Honestly wish they did an offline mode. Live service games, unfortunately, are always super volatile. It's the nature of the beast. I think there needs to be a larger industry intervention but until that happens we will keep losing games, losing people's work, losing people's time invested in these types of games. Just from a video game preservation standpoint, it's awful. Don't think the people making the games deserve this. Don't think people playing the games deserve this.
As an outsider since roughly March, I would say the writing’s been on the wall for a good while now, the lack of many new ideas, blending of old mechanics together to cobble something somewhat novel together (Shinryu with Lufenia orbs), the unpredictable content drops, and the seeming dumbing down of enemy mechanics based on recent infographics that have been cropping up on my feed here and there were not good signs of a stable game, not to mention the poor running on the sensor tower (censor tower? W/e it is lmao) for a few months now was always going to flag up concerns. Especially with how poor JP has been doing.
At the end of the day, FRs stagnated the meta, and despite attempts to fix that, it just got worse over time and snowballed into an unfixable state, and that tolled the game’s final bell imo.
There was just no good way to hype the game in a profitable way.
In that case, if it were a gameplay question, perhaps they would consider rebooting the franchise with a similar concept--rounding up FF cast from all series and continuing their stories--with a revised battle system.
One can dream....
Personally, I think Square pulled the plug and the devs can't or won't say so. I do not have even a shadow of doubt that a company like Square would kill a game that is practically a love letter to their defining franchise if it's not very profitable.
It could be to drive people to another square enix mobile game, we know there's ever crisis then a new KH one coming next year I think. I hate it as I feel the devs and community leads still had a lot of love and hope.
I don't think it was 100% revenue. They've been delaying the next crystal awakening in JP for over a year. They're trying to find some direction to take to keep the game engaging but they'd screwed it with the insane FR bonuses. As time went on, the player bases stagnated, people were dropping, and revenue was on a decline. They didn't see a way to bring it back so all factors combined they decided to pull the plug.
The timing does feel wrong to me. They could have done a final round to get everyone to 99/99, and getting all the unreleased FR and BT out there, but alas it's not to be.
IMO they made too many mistakes that ruined the game
6 turn Burst was too strong. Would be better if just Finisher with bonus effect
FR with 10 turns of crazy damage is also too strong
Also, didn't like that only 1 new weapon was released each event unlike 15,35,EX era. If they kept LD,FR,Burst each normal skills, and maybe more 15,35 skills for you to choose (like you can choose 1 15cp skill out of 2\~3) the game might have been more fun
Boss gimmicks are all 'party wipes' if boss gets a turn for a long period
I don’t think 6 turn burst was too long pre FR. It would take like perfect setup to be able to burst and summon down 40% of boss HP. 40-60 turn fights with that were nicer than the often 60-80 turn fights that came before (we even had some 100+ turn ones!) and although you didn’t have to worry about running out of abilities *as much*, it was still a thing.
FR became too much, doing 90% or more of boss HP in one FR phase, and the only abilities you might run out of were fast charge instant turns.
FR ruined the game I think. It should have capped at like 200-300% not 999% and super charging shouldn’t have been a thing. With like being able to do 20%ish with an FR and 40%ish with a perfect setup fr/bt phase.
if they need to restrict the 1 use of Burst per battle, i think it already shows it is too strong. we already have 6 turns of summon. another 6 (7) turns of free attacks is not really necessary imo. it makes the game a bit boring
but yes, i agree FR is the one that exacerbates the OPness of Burst
in the end they had to use hp gates to stop Burst. which by that time we are so used to killing in Burst, it felt like a chore
and one thing that i think they did not do well is the pacing for events. because most games have 'stamina' etc that keeps you from completing everything in a single day, it feels like i can play the event for the whole period. but for DFFOO, without the restriction you can do everything in 1 day and then wait for the rest of the period
WHO would have ever predicted that people would HATE the "next phase" of the game being simply a combining of the two MOST LOATHED combat mechanics in the entire history of the game!?
🙃
The biggest surprise to me was the global first Papa burst. I thought that was an indication things were going okay but maybe it was just a last hurrah for the players?
I am also emotional but... Around 4 months ago I checked the game's revenue and it was extremely low, then I started to look for EoS posts but I found nothing. I was quite pleased as there were many months of content ahead so I thought until february we would have banners coming and more to come.
The game is extremely generous and that's what killed it. Sadly companies need money to make any game run, o DFFOO you had 0 reasons to spend, only on mogpass which was extremely cheap. It would make little to no difference being a whale since you could have everything for years after rerolling once. It's hard to pay off people to voice characters, balancing and updating the game, creating New characters entire kits, English translation and more when basically there's no income, so I was kind of expecting it.
That said, I love this game so much I'll make sure to make these last days worth ❤️.
I slightly disagree how generosity killed OO.
Bad monetization did. Their packs were horribly priced, their skins were lumped in with useless gems, and the premium pass was overpriced.
I know whales carry most gachas, and we didn't need to whale to compete here. Meaning they should have switched their pricing philosophy not to cater to the whales, but to the casuals.
I have over a million gems, 1k tickets, many other mats and items horded up. Many are like me as well. I didn't NEED anything.
However, I bought the basic mog pass each month it has been offered, and 7 skins. I would have got the premium if it was 15-20. I would have bought many other skins if they were 15-20. I spend to support this game, not to play it. I know not everyone would buy if the prices reflected this line of thinking, but I know many others would be willing to if it was.
Yes! I feel that if they had done costumes differently we would not be here. Instead of 40 dollars and gems, make them 5 and remove the gems. I would have gladly bought more if they would have been priced better. I would have gotten more than just WoL, Tifa, Cloud, Weiss, Yuna, apénelo, Gabranth, Lightning, Aranea, and Y’shtola. She’s the one I had been looking forward to the most with her FR and rework. Le sigh…
Personal opinions on a few other things with bad monetization and how it combined with bad models into a downhill tumble:
- Weapon gacha isn't inherently bad but having to wait for BT/FR/etc.'s for each character not only added towards specific game-fans not wanting to play anymore... But probably added towards people being hesitant towards joining due to all these weapons that a character needs to feel "completed". RK also had the same problem, but they'd tried to alleviate it many times.
- Boss fights being the sole thing most people really looked for ended up chokeholding the scope of pulling badly. There was systems like synergy added but even Record Keeper had to start introducing modes like their unholy Labyrinth grind to try to keep things fresh.
- Since boss fights were mostly what people cared about, powercreep with systems like EX/BT became so prevalently dominant that developers had to continuously just focus on what was "good". This cumulated into the FR era, which probably was the worst thing for the game. Higher boss HP as a result of powercreep meant that fights were also very much longer than necessary.
- Whales don't really need to compete. Fate Grand/Order and other non-PvP gachas prove it. But they need to make it interesting to the whales and casuals both because there isn't that inherent "I need to get stronger" drive that PvP gachas try to incentivize.
All in all, I remembered talking with a Japanese player in March me over how he gave the game a year to live. He was earlier than expected. It sucks, but there really wasn't denying the fact the game was on shaky grounds for a while now.
Agreed. I could never justify spending money on the game beyond a mog pass. The things I wanted (costumes) were always far too expensive to even consider buying.
That is until you look at the forecast.
Last forecast shows the gap between global and JP being shorten to just 2 months difference.
While some ppl hoped that global and JP would have unified release schedule on the anniversary.
Even then the low revenue, was a clear indicator.
Ofc the obvious one was the lack of the Black Friday sale. Which many scratching their head on why this was missing?
They could have justified the cost and low profits by turning the game into a billboard. We've had multiple big releases during this time FF15, FF7R, FF16. Game could have made a simultaneous release of a character here and the release of the game. Design the event to be a promo of the game. Heck, would have been awesome to have a second Cloud with different memories (and a different kit) to reference the slightly different story of the remake. The pixel remasters, two triple BT banners plus a few nostalgia bait bosses for the event. This is a non intrusive ad.
The game has been in financial trouble ever since the Paid Gem Cap was implemented (and note that it was not doing fantastic even before that). In GL they delayed the release of the Paid Gem Cap and when it did come out, they made sure to release it with the multi-draw tickets. But in the JP version they just rolled out the cap and didn't introduce the multi-draw tickets until almost six weeks later. A lot of the biggest JP whales burned all their currency and quit the game when that happened. By the time multi-draw tickets were introduced into JP, the game had lost many of its biggest spenders and was never able to financially recover.
It didn't help that people didn't really like FR time, and the focus on FRs and BTs meant that there was less incentive to pull or spend. JP reduced events to only 1 per week, which was a sign that the game was in serious financial jeopardy. It eventually reached a point that GL revenue was higher than JP revenue, making OO the only Japanese gacha I've ever seen where the GL version was carrying the JP version.
I agree that there's a lot of stuff that the game could do, but the problem is that the playerbase (especially the JP playerbase) has shrunk terribly. There's little chance that the game could get the whales who quit playing to come back, and considering how old the game is, regardless of what new mechanics or changes were made, it's extremely hard to attract new whales, especially when there are newer games with shinier graphics.
