In some sad news for mecha anime fans everywhere, Bandai Namco’s Gundam Evolution has officially closed its servers today. The ambitious project, perhaps a little too late to catch on to the arena shooter trend, lasted a little over a year before closing shop. The game was unfortunately plagued with bad decisions and poor monetization, and even the EU CEO of Bandai Namco Arnaud Muller could only say that the game was “a good learning experience” when asked about his opinions on the project.
Despite being a multi-billion dollar IP and certainly one of Japan’s biggest properties, the Gundam franchise has had a lot of trouble getting a foothold in AAA gaming, especially in the West. While some gacha games and spinoffs like Super Robot Wars keep the name alive in video games in the East, in the West those titles are niche and not nearly as many people play them as Bandai Namco would like to. Though one could maybe attribute this to Bandai Namco’s poor handling of their games as they cross the seas. Indeed, Gundam Battle Operation 2 was recently ported to Steam and, despite a wave of great initial hype surrounding the game excitement for it quickly died down due to poor handling and negligence on the developers’ part, with the game currently sitting at a depressing “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam.
And a similar thing happened to Gundam Evolution, despite the game having a very passionate base of players it failed to generate any lasting excitement for something that could be described as a “live-service” game. The large space between content updates and lack of content in general, as well as a plethora of bugs and the big kicker being monetization issues left the arena shooter high and dry. It’s unfortunate because at the time many people were looking for an alternative to Overwatch 2 and Gundam Evolution was in the prime position to be that, but all of its problems just ended up causing the ship to sink.
In its last moments, it seems that Gundam Evolution sought to rectify at least a few of these problems, not the least of which being its content, releasing several planned suits in the span of several weeks before the game’s servers closed such as the beloved titular Zeta Gundam from Zeta Gundam as well as the Kampfer from War in the Pocket.
One can only hope that Bandai Namco doesn’t drop the IP as a video game franchise altogether. It’s clear that the issues that plagued Gundam Evolution as well as Gundam Battle Operation 2 are more from negligence and poor handling of player issues than anything else. If anything, this year has been a bright spot for the future of mecha games, with FromSoftware’s Armored Core 6 selling over 2.8 million copies in October, and probably selling much more since.
But in the meantime, it is sad that Gundam Evolution had to go out like this. As stated the game did have a dedicated and passionate, but small, fanbase and many of them decided to hop in their mobile suits for one last day of sorties. A sad, but fitting end as they salute their game before it sinks into the sea.