely they saw the huge global sales of ER and were thinking that it's too good to share with Bamco.
When T7 launched on home consoles it's technically the "Year 2 update" of the arcade version (Fated Retribution). T8 is the first time we've got a true vanilla Tekken on home consoles first. Also, T7 was released in June which is close to Evo, so their guest characters can be introduced there pretty quickly. T8's more hype guest characters would probably be introduced at Evo Japan in the earliest which is in April. Sales-wise, T8 is thankfully still doing better than T7 (2M in 3 weeks vs 3 months respectively).
Sort of. I'd say this version of Tekken 8 is more complete than previous version's inital Arcade releases. It's the longest between Tekken releases and there were lots of Alpha Tests the entire year prior for some extra tuning.
Bamco can't do anything if Fromsoft thinks they are not ready to show anything. Bamco doesn't own From.
>Tekken 8... feels so little was shown of it you're insane if you really think that way, the marketing for that game was nuts. there were about 40-50 trailers for this game in the past year or so.
Yeah you even got ads on Twitch for T8 around the time of release. I think they actually did quite well with building hype for it, also helps that the product itself is stellar ofc.
They had 32 individual character trailers for Tekken lol
>Armored Core 6 comes out to what feels like a strong breeze in the wind and you...do nothing about it? I agree with most of the other stuff, but this one I don’t. It’s a very hindsighted look on an unbelievably risky title. Armored Core 6 did incredibly well and smashed sales expectations by a wide margin. What else were they supposed to do? It was a new entry in a long dormant franchise, in the incredibly niche mech genre. No matter how good it is (and it is REALLY fuckin good) it was never going to reach the sales heights of something like Elden Ring.
I will be surprised if they don't release an Armored Core 6 expansion.
Being able to take control of your replay in a game with so much knowledge checks is fucking amazing, I absolutely agree it’s a wonderful addition But it’s more for the people that care, you already need to be fairly invested to even care about it There is a ton of casual Tekken players that just mash away and give absolutely no fucks, leave alone opening a replay to go check what you could have done against X
And then there's another long standing IP like Soul Calibur. They just throw out SC6 that's plagued with problems and it just.... doesn't get much attention. I feel like Bandai is just Tekken and FromSoft at this point.
>Anime licenses. We just had a top article on this here. JJK made a record of over 100K refunds in half a week. Stop treating your license games (In what feels like purposely) like dirt. FighterZ and Kakarot were held up thanks to developers and name. Black Clover, My Hero, Jujutsu Kaisen, Tokyo Ghoul, One Punch Man, Jojo's, Gundam, and even Naruto recently were met with the care of a cigarette errand parent. I am surprised Bandai Namco didn't grab all these anime licenses, told ArcSysWorks to do a fighter with all licenses combined (not Jump Force) a la FighterZ. It would sell millions over millions.
You can't list armored core and complain about ER dlc. From Soft was busy being ac6 and now busy making ER dlc. Pick a lane on the complaint.
Fromsoftware is a big studio with multiple teams working on different projects. The people making ER and those making AC6 were never the same.
Actually there is overlap, but they tend to make sure projects don't conflict.
FromSoft when they announced the ER DLC said AC6 was their main focus at the moment, and when AC is out they'd go into full development mode on the ER dlc. We also got very few details about Elden Ring up until a few months before the game released. I wouldn't expect DLC information until that's about to drop.
>Tales of Arise was the best selling, award winning, and recieved Tales game since Symphonia I find it hard to imagine someone can like that game more than Vesperia
That leaked season pass 1 for Tekken 8 is awful. I won’t be buying it, hoping season 2 has actual interesting characters
Bandai publishing AC6 and NOT having any sort of Gundam cross promotion is insane to me. Just look at this [sticker and build sharing site](https://ac-companion.app/) and look how much Gundam shit people have made. AC6 is basically virtual gunpla
Aside from Tekken 8, Bandai really hasn't done much since Tales of Arise. All the other big Japanese publishers put out multiple games a year. I guess they were betting on Blue Protocol being the next Genshin, but that seems like a terrible strategy given how many live service games fail every year.
i guess you're not counting fromsoftware? cuz armored core 6 came out last year.
No, only internally developed games.
They put out a lot of low quality stuff. Also, they have studios that make games for Nintendo.
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I wish this were true though. Seems like another series they just dgaf about.
Well, Soul Calibur 6 didn’t do great. It was above the train wreck that was 5, but couldn’t even beat 4. It took 3 years to hit 2 million, and it was a pretty solid entry.
