Bamco is incompetent. Are they a public company? If so, why is anyone still invested in them? Withdraw your money now.

NGS has a fanbase that can be milked. BP was a completely fresh IP that wanted to be NGS 2.0 of course that fails.

lol

Difference between a known and a unknown ip.

Lol, LMAO even.

The big three at time of launch:
- Final Fantasy
- Dragon Quest
- Phantasy Star

PSO2:NGS ver2 = June 7th 2023
Blue Protocol ver1 = June 14, 2023
Dragon Quest X ver7 = March 21st, 2024
FF14 ver7 = July 2nd, 2024

There is only room for a couple games to gather large revenue. Blue Protocol was not a Titan (Overwatch's old name), it was a BlueStreak (Lawbreaker's old name). There was no way BP was ever going to get into the big leagues with those juggernauts.

The only way statistically for the Blue Protocol Anime-Fantasy target to chance a win. Was if it was a Tales of MMO like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KVNKALiaZw However, that one died even faster... March 3, 2006 to March 31, 2007.

You've had people playing the Japanese version PSO2, even over a VPN, for like 20(?) years.
Then NGS comes around and it's universally disliked.
Then the English version for both games come out, and they're censored downgrades to the JP version, so they don't even reach 5% of the JP playercount.

Blue Protocol somehow managed to take a step even further down from that?
I could see English people losing interest, because Amazon butchers any game they touch. But for the Japanese version to die as well, I wonder what went wrong.

Was this one of those games where Amazon was asking the game be censored in the design process so they have less butchering to do?

Originally posted by Yerc2:

Was this one of those games where Amazon was asking the game be censored in the design process so they have less butchering to do?

Amazon asks were standard anime censorship over here. Even though the rating was Teen, they actually wanted it to be E/E10+. Where Amazon wanted to lean more towards more conservative family-oriented anime rather than current liberal modern anime. These changes were only applied to AMS/WEU/ANZ regions.

Also, it should be noted the specific censorship is actually normal in Japan as well. If the anime target is the younger age range (4-14), which would be CERO A~B.

Originally posted by MysteryGrayLeaf:

Originally posted by Yerc2:

Was this one of those games where Amazon was asking the game be censored in the design process so they have less butchering to do?

Amazon asks were standard anime censorship over here. Even though the rating was Teen, they actually wanted it to be E/E10+. Where Amazon wanted to lean more towards more conservative family-oriented anime rather than current liberal modern anime. These changes were only applied to AMS/WEU/ANZ regions.

Also, it should be noted the specific censorship is actually normal in Japan as well. If the anime target is the younger age range (4-14), which would be CERO A~B.

I been watching anime since I was a kid, and I know many people who like anime, but I really want to know who these "conservative families" that are liking anime because I have never seen any of them in my life. I'm willing to bet this target audience doesn't even exist!

Originally posted by Spencer:

Originally posted by MysteryGrayLeaf:

Amazon asks were standard anime censorship over here. Even though the rating was Teen, they actually wanted it to be E/E10+. Where Amazon wanted to lean more towards more conservative family-oriented anime rather than current liberal modern anime. These changes were only applied to AMS/WEU/ANZ regions.

Also, it should be noted the specific censorship is actually normal in Japan as well. If the anime target is the younger age range (4-14), which would be CERO A~B.

I been watching anime since I was a kid, and I know many people who like anime, but I really want to know who these "conservative families" that are liking anime because I have never seen any of them in my life. I'm willing to bet this target audience doesn't even exist!

What you are saying is stereotypes have to fit within the norm of that stereotype. Anything outside that norm is false.

Welcome to the human state. You are wrong in your notion cause you stereotyped in the first place.

Originally posted by MysteryGrayLeaf:

Originally posted by Yerc2:

Was this one of those games where Amazon was asking the game be censored in the design process so they have less butchering to do?

Amazon asks were standard anime censorship over here. Even though the rating was Teen, they actually wanted it to be E/E10+. Where Amazon wanted to lean more towards more conservative family-oriented anime rather than current liberal modern anime. These changes were only applied to AMS/WEU/ANZ regions.

Also, it should be noted the specific censorship is actually normal in Japan as well. If the anime target is the younger age range (4-14), which would be CERO A~B.

I'm pretty sure you have your groups mixed up. Amazon is very liberal, which is why they're so pro-censorship. And why they're pushing for games they publish to become censored "safe spaces". They'd rather sabotage their own products to appeal to investors to make them "safe" for their imaginary audience.
Even in Japan, the more /conservative/ stance is to /conserve/ the game as it is, with as little censorship as possible.
This also holds true with pretty much every major game and anime company in the West.

They're trying to make everything they touch appeal to their imaginary audience(and bots) of woke and virtue-signalling people, who only complain on social media sites like Twitter and Reddit, without actually buying any games.

