Two major MMORPGs from Asia are announced for the year 2024, which should be brought to Europe by Amazon, on PS5, Xbox Series X, and to Steam: Throne and Liberty from South Korea and Blue Protocol from Japan. Both have already launched in Asia and both have their global release date set for 2024. But for months there has been nothing. What is the status?
When was the last news about Blue Protocol? The MMORPG Blue Protocol had its last official news on Amazon’s western website on November 13, 2023. At that time, Amazon thanked for the completion of the technical test.
The next time the servers open, they look forward to hosting an even larger event that brings new updates from the Japanese server.
That was 5 months ago.
Since then, there has been no word from Amazon regarding Blue Protocol, and social media channels are silent.
When was the last news about Throne and Liberty? Here it’s been even longer. The last official news also concerned a technical test in October 2023. The head of the game at Amazon, Merv Lee Kwai, thanked the participants, published statistics, and expressed his eagerness to welcome players back soon.
That was 6 months ago. Similarly, the social media channels are silent here as well.
However, it is by no means that the games are dead and nothing is happening. Reports about the MMORPGs regularly reach us from their home countries in Asia, even if they don’t sound very encouraging:
Why is this unusual? Normally, one would expect that even if there is nothing to report, signs of life, called “beats”, would appear on websites and social media channels at regular intervals to slowly build the hype, but nothing is coming in that direction.
It is actually not planned to halt an advertising campaign for a game once it has been started.
Circumstances in 2024 are significantly less rosy than a few years ago
What could be the reason? Both Throne and Liberty and Blue Protocol are not performing as well as expected in their home countries. Additionally, there seem to be issues with the implementation:
- For Throne and Liberty, the console port could be causing difficulties for which Amazon is responsible
- For Blue Protocol, there is the troublesome issue of “culturally necessary adjustments”
Furthermore, the gaming industry is currently in a completely different state than a few years ago when Amazon secured these deals, and the games no longer appear as attractive as they once did.
In November 2023, Amazon also had to lay off 180 employees. However, this is not supposed to have any impact on the MMORPGs; on the contrary, they should now receive more attention.
However, 4 months after the wave of layoffs, there is no sign of that.
Nevertheless, the release for both MMORPGs is still set for 2024. Even though the dates have already been postponed several times:
