'Jump Force' Has Been Pulled From Digital Storefronts Forever

Overnight, we lost a legend. Well, maybe not a legend, but still a pretty decent game. It had over 20,000 mostly positive reviews on Steam, which has got to amount to something, right? Well, apparently not to Bandai Namco.

I’m talking about Jump Force - that big ol’ anime crossover fighting game, which features (or featured, I suppose) a whole host of manga and anime characters from loads of different series, including Naruto, Dragon Ball, My Hero Academia and Yu-Gi-Oh. It’s probably the only game where you could see Sasuke, Son Goku and All Might team up in battle, but don’t quote me on that.

ICYMI... check out the trailer for Jump Force below (although you'll be struggling to play the game now if you hadn't already).

Last November, it was announced that the game would be delisted from digital storefronts, despite only just releasing in February 2019 - it’s really not very old. As you’d expect, its online servers are also set to be sent to the shadow realm, just not yet - they’ll be shut down between August 24 and 25 this year, depending on where you live. According to PC Gamer, you’ll still be able to play online against friends even after this date, though, but ranked matches will be gone.

Any DLC you bought before its removal from the storefronts will also still work just fine, so don’t worry about that. Obviously, all the game’s offline modes will remain fully accessible, too.

The strange thing about this is that no actual reasoning has been given as to why the game has been removed. We can only assume that sales just weren’t profitable enough to keep it going, but that still seems pretty extreme for something that’s barely three years old, and had pretty decent reception. 

At this moment in time, there’s no official talk of a sequel being in the works, either. You’d think that they'd want to get in on that now that there’s no way left to buy the original, unless you want to buy a preowned physical copy (which, obviously, Bandai Namco wouldn’t get any money from anyway). Rest in peace, Jump Force - we hardly knew ya.