Konami is the last of the major Japanese publishers to formally pull live service from Russia and Belarus, and the late date is the entire story. The Konami Russia shutdown takes effect at 06:00 local time for Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel and Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links, and 09:00 for eFootball and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain online services. Four years after the invasion. Sony, Microsoft, and EA closed storefronts in March 2022. Konami kept the lights on until May 2026 because, structurally, it could.
The Card Games Were the Only Real Question
Master Duel and Duel Links were the only Konami titles where the Russian market produced enough recurring revenue to justify the operational drag. eFootball runs free-to-play with virtually no monetisation surface. Metal Gear Solid V's online component has been a skeleton service globally for years. The card games were different. Both rely on continuous content drops, ranked seasons, and gacha pulls that need a functional payment rail to convert.
That rail has been broken since Visa and Mastercard suspended Russian operations in March 2022, with Mir cards locked out of foreign app stores. Konami spent four years running servers for users who couldn't legally pay them.
The 242-FZ Problem Sat Underneath All of This
Russia's personal data localisation law, 242-FZ, has required foreign operators to store Russian user data on servers physically inside Russia since 2015. Enforcement tightened sharply after 2022. For a Japanese publisher with no Russian subsidiary, full compliance would mean infrastructure spend that the market can no longer return. Non-compliance carries Roskomnadzor blocking risk that has already taken down LinkedIn, Meta properties, and most VPN providers.
Konami chose neither. It kept services live without compliance investment, which is the cheapest possible holding pattern and the one with the shortest natural life.
The Withdrawal Order Tells You About Internal Priority
Sony, Microsoft, EA, and Activision Blizzard exited in March 2022. CD Projekt Red followed within days. Ubisoft cut sales but kept some services running into 2023. Nintendo moved its eShop to maintenance mode in March 2022 and never restored it. Konami's 50-month delay puts it in a category with almost no peer. The closest comparison is the slow attrition of Korean MMO operators, who similarly held Russian service open until monetisation infrastructure made the operation pointless rather than political.
That comparison matters. It frames the shutdown as a financial decision, not an ethical one.
Who Loses and Who Doesn't
The losers are narrow. Active Master Duel and Duel Links players in Russia and Belarus lose progression, locked accounts, and any unspent currency. The Yu-Gi-Oh! competitive community in the region, which has produced [link: Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel] tournament-level players for years, loses its primary platform. eFootball's Russian player base, which was substantial given the title's free-to-play model, loses a casual fixture. Metal Gear Solid V players lose almost nothing because the online component was already a ghost service.
Konami itself loses very little. Russian revenue from these titles has been functionally zero since payment rails broke. Server costs are the only line that comes off the books.
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