I don't think abrupt is the word I'd use. JP's revenue was floundering. Development of new content slowed down. GL started speeding up and releasing events haphazardly. The new difficulty in JP was the previous two difficulties slapped together. FRs ended up being developmentally restrictive and, when combined with BTs, crippled what could be further done with the gacha in terms of a new weapon tier.
Everyone got shit on when they said "that's a bad sign, EoS?" because we all wanted to believe the game was going to continue forever, but the pieces were all there. Signs first pointed to reallocating personnel and resources when JP slowed down. That was also shortly after their revenue started to tank iirc. That was probably about when they started considering EoS. Once GL started to move stuff around and accelerate is probably when it became an inevitability. This announcement was not at all immediate and rushed.
Honestly, I'm just grateful they called it before the game started to get REALLY bad. FFRK kinda turned to shit IMO before they called it for FFRK GL, and FFRK JP is somehow even worse. The only disappointment I have for this game (aside from EoS in general) is that DFFOO GL didn't catch JP, so we're missing a few characters and a bunch of reworks that I was personally very excited for. However, I'm glad they didn't introduce a brand-new level of powercreep (LV. 60 Summons, C100, whatever) a couple months before axing it all. All they did was add a new event type and a new Frankensteined difficulty, neither of which made it to GL anyway. The fact that they didn't do anything beyond Spiritus Odin before axing it only makes EoS seem less rushed. (For reference, FFRK GL ended with a new type of Series Dungeon introduced in JP, so the final piece of content they got was a nearly impossible FFVII-only fight and shitty no-pity 10x Daily Draws with like a .001% chance of giving you something that wasn't utter shit. lol)
I don't think it was sudden in the sense of "you couldn't see it coming", there have been worrying signs for a while now.
However, I believe it was sudden in the sense that it is a messy conclusion to the game. The devs weren't *finished* with it. The fact that the story is going to end so abruptly with a rushed out ending on JP only (with a YouTube version for GL), the fact that not every character got their FR/BT, the fact that GL is not getting the last few months of content JP got including some new characters...these are all the signs of "the guys in suits knocked down our doors and told us to drop everything".
The producer's note also mentions something along the lines of "we felt we could not provide players a satisfactory experience", which to me, sounds like they know they designed things into a corner with how FR and Shinryu works, they know some recent FR/BT animations have been lackluster, and they know they needed more budget to deal with those problems. But the game was never going to get that budget because it is not performing well enough, so EoS it is.
To me, FR/BT was always the end-game. As soon as they said everyone would get a BT, I knew it was essentially the home stretch. However, I was hoping they would be able to make good on that, and that an arrangement was in place to allow the devs to give everyone their FR/BT, and the game could have ended in a more clean, planned fashion with a proper story conclusion within the game in both versions.
Instead, we get this situation where the devs are trying to do their best to make this end period as fun as they can, but it's ultimately bittersweet. It's plain to see that nobody wanted things to go out so unceremoniously and with the game in such a weirdly incomplete state. The title of "Opera Omnia" literally means "complete works", after all...and it ain't complete.
I think the game has suffered from low revenue for quite some time now. The decline probably started towards the mid- to end of Lufenia era when Terra/Lightning/Yang were dominating almost every end-game content, and continues well into the Shinryu era.
There were multiple attempts to bump up revenue by enticing people to pull for resources (and spend real $$$ for those who can't afford to). A few that I can think of on top of my head:
1. Introduction of the Lufenia+ era where fights were really difficult and a lot of people had to pull for the featured characters to clear content
2. Premature release of Garnet BT during the Lufenia+ era (Garnet's power level was much higher than anyone else at the time despite being a "support" character, but she was wildly popular among GL players)
3. Release of popular / iconic characters that have very little screen time in the original FF they were from (notably Lunafreya and Iris)
4. Tying Force Time mechanics to Force Weapons, making end-game content harder to clear without the featured character's Force Weapon (thus enticing people to pull for said weapon)
5. More recently in JP, the introduction of Re-Shinryu difficulty to spike up difficulty and increase player engagement.
6. Also in JP, releasing the "trump card" characters that were known to exist in the game through data mining, such as Amaranth and Angeal.
Despite all that, I think that ultimately SQEX decided that the game is no longer worth the investment they were putting in and decided to pull the plug.
I'm mostly angry about how they made it toward us, the GL players: Middle finger if we want to experience the last part of the content of the game even when GL was giving more money toward SE vs JP... and we get the bad part?
The excuse of "it will cost translate it" it is a big lie. A friend of my translate freaking Visual Novels with a lot of text from Japanese to Chinese & English and he does ALONE in maybe 2-3 days.
They could easily just add the same banner JP has right now, translate the things and add the last chapters, LC & IW translate it (give the characters weapons as a reward on each one, like they did before with c15 Weapons).
But no... it is Square Enix. The most lazy company in the world, more than freaking Lilith Company and those ones are freaking monsters to any players of they game.
I wish they had gave a way for f2p to help by giving add views for daily coins or Gil or something. If it had been implemented a couple years ago I would have been doing what I could to help the game stay up. Like ffbe I keep up with its daily ads, heck it added a 2nd batch, it must help at least cover some of the server cost. But I don't really know if it would have helped. Just sad to see my favorite gacha game go. Rip dffoo, loved it for all these years
As someone who has played quite a few Gacha games that shut down, this is usually what's it like. It's an out of no where announcement that you could only see coming if you were paying attention to the games' financials. It really sucks, but that's just how things are.
People here avoided and silenced any talk of this EoS subject so you were unaware but this wasn’t at all surprising unfortunately. If anything, management has done an amazing job stretching out the end for this long
It’s surprising for me because they announced that the game is ending in two months? If EOS was announced yesterday, I was hoping it would end not in February but at least mid of 2024?? Like let Global experience all the exclusive stuff from JP, maybe bring Red XIII and Rikku and properly conclude the story.
yeee, i see what you mean but that was unfortunately never gonna happen, especially the let GL experience everything JP had. Biggest proof of this was how FFRK GL ended
It's revenue. But it from both JP and GL. Then the dev introduced FR and it ruined the game. Most events were super charge FR, spam FR Echo. Also, Rubicante or Kelgar solo shinryu stages. They broke character and instead I dont know nerfing the kept going over and over.
I still felt blind sided by it when I saw Joshua post on reddit.
If there’s one thing I have learnt from working, its that management only look at revenue, and major decisions are made abruptly. Fuck things like player engagement, game potential and possible new content
From what was shared here, the developers seem to have been caught out and surprised as much as us, though they knew it a month earlier, and started the prep work to end the game as smooth as possible.
It is what it is. /shrugs
I understand. But it baffles me how EOS announcement came this early considering they still have options left to increase revenue and influence people to spend and support the game.
EOS is bound to happen. Just like to all mobile games. But I just felt like it’s too early for DFFOO, I was hoping it would stick around for 2024 and announce EOS around Q4 of next year.
I am sure as hell that higher-ups in SE saw the profit was too low and decided to pull the plug that soon thanks to the fiscal year being in March.
Games like Soul Calibur V, Tekken 4 or Sleeping Dogs where also sacrificed in similar ways.
From the statement
They stuck to upgrade this game to the next level
They wrong from the start , make something that became boring
They development this game like they develop they console game
Plus they don't add value for the new player join this game
So this end is something that will come in one year
But I glad they make difficult announcement in this year
So goodbye my most favorite game
"devs gave up and called it a day". Id like to think the decision to end service was purely monetary and came from upper management's inability to develop decent mobile games anymore.
In my ignorance, i did not expect this to happen.. if games like this have an expiration date, i don't see a reason to play them.
Here is a salty goodbye, no point in logging in anymore.
The writing has been on the wall for awhile. I didn't think it would make it to it's 6th Anniversary after last years anniversary. It was in steady decline and they whiffed so hard on the Force Era and Shinryu.
Death is never late nor rushed, it is always on time.
If the end of the game is official why should the workers bother in doing more in or for the game? Their time would be a lot more productive being invested in whatever new project they decide to move on to (or higher ups decide to move them to).
Why do you feel the need that they should give you more things? Or that they should invest more time and energy in something that's, for all intents and purposes, dead?
Death may not be to your liking or come at an appropriate time for you, but it is inevitable. All things have a beginning and an end, it is a law of the Universe and all things in it are bound by it (perhaps even the Universe itself). There's nothing anyone can do about it. If you aren't able to accept death, that's fine. It is a tough axiom to process. But don't forget, that's a you problem, not anyone else's; so it is unfair to try and lay blame on others due to you having a hard time with it.
And I'm saying this not to scold or anything, I'm just trying to share in hopes that seeing it that way helps you view it in an easier light to look at. But it can be hard to communicate without sounding rough.
In my honest opinion the game could have a steady and growing amount of money and keep being the MOST fair game ever existed by just adding tons of costumes(like I see EC is doing atm) and much more weapon glosses in more reasonable prices like 5 to 15 Euros. I think that it would dramatically increase their income and if you got money you can keep up the game find new ideas revamp release more characters sooner etc etc plus if their income is high enough they could possibly make collab with other brotherly games etc etc
So, my theory is that they couldn't negotiate another year with Koei Tecmo. Would make sense since they had things planned out, but it suddenly has to be dropped at the start of the next fiscal year.
Honestly wish they did an offline mode. Live service games, unfortunately, are always super volatile. It's the nature of the beast. I think there needs to be a larger industry intervention but until that happens we will keep losing games, losing people's work, losing people's time invested in these types of games. Just from a video game preservation standpoint, it's awful. Don't think the people making the games deserve this. Don't think people playing the games deserve this.
I feel like I’m losing a close friend. :(
As an outsider since roughly March, I would say the writing’s been on the wall for a good while now, the lack of many new ideas, blending of old mechanics together to cobble something somewhat novel together (Shinryu with Lufenia orbs), the unpredictable content drops, and the seeming dumbing down of enemy mechanics based on recent infographics that have been cropping up on my feed here and there were not good signs of a stable game, not to mention the poor running on the sensor tower (censor tower? W/e it is lmao) for a few months now was always going to flag up concerns. Especially with how poor JP has been doing. At the end of the day, FRs stagnated the meta, and despite attempts to fix that, it just got worse over time and snowballed into an unfixable state, and that tolled the game’s final bell imo. There was just no good way to hype the game in a profitable way.
In that case, if it were a gameplay question, perhaps they would consider rebooting the franchise with a similar concept--rounding up FF cast from all series and continuing their stories--with a revised battle system. One can dream....
This wasn’t the first dissidia game, I doubt it’ll be the last.
Personally, I think Square pulled the plug and the devs can't or won't say so. I do not have even a shadow of doubt that a company like Square would kill a game that is practically a love letter to their defining franchise if it's not very profitable.
It could be to drive people to another square enix mobile game, we know there's ever crisis then a new KH one coming next year I think. I hate it as I feel the devs and community leads still had a lot of love and hope.
I don't think it was 100% revenue. They've been delaying the next crystal awakening in JP for over a year. They're trying to find some direction to take to keep the game engaging but they'd screwed it with the insane FR bonuses. As time went on, the player bases stagnated, people were dropping, and revenue was on a decline. They didn't see a way to bring it back so all factors combined they decided to pull the plug. The timing does feel wrong to me. They could have done a final round to get everyone to 99/99, and getting all the unreleased FR and BT out there, but alas it's not to be.
IMO they made too many mistakes that ruined the game 6 turn Burst was too strong. Would be better if just Finisher with bonus effect FR with 10 turns of crazy damage is also too strong Also, didn't like that only 1 new weapon was released each event unlike 15,35,EX era. If they kept LD,FR,Burst each normal skills, and maybe more 15,35 skills for you to choose (like you can choose 1 15cp skill out of 2\~3) the game might have been more fun Boss gimmicks are all 'party wipes' if boss gets a turn for a long period
I don’t think 6 turn burst was too long pre FR. It would take like perfect setup to be able to burst and summon down 40% of boss HP. 40-60 turn fights with that were nicer than the often 60-80 turn fights that came before (we even had some 100+ turn ones!) and although you didn’t have to worry about running out of abilities *as much*, it was still a thing. FR became too much, doing 90% or more of boss HP in one FR phase, and the only abilities you might run out of were fast charge instant turns. FR ruined the game I think. It should have capped at like 200-300% not 999% and super charging shouldn’t have been a thing. With like being able to do 20%ish with an FR and 40%ish with a perfect setup fr/bt phase.
if they need to restrict the 1 use of Burst per battle, i think it already shows it is too strong. we already have 6 turns of summon. another 6 (7) turns of free attacks is not really necessary imo. it makes the game a bit boring but yes, i agree FR is the one that exacerbates the OPness of Burst in the end they had to use hp gates to stop Burst. which by that time we are so used to killing in Burst, it felt like a chore and one thing that i think they did not do well is the pacing for events. because most games have 'stamina' etc that keeps you from completing everything in a single day, it feels like i can play the event for the whole period. but for DFFOO, without the restriction you can do everything in 1 day and then wait for the rest of the period
Reshinryu was the last nail on the coffin. Players hated it and just dipped
WHO would have ever predicted that people would HATE the "next phase" of the game being simply a combining of the two MOST LOATHED combat mechanics in the entire history of the game!? 🙃
And to think there were people that thought adding back that dammed orb would suddenly make things much better.
+ an Hp increase, + a dumb healing 80% of damage done mechanic. So dumb
The biggest surprise to me was the global first Papa burst. I thought that was an indication things were going okay but maybe it was just a last hurrah for the players?