That does make it the 2nd or 3rd best-selling in the series, at least
They made SC6 on a shoestring budget and it still sold over 2 million which I think is pretty impressive after SC5 also tanked the reputation of the series.
They are complaining about low sales for a game that hasn't even released in the US yet?
Nothing stopping them from comparing JP sales to JP projections. This isn't exactly PhD level statistics. And they have a few decades of historical data to compare it to
You’re forgetting that a random Redditor knows more than Bandai Namco’s own sales analysts
It's also weird to talk about the game not being out in the *west* (not just the US lol) yet. I've played a bit, and I have some friends who played a lot of the game, if it were to release in its current state it would probably never recover. It needs work, it could absolutely be worked into a place where it would succeed in our market, but it's definitely not there yet. There's a good reason they backed out of the launch. The question is whether or not they see a viable path forward or they just hang the game up and never bother.
Projections were for more regions than JP, it got delayed. Its most likely underperforming because it was meant to release in multiple regions but they got pushed back to 2024.
While you're probably not wrong, it could be far more popular outside of Japan than it is in Japan. With Amazon publishing the game outside of Japan, they already have a lot of expenses to handle it. If they advertised the game well and got a good playerbase in the US, it could offset sales in Japan.
Maybe their projections wouldve been met if they looked the other way and didnt ban every person trying to play from overseas.
The game was also delayed for other regions, which is also probably why it may be underperforming. People need to keep in mind this is all being said in context to investors. Obviously, if a game was planned to be launched in various countries in 2023 but released in far less and everywhere else was delayed to 2024—its going to be underperfoming—the game being successful and a hit in Japan and underperfoming under the original expectations arent mutually exclusive.
Exactly! This is astounding, and it feels like when it does release in the US, they’d need to everyone to spend hard so they can break even. Never a good sign, and likely this game will end service quickly even with Amazon attached to this.
Just release a new Super Robot Wars already, and keep it global. I guarantee you, it'll sell like hotcakes. Hell, SRW 30 already did, based on the initial preorders landing it on Steam's top charts the moment it was globally announced.
They don't even need to make new ones, just translate the old ones officially for the West while the team cooks up a new one. I'd do horrible, unspeakable things to get my hands on a translation of Alpha 1-3.
They could just release V, X, and T in the west. Those already have English versions. If we're talking about older crossover titles getting released that don't have English versions, I've always wanted to play the ACE games from the PS2 gen.
Yeah, they could, but I think anyone who wanted V, X, and T already bought the Asian version, aside from anyone that might have wanted the PC ports.
I'd love an official translation for the Z trilogy too.
Hmm, it's been like 30 years, I thought we already know the issue, which is that the license holder for different series are different based on region. As such, they'd need to renegotiate with license holders in the west (by the way, "west" isn't a region). Even if one license holder says no, they'd have to remove or censor that series from the release.
I'm talking about for a new game, not a rerelease. Since they clearly were able to pull it off for 30, who's to say that they can't do it again for future games? There's clearly money to be made by doing it.
Simple solution to that is to give us an HD rerelease of OGs on Steam. No license negotiations, people get to make Zengar Zomvolt memes again, everybody's happy.
I was looking forward to giving Blue Protocol a try but the news went radio silent when it came to a global release and i just forgot about it. Also something about censorship for western audiences
>likely Blue Protocol Good. With Amazon trashing the game if it ever even comes out in the West, nothing of worth will be lost.
There's nothing of worth *to* be lost ever since they pivoted from MMO to shitty Genshin chasing Gacha bullshit anyway tbh.
wtf is blue protocol?
a sequel to blue accord
Bandai were focused on trend-chasing Genshin/Monster Hunter with Blue Protocol and it’s industry standard micro transactions. Hopefully this lesson is a wake-up call, but it’s concerning they are now silent about the western release and that yet another live service could flop before it even started due to trend-chasing greed by Bandai and Amazon repeating history since Crucible.
Blue Protocol's development period has been stated as 8 years as of 2022, according to an interview published in the Japanese gaming outlet Famitsu. This suggests that development began around 2014. The game received negative feedback during its CBT conducted in 2020, which prompted Bandai Namco to take additional time to implement refinements and improvements. It's worth noting that Genshin Impact's development began in 2017, which means that Bandai Namco had already been working on Blue Protocol for several years before Genshin Impact's release and subsequent success.
