Bandai Namco’s Jump Force is Being Delisted

Announced at Microsoft’s E3 press conference back in 2018 and released in February 2019, Jump Force is a crossover fighting game made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the popular weekly manga magazine, Weekly Shōnen Jump. It features one-on-one battles between teams of three in huge 3D spaces. While some were put off by the realistic style of the characters and it wasn’t destined to be a huge competitive fighting game played at EVO that year, the game had strong sales and managed to keep a dedicated community. Launching with a modest 40 characters hailing from so many beloved series likely helped.

I don’t think anyone was expecting to hear much more news about the game. That is why it was certainly surprising to a lot of people when Bandai Namco tweeted out that support wasn’t just ending, but that all editions of the game and its DLC are being taken off digital storefronts on February 8th, 2022. “Online service” is currently set to end on August 25th, 2022.

Already owned DLC will of course still be available to use along with all offline content in the game. Online battles will still be available after the online service goes down, except for multiplayer lobbies and ranked matches. Although it isn’t uncommon for games to lose support and online service over time, delisting is a much different beast entirely.

The fact that the game will be digitally gone only three years after release is also pretty strange, to say the least. Many are theorizing that there might be some trouble with licensing one of the properties behind the scenes. Considering there are 17 different series being represented, that would make the most sense.

It’s all very curious though. The previous crossover game to celebrate the 45th anniversary, J-Stars Victory VS, is still up and available with no notice of being taken down as of this time. It’s unknown if Jump Force going down would be due to a different series that wasn’t a part of J-Stars Victory VS, or if there’s just a weird legal issue at the root of all this. A lot of people in the community are taking it differently, but overall everyone is just confused.

Plenty of games will end online service and continue to sell because there’s some degree of offline content to offer. That’s not happening here, which seems to suggest this isn’t a typical situation. Of course, any attempts of explanation are purely theoretical unless Bandai Namco decides to provide an explanation themselves, which I highly doubt they’re going to do. There’s a decent chance a new crossover game will be developed for the 55th anniversary, but Jump Force won’t be there to see it. The tweet announcing the delisting and the end of the online service is linked above and the included photo detailing everything can also be seen below.