In general, more conservative views are in favor lewd anime, and against censorship when it comes to fictional stuff.
Whereas more liberal views are are more in favor of censorship towards fictional stuff, and against lewdness due to it somehow being offensive.
Of course, these roles are typically reversed when it involves real humans.

Games like PSO2 and Lost Ark suffered from the same kind of thing with their English releases.

Sadly I wasn't a big fan of NGS. I put a good thousand hours into it, but ended up dropping it within a year. Base PSO2 while not perfect was a much more enjoyable experience and I put a good 2k hours into the global version before NGS released. The thing is though global base PSO2 received its updates at an accelerated pace compared to JP which really made the experience fun. The JP update speed would not have flown globally especially nowadays.

I've always hoped for a good high budget anime style MMO not based on an existing series(dragonball, naruto, sao and such), but I'm starting to think it will never happen. I always find myself wondering what will it take to make one and have it stand the test of time. I think looking at games like Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves gave me a false hope that it would happen eventually. Those games aren't as far off from being MMOs as you would think despite being mainly single player games especially Wuthering Waves.

I never played Tower of Fantasy the game looked jank and was released way to soon not to mention I don't think their pay model was the right fit. I think if they had given it another year or 2 in the oven before releasing(for more content and polishing) and found a better monetization system it could have seen a lot more success.

Originally posted by Yerc2:

I'm pretty sure you have your groups mixed up. Amazon is very liberal, which is why they're so pro-censorship. And why they're pushing for games they publish to become censored "safe spaces". They'd rather sabotage their own products to appeal to investors to make them "safe" for their imaginary audience.
Even in Japan, the more /conservative/ stance is to /conserve/ the game as it is, with as little censorship as possible.
This also holds true with pretty much every major game and anime company in the West.

They're trying to make everything they touch appeal to their imaginary audience(and bots) of woke and virtue-signalling people, who only complain on social media sites like Twitter and Reddit, without actually buying any games.

In general, more conservative views are in favor lewd anime, and against censorship when it comes to fictional stuff.
Whereas more liberal views are are more in favor of censorship towards fictional stuff, and against lewdness due to it somehow being offensive.
Of course, these roles are typically reversed when it involves real humans.

Games like PSO2 and Lost Ark suffered from the same kind of thing with their English releases.

Censorship by removing nudity, blood, sexualization, actual sex has always been a conservative tactic.

"When Cartoon Network began to broadcast anime there were no internal standards in place for the use of overseas material. This required them to develop a set of standards and guidelines for the handling of the content. The display of alcohol consumption, tobacco smoking, violence (including depictions of death, spoken references to death and dying, scenes of characters being threatened or in life-threatening situations, and depictions of suicide), gambling, blood, offensive language, offensive hand gestures, sexual content (including nudity, intercourse, innuendo, and depictions of homosexual and transsexual characters), and the mistreatment of women and minors were all deemed unacceptable as well as other situations unsuitable to a younger audience. Material for Cartoon Network was edited for TV-Y7, whereas Adult Swim content was edited for TV-14 standards."

The above was mostly developed from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority which was developed from Hays code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code which was created by this guy and enforced by that guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_H._Hays
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Breen

"Moral panic" in America has always been caused by the right/conservatives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLDzjSy5DxY So, the censorship that Amazon requested is inline with conservative censorship.

"When we talk about changes, we are looking at a perspective from bringing the game to as many people as possible. We are targeting a T-Rating since it as an Anime game, and generally speaking, Anime is much more approachable for the Teen market unless you start going towards certain extremes.

But generally speaking we’ll make it so when parents or friends are playing with other Teens, that they’re not necessarily going to be pulled out of the environment or the game’s perspective.

So from a censorship point of view, again we’re looking at what do we need to hit from the requirements of all the entities, the country legal requirements and the regulatory ones." -Mike Zadorojny, regulatory ones are related to the past censorships. To sell to a children audience, Amazon needs to pass moral panic regulations. It would only take a single group of parents to complain and force ESRB from a T-rating to an AO-rating.

If PSO2/PSO2:NGS kept the same standards as PSO1(CERO A) and PSU(CERO B). SEGA would also be using the same censorship as Blue Protocol for US but for JP. Where we have the Satan Panic, Japan had the Otaku Panic. So, the ratings have the same morally conservative regulative/censoring force.

Originally posted by Yerc2:

Blue Protocol somehow managed to take a step even further down from that?
I could see English people losing interest, because Amazon butchers any game they touch. But for the Japanese version to die as well, I wonder what went wrong.

I can tell you what went wrong.
People wanted Blue Protocol to be a better version of PSO2 NGS. Instead we got a game with exactly the same problems. So why play a new IP when its just PSO2 NGS with a different paintjob ?

Neew IPs need something to rpove itself. Blue Protocol didnt have that.