For us it was the middle of the night when we heard the news: Blue Protocol is dead. There will never be a localized version, and while the Japanese version will stay online for a few more months, that’s just a gesture. The game is dead. And we all knew that would be the likely outcome. After Bandai Namco Online filed for bankruptcy, the writing was on the wall. We knew this game would never come out here.

But when did it happen? What caused it to happen? Caught by the same spirit of simultaneous obsession and curiosity that so often governs my actions, I was fixated on this one question. Blue Protocol is possibly dead, and the question of what led to its death is honestly pretty mundane: it never had enough players in Japan to justify its running costs. But since those questions are incredibly easy to answer, I latched onto the question of when the game died—because it wasn’t exactly in the middle of the night. The game died long before that.

First, let’s look at an obvious data point: the bankruptcy declaration. On the face of it, that gives us a pretty good date. At that point, it was likely that the lights would go out for a number of projects while the company’s ultimate fate was in limbo, and by that point, Bandai Namco (hereafter referred to as “Bamco” to save me typing) certainly had a pretty clear picture of where things were headed. It makes it somewhat ironic that just a week earlier, the developer hosted an anniversary event and talked about price cuts, perhaps a last-ditch attempt to show bullishness.

But wait. It was in May of this year that we first noticed that Amazon was conspicuously Blue Protocol from its upcoming release list. This fits well with the assumption that Bamco was sensing the signs of the times ahead of the first anniversary. And it’s not exactly surprising that communication with eager Western players has somewhat dried up after the game’s Japanese launch was not exactly a huge success.

In fact, you have to go back quite a long way to see that Amazon really has Blue Protocol after the initial media offensive. The last major development came in November 2023, when a technical test was conducted for the game ahead of its early 2024 release. Obviously, that didn’t happen in early 2024; in fact, there was conspicuous silence from Amazon after that test, although Bamco was still talking about the game and hosting events.

So what happened? Did Amazon see the writing on the wall at this point? We know from the closure announcement that Amazon didn’t lay off anyone due to the game’s removal from its catalog, but why didn’t Amazon say so until now? Why did Amazon know back in May that it wouldn’t release the game if the closure didn’t come until August? Something is going on. Something is on foot.

The only answer at this point was to do what any reasonable person would do: scour Reddit.

There I found an anonymous person who confirmed leaks of files from Totally Legitimate’s internal documentation at Amazon, where complete localization files for the English, French, German and Spanish versions of the game were present. Apparently, according to this anonymous leaker, Amazon had plans to release this game until the end of the service was announced, which even surprised Amazon! And why was Amazon so quiet about it? This is also obvious: They wanted to make sure that the focus on New World And Throne and Freedomwho both have big releases planned this year! By waiting until Blue Protocol If development was further along, Amazon could present the game in its complete and updated form to a waiting audience, with all development steps already advanced. Better yet, Tencent will buy out the game now that it has reached its end, allowing Bamco to write off the investment and then release a global version of the game for everyone! You can’t see the leaked files, but it all makes sense! After all, why would developers announce something that never happened? It’s clearly all just a drawn-out back and forth! Blue Protocol is not dead at all! It is just in a small ravine at the moment and when it is released again we will all love it and it will bring food and water and destroy our enemies!

Because, you know… that’s a lot more plausible than someone on Reddit just lying about a game that died when it released in June 2023.

Yes, I’ve been teasing you with that crazy social media conspiracy theory. Here’s the real answer. Blue Protocol launched in Japan with muted sales and struggled to retain its launch audience. Bamco was required by law to block connection attempts from anyone outside Japan, and that didn’t help it retain its audience. By the time localization work began, it was almost certainly too late for a company already struggling with revenue and cash flow.

So when Blue Protocol die? The real answer is that there is no real answer and it doesn’t matter. In a year, no one will care. The game looked great, but based on the information we have from people who actually played it, it wasn’t really good at launch. Great graphics do not make a satisfactory MMORPG, and based on the game’s business model and its struggle to hold onto an audience, we can be pretty sure there wasn’t a revamp in the West that would have made it a mega-hit either.

Amazon stayed silent not because of a conspiracy, but because it had legal obligations regarding publishing options and didn’t want to strain its relationship, but neither Amazon nor Bamco thought a western release would save the game or even be worth the time and effort. As entertaining as the scam may be, the actual answers are… completely boring and completely understandable.

The worst part is that even if I could find out the exact date it died, it would make a difference. The dead will still be dead. It’s another great-looking game that you and I can’t play. Maybe it was great, maybe it was awful, but it’s still just as dead. Answers won’t change that. It might be satisfying for a moment, but so what?

I started looking back because I was curious. I wanted to see if I could pinpoint exactly when things went wrong, and I realized it didn’t matter. So I stopped, because it turns out answering when is less important than answering what. It’s another disappointment, another loss, and no answer will soothe the wound. Like any game that ends, all that happens is you lose, and then you just… stare. You stare at an empty space where something once was, now there’s nothing, and no answers will ever give you what you so desperately want.

You can’t get an answer that won’t hurt it. You can arrange the notes, check the dates, draw strings between them, and even if you see the shape, you will whisper the same words to no effect.

Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on in the MMO genre, and sometimes you just have vague patch notes informing you that something has probably changed somewhere. Senior reporter Eliot Lefebvre likes to analyze such notes, as well as vague elements of the genre as a whole. The power of this analysis can be adjusted in certain circumstances.