Nexon and Neople’s free-to-play first-person shooter Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex – First Assault will have its servers shut down in Japan starting November 29th.

The news comes courtesy of the official Nexon Japanese website, where they announce that after having launched back in November of 2016, just a year later and the service will be shutting down in November of 2017… in Japan.

Item sales in the cash shop will cease beginning September 6th, 2017, so it’s best you don’t purchase anything else for the game from the cash shop if you’re playing on the Japanese servers.

This news is rather shocking and odd given that just a few days ago on August 9th, 2017, Nexon recently announced a new in-game event for Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex – First Assault. They had been regularly supporting the game with events, updates and new content for the Japanese version just about every month.

According to MMOSite, the North American version will not be affected by this change. According to their article, the American version of Ghost in the Shell: First Assault is doing rather well. They do note that the North American servers have heavy IP region restrictions on them, so maybe with the closure of the Japanese servers this fall Nexon might consider loosening the grip on the IP restrictions for the North American version? I suppose we’ll find out when November arrives.

Then again, the North American version is suffering from heavy backlash after a major update managed to render a lot of cash shop items useless,  causing forfeiture for a lot of paid content from heavy cash shop users. The game now has a severely negative rating after the update, so maybe it won’t be long before Nexon cuts ties with the North American version, too? I’m sure most die-hard fans of the game would prefer the developers update and fix the major issues they caused, or roll-back the less savory aspects of the update.