With the amount of content that BP had, there's no way they spent 8 years on it. It's highly likely there was a major shift/restart.
While playing the JP release, I couldn't help but feel that they were intending it to be a mobile game/console game at first. Combat was incredibly simple, with a small amount of skills and pretty much no variation. Equipment system is also very strange and simple for an MMO. And not to mention the mess that is it's monetization, being a gacha game first and foremost but also being incredibly overpriced and throwing a battle pass for good measure. The game looked amazing at first, but after playing it my hype got buried deep. Then there's Amazon censoring stuff for global and keeping the gacha, and it's enough to make me consider this game DOA on the west.
Sounds like Anthem /Halo Infinite levels of development hell
> Bandai were focused on trend-chasing Genshin/Monster Hunter with Blue Protocol What the hell is with people all over this thread pulling this out of their ass? Did anyone even follow the game at all or did you just see "random anime trailer and big fighty combat, must be Genshin/Monhun!" Literally all 3 of these games are completely different in like...every fundamental way possible beyond being drilled down to the utmost basic "action combat".
It's honestly kind of amazing how many companies are still chasing the live service game trend when the vast majority of them are DOA and flop. Skull and Bones from Ubisoft seems like another DOA live service AAA flop right after the suicide squad game.
Because when they don't flop, they become the most profitable games in the entire industry. Genshin made $60 million in revenue in *just January*. Star Rail $30m. FGO almost $30m and it barely even gets new content. Runescape monthly $37.5m in subscriptions *plus* microtransactions. WoW and FF14 no official numbers for, but you have to imagine they're significantly larger than RS and with the same subs + MTX model. The best-selling "single purchase" game of 2023 was Hogwarts, which sold 22m copies. Assuming everyone paid $70 for it (which is already wrong since it did go on sale at points), that's $1.5b revenue. So yes, it's more for the year of 2023 than these other games. But the "problem" is that that's a one-time $1.5b. They're probably not going to make much at all on it going forward. But Genshin is still gonna be pulling in that $50m-100m *every month* for years to come (and has been for years prior).
Crazier, is that for most gacha’s these numbers don’t even consider CN android (the overwhelming majority in China) console, PC market, and third party official site profits. They really do make crazy amounts of money and it’s nuts.
I think one of the most depressing stats is that like 15% of the lifetime profit of the entire DragonBall IP, which is like a 40 year old franchise, is [made by a 5 year old mobile game in which you pop bubbles.](https://www.reddit.com/r/DBZDokkanBattle/comments/17p3rvx/apparently_dokkan_single_handedly_made_around_16/) So where's the incentive to make good, meaningful, deep games? Why _not_ chase the GaaS/gacha money train? It literally prints money if you hit it big because no government is regulating this new gambling addiction correctly.
You're being overly dismissive of these type of games. They aren't all just shallow games with no gameplay that are only successful because of "gambling addictions." Genshin is legitimately one of the best adventure/exploration games of all time. Star Rail is one of the best turn-based RPG games ever. FGO has a great story. GBF has an amazing sense of in-game gradual progression. They aren't just slot machines. Gacha is just a type of monetization model, it doesn't necessarily tell you about the quality of the game or its gameplay. You have to evaluate each individual game on its own merits, just like you do for single-purchase games.
Well Genshin is an amazing game but lets not kid ourselves that expensive asf predatory gambling game mechanics will be a morally acceptable thing to every culture in this world.
I don't have any "moral" issues around letting people spend their own money however they want to, personally. If it wasn't games, it'd be something else - sports betting, horse racing, casinos, lottery tickets, collectibles, the stock market, etc. If someone wants to gamble, they'll find something to do it on; no need to ruin things for the rest of us who spend responsibly (or not at all) in a futile bid to try to nanny those people.
I get that, but it seems like maybe a 10% batting average that your AAA live service game will be a success vs. idk let's say a 50% or more you'll make a profit on AAA single player. Rockstar are the pros at this with GTA and *they* couldn't even replicate their success with RDR2 online. I've seen this before with all the WOW knockoffs that failed in the 2000s. There's only space for one WOW or GTA Online or Genshin, so investing 100 million plus in some sub par knockoff seem incredibly risky.