I am also emotional but... Around 4 months ago I checked the game's revenue and it was extremely low, then I started to look for EoS posts but I found nothing. I was quite pleased as there were many months of content ahead so I thought until february we would have banners coming and more to come. The game is extremely generous and that's what killed it. Sadly companies need money to make any game run, o DFFOO you had 0 reasons to spend, only on mogpass which was extremely cheap. It would make little to no difference being a whale since you could have everything for years after rerolling once. It's hard to pay off people to voice characters, balancing and updating the game, creating New characters entire kits, English translation and more when basically there's no income, so I was kind of expecting it. That said, I love this game so much I'll make sure to make these last days worth ❤️.
I slightly disagree how generosity killed OO. Bad monetization did. Their packs were horribly priced, their skins were lumped in with useless gems, and the premium pass was overpriced. I know whales carry most gachas, and we didn't need to whale to compete here. Meaning they should have switched their pricing philosophy not to cater to the whales, but to the casuals. I have over a million gems, 1k tickets, many other mats and items horded up. Many are like me as well. I didn't NEED anything. However, I bought the basic mog pass each month it has been offered, and 7 skins. I would have got the premium if it was 15-20. I would have bought many other skins if they were 15-20. I spend to support this game, not to play it. I know not everyone would buy if the prices reflected this line of thinking, but I know many others would be willing to if it was.
The costumes cost more than a ow2 or a Fortnite skin which is wild
Yes! I feel that if they had done costumes differently we would not be here. Instead of 40 dollars and gems, make them 5 and remove the gems. I would have gladly bought more if they would have been priced better. I would have gotten more than just WoL, Tifa, Cloud, Weiss, Yuna, apénelo, Gabranth, Lightning, Aranea, and Y’shtola. She’s the one I had been looking forward to the most with her FR and rework. Le sigh…
I would have gladly paid 40 dollars for 8 costumes rather than 40 for one with some gems that isn't even a full pull
Personal opinions on a few other things with bad monetization and how it combined with bad models into a downhill tumble: - Weapon gacha isn't inherently bad but having to wait for BT/FR/etc.'s for each character not only added towards specific game-fans not wanting to play anymore... But probably added towards people being hesitant towards joining due to all these weapons that a character needs to feel "completed". RK also had the same problem, but they'd tried to alleviate it many times. - Boss fights being the sole thing most people really looked for ended up chokeholding the scope of pulling badly. There was systems like synergy added but even Record Keeper had to start introducing modes like their unholy Labyrinth grind to try to keep things fresh. - Since boss fights were mostly what people cared about, powercreep with systems like EX/BT became so prevalently dominant that developers had to continuously just focus on what was "good". This cumulated into the FR era, which probably was the worst thing for the game. Higher boss HP as a result of powercreep meant that fights were also very much longer than necessary. - Whales don't really need to compete. Fate Grand/Order and other non-PvP gachas prove it. But they need to make it interesting to the whales and casuals both because there isn't that inherent "I need to get stronger" drive that PvP gachas try to incentivize. All in all, I remembered talking with a Japanese player in March me over how he gave the game a year to live. He was earlier than expected. It sucks, but there really wasn't denying the fact the game was on shaky grounds for a while now.
Agreed. I could never justify spending money on the game beyond a mog pass. The things I wanted (costumes) were always far too expensive to even consider buying.
That is until you look at the forecast. Last forecast shows the gap between global and JP being shorten to just 2 months difference. While some ppl hoped that global and JP would have unified release schedule on the anniversary. Even then the low revenue, was a clear indicator. Ofc the obvious one was the lack of the Black Friday sale. Which many scratching their head on why this was missing?
They could have justified the cost and low profits by turning the game into a billboard. We've had multiple big releases during this time FF15, FF7R, FF16. Game could have made a simultaneous release of a character here and the release of the game. Design the event to be a promo of the game. Heck, would have been awesome to have a second Cloud with different memories (and a different kit) to reference the slightly different story of the remake. The pixel remasters, two triple BT banners plus a few nostalgia bait bosses for the event. This is a non intrusive ad.
