Bandai Namco Online announced that they will be discontinuing services for the anime MMORPG Blue Protocol. Although the game was originally planned for a global release by Amazon Games in 2024, those plans have now been canceled as well.
These decisions are not entirely unexpected, considering Bandai Namco’s strong commitment to globalist principles, focusing on ESG initiatives. Blue Protocol, which was a joint effort with Amazon Games, has faced challenges such as censorship and enforced diversity and inclusivity across different regions.
Blue Protocol was the only live service MMO released by Bandai Namco Online recently. Following a substantial loss of ¥8.201 billion Yen for the fiscal year ending in March 2024, the failures of Blue Protocol have led to the insolvency of Bandai Namco’s online division.
Blue Protocol, developed by Project Sky Blue, a collaboration between Bandai Namco Online and Bandai Namco Studios launched in Japan in June 2023 after a lengthy development process. The game initially attracted considerable attention due to its sleek anime-style graphics and the promise of a high-budget domestic MMORPG, similar to miHoYo’s Genshin Impact.
At launch, Blue Protocol celebrated 200,000 concurrent players, with users eager to enter its crowded servers. However, this strong start was short-lived, as player dissatisfaction soon emerged, leading to a rapid decline in user numbers.
The plan was always to bring Blue Protocol to Western regions, but this would have required significant changes to character and outfit designs to make the game appear more culturally appropriate and inclusive to the diverse Western audience.
Many Western players are apprehensive about anime-themed games, as they often struggle to distinguish between fiction and reality, leading to the perception that “child-like” characters are sexualized and therefore are pedophilic.
Blue Protocol was announced during the 2022 Game Awards, but observant fans noticed that Bandai Namco and Amazon Games had subtly changed the race of various characters between the trailers for different regions. This mirrors what happened with another MMORPG published by Amazon Games, Lost Ark.
It then became clear that Blue Protocol would be censoring various character costume designs for its Western release. This censorship appeared to extend to its console release on Sony’s PlayStation 5 in Japan, where the option for a “jiggle physics” button was removed from the character creation screen, and several outfits were redesigned to be less revealing and provocative.
The game was ultimately doomed from the beginning, as Japanese players quickly lost interest after its release, partly due to the Western censorship affecting the PS5 version in Japan.
This censorship more or less alienates the core audience for such games in Western markets. Bandai Namco later expressed disappointment with Blue Protocol’s underperformance, which had serious financial repercussions for the company.
However, the censored Western release never came to fruition, as Bandai Namco could no longer bear the losses and has officially announced the termination of Blue Protocol.
Blue Protocol will officially shut down on January 18th, 2025. After years of delays and a full year of negative reception from domestic players, Bandai Namco has canceled its plans for a Western release of the MMORPG.
The developers had continued working on the game until quite recently; on June 26th, they released a major update titled “Beyond,” aimed at addressing many of the game’s issues and revitalizing it.
However, these efforts were insufficient to rekindle player interest, leading Bandai Namco Online to announce the game’s shutdown shortly after its one-year anniversary.
Despite these significant financial losses, Bandai remains steadfast in its commitment to ESG and DEI initiatives, which have led to tokenized diversity, representation, and censorship to adhere to western cultural ideals. A Bandai representative recently confirmed that the Japan-based developer is still dedicated to prioritizing political ideologies over creativity in their products.
During the 2024 Computer Entertainment Developers Conference (CEDEC), an annual event where East Asian video game industry members gather to discuss practical aspects of their business, Okuma Mirai from Bandai Namco’s Quality Assurance department delivered a presentation.
According to a recap by Japanese video game news outlet 4gamer.net, Mirai explained that the company’s shift towards DEI initiatives was driven by a desire to broaden their content and “reach a more diverse audience” which worked well for Sony’s Concord.
She acknowledged that to expand their operations, it was essential to consider the preferences of their target audiences, noting that DEI had emerged as a major concern for Western players based on feedback from overseas partners.
Interestingly, Miura then provided her working definition of DEI, describing it as a state where diverse individuals are respected and can showcase their abilities in a fair environment and under equitable conditions.
With this perspective, the Bandai Namco representative argued that although representation and diversity are not legally required in Western media productions, these concepts must be considered when developing games for release outside of Asia. She asserted that incorporating them would enhance a game’s appeal to Western audiences.
To support her claim, Miura referenced an unnamed study by the analytics firm Newzoo, which found that slightly over half of respondents in Britain and the U.S. viewed DEI concepts as generally “important.”
It’s worth noting that the survey likely included areas with high diversity and inclusivity such as San Francisco and London, rather than consulting with actual gaming audiences or consumers. It’s important to probe locations where Whites are a minority race and individuals identifying as LGBT are significantly higher than the national average.
Miura then recounted how their experience with DEI issues began during the development of Blue Protocol. A player had complained about a lack of “black hair” styles in the character creator, feeling unrepresented by the game’s original options.
This situation reminds me the “controversy” surrounding the “Space Bun” incident in Animal Crossing, where specific hairstyles were criticized as cultural appropriation if not worn by individuals of the associated ethnic background.
According to 4gamer’s recap of the event, the representative shared that she had educated herself on DEI by extensively reading international media and DEI-related articles in the gaming industry from the past decade up to the present.
Blue Protocol was Bandai’s most prominent game developed with ESG and DEI initiatives in mind, as it was a collaborative project with Amazon. It notably featured changes in character representation between trailers and marketing for Japanese and Western audiences.
However, with Bandai Namco announcing the game’s termination before its planned end-of-year release, it appears Western players will not see the game. Despite this, Bandai Namco remains committed to policies aligned with Larry Fink’s regressive approach, which has led to significant long-term losses for companies like SEGA and especially Square Enix.
Bandai Namco Studios recently reported a loss of ¥3.983 billion Yen, marking their first negative annual income since the subsidiary was established in 2012. Bandai Namco Studios specializes in planning and developing video games for home consoles, PC, mobile, and arcade systems, such as Blue Archive which is now transitioning to End of Life.
Bandai Namco, like many other major Japanese game developers, is experiencing significant financial losses due to their commitment to Western ideologies such as ESG and DEI agendas.
These policies are expected to lead to continued losses, especially with upcoming releases like SYNDUALITY: Echo of Ada, which includes progressive body type terminology to describe characters’ sexes.