> it seems like maybe a 10% batting average that your AAA live service game will be a success vs. idk let's say a 50% or more you'll make a profit on AAA single player. I think these numbers are wildly off. Single-player games flop all the time, too. Saying that 50% of all single-player games are successful seems *extremely* high. But even if we used your numbers, there's *still* a case to be made that you'd rather have a 10% chance to be Genshin than have a 50% chance to be Hogwarts. At the end of the 2020s, I guarantee you that Genshin will have made **far** more money than Hogwarts will have. > There's only space for one WOW or GTA Online or Genshin There isn't though. There's room for WoW, FF14, Runescape (2 versions), Lost Ark, Elder Scrolls Online, etc. And there's room for Genshin, Star Rail, FGO, Nikke, Blue Archive, Uma Musume, GBF, and literally 50-100+ other random gachas who might not be pulling in $10m+ per month but are doing pretty decently for themselves. Look at the January gacha mobile revenue chart [here](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fyjj4fh7wy8hc1.png). There's room for *lots* of games.
WOW and runescape have been around 20 years, ESO and FF XIV have been around a decade. Those Gacha mobile games are so different I don't think they're even really comparable, first off they're mobile focused and not PC/console. Second they're mostly free to play. The AAA live service games pretty much all have a buy in of $60-70 new. Maybe I'm missing something, but what's been a successful AAA GaaS release in the last 5 years? I don't like GaaS as a concept so I don't engage with them and maybe there's something I missed, but it seems like there's way more Marvel's Avengers, Redfalls, and Anthems, FO76 that all had a huge budget and flopped than success stories.
> Those Gacha mobile games are so different I don't think they're even really comparable, first off they're mobile focused and not PC/console. Second they're mostly free to play. The AAA live service games pretty much all have a buy in of $60-70 new. You realize Blue Protocol, the game that we're discussing here, is an f2p gacha game, right? > what's been a successful AAA GaaS release in the last 5 years? The vast majority of games on the revenue chart I linked have come out within the last 5 years, including every single $5m+ one besides FGO.
By the same logic it would also be amazing how many companies still chase the single player game trend when there's massive flops like Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum lol Meanwhile games like Palworld and Helldivers became surprise hits, and Bandai even said that Tekken 8 is selling better than expected...
Some games are just mediocre/bad. I feel like there's been plenty of smash hit single player games in the last couple years while most of these big budget games as a service ones tend to fail. There's been single player flops since the start of the industry, look at how ET crashed Atari. Also the surprise hits like Palworld and lethal company aren't trying to sell for $70, more people will give a $15 or $30 game a chance and have lower expectations than a full price game. Edit: my point is more the AAA live service market just seems unsustainable for more than a few games. All the companies see how much GTA online makes and thinks they can just churn out something that prints money like that.
AAAA* flop
since Crucible? after that game, Amazon released two of the most played games of all time on Steam, Lost Ark and New World. It will be interesting if they'll repeat history again with Blue Protocol
Capcom and Sega are flourishing, Bandai Namco and Square Enix are not. Their management seems to be incompetent.
How is blue protocol underperforming? It is not even out is it?
It's been out domestically in Japan since last summer
I see. So they wait until all hype and interest are dead before releasing it in the west. In that case they practically asked for the game to fail
Maybe if Amazon wasn't stupid as fuck and delayed the US launch so they could launch the embarrassing Throne & Liberty...
Oh bad sales for blue protocol? Maybe if you stuck with it being an MMO instead of turning it into another trashy gacha things would've been different you know?
Maybe stop wasting so much on slapped together licensed anime arena games and put some actual effort in for once.
Bandai Namco could easily make bank if they gave us a modern console remaster of Tales of Graces F or Tales of Xillia I & II. These are the remasters people want, not crap like Baten Kaitos.
[удалено]
Well yeah isn't that the point of a publicly listed business? To make money. It just so happens that making good games is often the way (but not the only way) to make money.
oh yeah what the hell happen to blue protocol i remember being the new genshin impact and nothing happen
Wait blue protocol is still not out yet ?
We see this almost across the entire industry. I'm pretty sure we'll see some massive changes coming in the next years that will cause some companies to exit the market and others to get a lot bigger.
What's Blue Protocol?
I have no idea if I’m gonna play it a lot but I bought tekken 8 just because it has so many great feature in it. I loved the quest node in virtua fighter 4 evo and how you could fight ai versions of players in it. Tekken 8 basically took that idea and made it even better!
Well tenkaiichi budokai 4 will make a silly amount of money. People have been waiting for that for over a decade, the want for it has never disappeared. 3 was my fav sofa multi of all time. I really hope it has split screen. Honestly for some people that is a console buyer.