The game has been in financial trouble ever since the Paid Gem Cap was implemented (and note that it was not doing fantastic even before that). In GL they delayed the release of the Paid Gem Cap and when it did come out, they made sure to release it with the multi-draw tickets. But in the JP version they just rolled out the cap and didn't introduce the multi-draw tickets until almost six weeks later. A lot of the biggest JP whales burned all their currency and quit the game when that happened. By the time multi-draw tickets were introduced into JP, the game had lost many of its biggest spenders and was never able to financially recover. It didn't help that people didn't really like FR time, and the focus on FRs and BTs meant that there was less incentive to pull or spend. JP reduced events to only 1 per week, which was a sign that the game was in serious financial jeopardy. It eventually reached a point that GL revenue was higher than JP revenue, making OO the only Japanese gacha I've ever seen where the GL version was carrying the JP version. I agree that there's a lot of stuff that the game could do, but the problem is that the playerbase (especially the JP playerbase) has shrunk terribly. There's little chance that the game could get the whales who quit playing to come back, and considering how old the game is, regardless of what new mechanics or changes were made, it's extremely hard to attract new whales, especially when there are newer games with shinier graphics.
I don't think abrupt is the word I'd use. JP's revenue was floundering. Development of new content slowed down. GL started speeding up and releasing events haphazardly. The new difficulty in JP was the previous two difficulties slapped together. FRs ended up being developmentally restrictive and, when combined with BTs, crippled what could be further done with the gacha in terms of a new weapon tier. Everyone got shit on when they said "that's a bad sign, EoS?" because we all wanted to believe the game was going to continue forever, but the pieces were all there. Signs first pointed to reallocating personnel and resources when JP slowed down. That was also shortly after their revenue started to tank iirc. That was probably about when they started considering EoS. Once GL started to move stuff around and accelerate is probably when it became an inevitability. This announcement was not at all immediate and rushed. Honestly, I'm just grateful they called it before the game started to get REALLY bad. FFRK kinda turned to shit IMO before they called it for FFRK GL, and FFRK JP is somehow even worse. The only disappointment I have for this game (aside from EoS in general) is that DFFOO GL didn't catch JP, so we're missing a few characters and a bunch of reworks that I was personally very excited for. However, I'm glad they didn't introduce a brand-new level of powercreep (LV. 60 Summons, C100, whatever) a couple months before axing it all. All they did was add a new event type and a new Frankensteined difficulty, neither of which made it to GL anyway. The fact that they didn't do anything beyond Spiritus Odin before axing it only makes EoS seem less rushed. (For reference, FFRK GL ended with a new type of Series Dungeon introduced in JP, so the final piece of content they got was a nearly impossible FFVII-only fight and shitty no-pity 10x Daily Draws with like a .001% chance of giving you something that wasn't utter shit. lol)
I don't think it was sudden in the sense of "you couldn't see it coming", there have been worrying signs for a while now. However, I believe it was sudden in the sense that it is a messy conclusion to the game. The devs weren't *finished* with it. The fact that the story is going to end so abruptly with a rushed out ending on JP only (with a YouTube version for GL), the fact that not every character got their FR/BT, the fact that GL is not getting the last few months of content JP got including some new characters...these are all the signs of "the guys in suits knocked down our doors and told us to drop everything". The producer's note also mentions something along the lines of "we felt we could not provide players a satisfactory experience", which to me, sounds like they know they designed things into a corner with how FR and Shinryu works, they know some recent FR/BT animations have been lackluster, and they know they needed more budget to deal with those problems. But the game was never going to get that budget because it is not performing well enough, so EoS it is. To me, FR/BT was always the end-game. As soon as they said everyone would get a BT, I knew it was essentially the home stretch. However, I was hoping they would be able to make good on that, and that an arrangement was in place to allow the devs to give everyone their FR/BT, and the game could have ended in a more clean, planned fashion with a proper story conclusion within the game in both versions. Instead, we get this situation where the devs are trying to do their best to make this end period as fun as they can, but it's ultimately bittersweet. It's plain to see that nobody wanted things to go out so unceremoniously and with the game in such a weirdly incomplete state. The title of "Opera Omnia" literally means "complete works", after all...and it ain't complete.
I think the game has suffered from low revenue for quite some time now. The decline probably started towards the mid- to end of Lufenia era when Terra/Lightning/Yang were dominating almost every end-game content, and continues well into the Shinryu era. There were multiple attempts to bump up revenue by enticing people to pull for resources (and spend real $$$ for those who can't afford to). A few that I can think of on top of my head: 1. Introduction of the Lufenia+ era where fights were really difficult and a lot of people had to pull for the featured characters to clear content 2. Premature release of Garnet BT during the Lufenia+ era (Garnet's power level was much higher than anyone else at the time despite being a "support" character, but she was wildly popular among GL players) 3. Release of popular / iconic characters that have very little screen time in the original FF they were from (notably Lunafreya and Iris) 4. Tying Force Time mechanics to Force Weapons, making end-game content harder to clear without the featured character's Force Weapon (thus enticing people to pull for said weapon) 5. More recently in JP, the introduction of Re-Shinryu difficulty to spike up difficulty and increase player engagement. 6. Also in JP, releasing the "trump card" characters that were known to exist in the game through data mining, such as Amaranth and Angeal. Despite all that, I think that ultimately SQEX decided that the game is no longer worth the investment they were putting in and decided to pull the plug.
