Super Bomberman R Online

» see konami.com/games/bomberman/online as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Super Bomberman R Online arrived on 1 September 2020 as a Google Stadia exclusive, which is a sentence that already tells you most of what happened. The mode it was built around was called Battle 64: sixty-four players dropped into sixteen separate arenas, four to a board, playing one-minute rounds of ordinary Bomberman. Between rounds came a fifteen-second Movement Phase where fresh blocks dropped and whole arenas shut down, funneling the survivors through gates into whatever boards were left, until the last bomber standing took it.

It went free-to-play on consoles and Steam on 27 May 2021, and the opening numbers were real. Konami announced three million downloads on 21 July 2021, eight weeks after the multiplatform launch, and handed out 500 Bomber Coins to anyone who had played. That was the only download figure the company ever published. There was never a second milestone to announce.

The collapse was faster than the launch. Steam peaked at 6,899 concurrent players in May 2021 and was sitting around two hundred by September, which is ninety-seven percent of an audience gone in four months. Konami announced the shutdown on 1 June 2022 and stopped selling Bomber Coins at the same instant, leaving players 183 days to spend currency they could no longer buy, with no refunds offered for anything left over. The service ended on 1 December 2022 at 01:00 UTC.

~ the case file ~

~ the stadia problem ~

The obvious story is that Stadia took it down with it, and the dates refuse to cooperate. Konami announced the death on 1 June 2022. Google did not announce that Stadia was closing until 29 September 2022, almost four months later. The game went dark on 1 December 2022 and Stadia followed on 18 January 2023. It was not the platform that killed this game, it was Konami's own read of its numbers, taken 120 days before Google gave anyone a reason.

What makes it stranger is the farewell notice itself. Konami's own wording says the service "has continued to operate with the support of many users since its launch in May 2021", which quietly writes the entire Stadia year out of the game's life. The company that shipped it as a Stadia exclusive declined to mention Stadia in its obituary.

~ what the pack cost ~

Battle 64 was the free part, and it was a sharp piece of design. Everything else was not. The eight-player Bomberman that the brand has been famous for since 1983 sat behind a Premium Pack at $9.99, and so did the Konami guest characters, Simon Belmont and Solid Snake among them.

Content stopped well before the service did. Konami's own update notice of 17 March 2022 said Season 3 had ended and asked players to wait for news about future updates. The news arrived 76 days later and it was the shutdown announcement.

~ the ending ~

Konami issued no refunds. Google, closing Stadia six weeks later, refunded every game and add-on purchase made through its store, so a player who bought the Premium Pack on Stadia was made whole by Google for a game Konami had already switched off, while the same purchase on Steam got nothing back. Battle 64 itself survived: it was folded into Super Bomberman R 2, which shipped on 13 September 2023 and carried the sixty-four-player mode as a side dish.

The official site is still up. It still lists Stadia alongside the other platforms and still shows the three-million-downloads banner, with the service termination notice sitting above both. The last entry in its news feed is dated 20 December 2024, two years and three weeks after the servers went off, and it announces that the soundtrack is coming to streaming services.

~ where it could not be bought ~

Stadia never launched in Turkey. For the first nine months of this game's life there was no legitimate way to play it from where I live, and by the time the console and Steam versions opened it up in May 2021, the thing had eight weeks of healthy numbers left in it.

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