Examples of Damage Control in Gaming: Save the Drama for Cooking Mama

It’s been difficult for the Cooking Mama series to establish a place among current and recent gaming platforms. The series became moderately popular among the DS and Wii-owning audience, but sales for the franchise faltered when that audience migrated to mobile phones. It wasn’t popular enough to make the transition to a premium or free-to-play series, the latter types of which sell most on phones. This left it stuck in a low-budget limbo for a good while — until now, that is.

Now that the Switch has gained a foothold, it was time for a new ostensibly serious effort: Cooking Mama: Cookstar. It was also announced for PlayStation 4 and PC, because there’s no need to keep games to one platform when they can run on several.

Turns out, it wasn’t that serious an effort after all.

Cookstar’s release has been a sight to behold for all the wrong reasons, the arrival of which has been accompanied by high-level drama that won’t let up. Cooking Mama is one of the last franchises anyone would have expected goofball shenanigans around, exactly what makes this so entertaining.

This started when the game suddenly released at the end of March, something only noticed when its then-quiet Twitter feed was updated with a tweet and attached trailer that claimed it was “Available Now.” Its release seemed sudden for a game that received little promotion. But there was an immediate problem when a search for the game on the Switch eShop subsequently turned up no results, which revealed how it was only on sale for around three to four hours before being pulled for then-unspecified reasons. Physical copies of the game showed up at select GameStop and Target stores around the country according to Redditors, while Amazon is only offering copies from third-party sellers.

The ensuing speculation about why a Cooking Mama game, of all titles, had to be removed attracted a level of interest the franchise hadn’t seen in years. An early press release from publisher Planet Entertainment mentioned how the game would come with a blockchain for cryptocurrency mining, of all things, which could have overheated Switch systems if implemented. The assumption was that this explained why it was removed from the eShop, a guess later taken as fact when it started spreading around the Twittersphere like wildfire — one of the worst things about Twitter, honestly. The writers of that early press release either listed features that sounded cool, or actually thought they could implement one at that point. Either way, it doesn’t have it.

It’s also not true that Planet Entertainment has anything to do with staunch libertarian organization Koch Industries. The publisher actually has a deal with Koch Media, a completely different and unaffiliated corporation. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, especially social media.

Clearly something happened behind the scenes to set all this off, a question answered this week. Japan-based license holder Office Create Corp. claimed that Cookstar is an unauthorized release, the result of a relationship breach with Planet Entertainment. Office Create rejected the game due to its quality not measuring up to previous titles, but Planet released it anyway. They were also not licensed to release the game on PS4 despite an early promise to do so. Now, they’re exploring legal options.

Planet Entertainment fired back with a statement of their own posted to their Twitter account. They claimed Office Create did approve the game design work from developer 1st Playable, and that creative differences outside the scope of their original agreement arose as the game neared completion. Setting aside how grammatically challenged the statement is (as if it was written in another language and hastily translated into English), this is a long way of saying “no, you’re wrong.” Cooking Mama fans might have been excited for this title before this fiasco and the reviews from critics, but that interest is long gone. Their claim that Office Create has their “total respect” reads like backhanded snark, but it’s tough to tell given the bad writing.

If Office Create indeed attempts to sue them, it might be tough to prove their initial dissatisfaction with the product and Planet Entertainment’s obligations to change it unless they have this in detailed writing. But the game will be staying off the eShop for the time being thanks to this dispute, which may not be a bad thing given its apparent quality. There are a whole lot of suspect user reviews out there for a game that was barely available, especially with physical copies going for AAA game-level prices. This dispute is unlikely to end well, so expect physical copies to become collector’s items in months, if not weeks.

This saga has already provided enough entertainment, but Office Create’s desire to take further means this is far from over. The Cooking Mama series hasn’t seen this level of action within a decade — if it ever did. Whether the franchise will survive this remains to be seen, if Office Create survives this mess largely unscathed.