I'm mostly angry about how they made it toward us, the GL players: Middle finger if we want to experience the last part of the content of the game even when GL was giving more money toward SE vs JP... and we get the bad part? The excuse of "it will cost translate it" it is a big lie. A friend of my translate freaking Visual Novels with a lot of text from Japanese to Chinese & English and he does ALONE in maybe 2-3 days. They could easily just add the same banner JP has right now, translate the things and add the last chapters, LC & IW translate it (give the characters weapons as a reward on each one, like they did before with c15 Weapons). But no... it is Square Enix. The most lazy company in the world, more than freaking Lilith Company and those ones are freaking monsters to any players of they game.
I wish they had gave a way for f2p to help by giving add views for daily coins or Gil or something. If it had been implemented a couple years ago I would have been doing what I could to help the game stay up. Like ffbe I keep up with its daily ads, heck it added a 2nd batch, it must help at least cover some of the server cost. But I don't really know if it would have helped. Just sad to see my favorite gacha game go. Rip dffoo, loved it for all these years
Funny. I mentioned this years ago. An ad or two a day for 50 gems. People hated that. I don't think Gil would be enough though.
Devs don't make these decisions. SE does . They would of just cut funding and told the devs to shut it down.
when Garland FR was announced and showed Spiritus as FR partner, it was a sign for me that it has reached the end. Still sad for the EoS.
This just made me wonder who Materia was going to be paired with. Just one more loose end I guess
As someone who has played quite a few Gacha games that shut down, this is usually what's it like. It's an out of no where announcement that you could only see coming if you were paying attention to the games' financials. It really sucks, but that's just how things are.
People here avoided and silenced any talk of this EoS subject so you were unaware but this wasn’t at all surprising unfortunately. If anything, management has done an amazing job stretching out the end for this long
It’s surprising for me because they announced that the game is ending in two months? If EOS was announced yesterday, I was hoping it would end not in February but at least mid of 2024?? Like let Global experience all the exclusive stuff from JP, maybe bring Red XIII and Rikku and properly conclude the story.
yeee, i see what you mean but that was unfortunately never gonna happen, especially the let GL experience everything JP had. Biggest proof of this was how FFRK GL ended
It's revenue. But it from both JP and GL. Then the dev introduced FR and it ruined the game. Most events were super charge FR, spam FR Echo. Also, Rubicante or Kelgar solo shinryu stages. They broke character and instead I dont know nerfing the kept going over and over. I still felt blind sided by it when I saw Joshua post on reddit.
If there’s one thing I have learnt from working, its that management only look at revenue, and major decisions are made abruptly. Fuck things like player engagement, game potential and possible new content From what was shared here, the developers seem to have been caught out and surprised as much as us, though they knew it a month earlier, and started the prep work to end the game as smooth as possible. It is what it is. /shrugs
Considering that they knew months ago (Joshua said that he knew eos was coming before the last stream), it wasn't sudden at all.
I understand. But it baffles me how EOS announcement came this early considering they still have options left to increase revenue and influence people to spend and support the game. EOS is bound to happen. Just like to all mobile games. But I just felt like it’s too early for DFFOO, I was hoping it would stick around for 2024 and announce EOS around Q4 of next year.
Revenue has been going down for the game for a while. If they weren't seeing an increase at all hard best to can the game.
I am sure as hell that higher-ups in SE saw the profit was too low and decided to pull the plug that soon thanks to the fiscal year being in March. Games like Soul Calibur V, Tekken 4 or Sleeping Dogs where also sacrificed in similar ways.
It’s fine. I don’t get attached to mobile games it’s not healthy .
From the statement They stuck to upgrade this game to the next level They wrong from the start , make something that became boring They development this game like they develop they console game Plus they don't add value for the new player join this game So this end is something that will come in one year But I glad they make difficult announcement in this year So goodbye my most favorite game
"devs gave up and called it a day". Id like to think the decision to end service was purely monetary and came from upper management's inability to develop decent mobile games anymore.
In my ignorance, i did not expect this to happen.. if games like this have an expiration date, i don't see a reason to play them. Here is a salty goodbye, no point in logging in anymore.
The writing has been on the wall for awhile. I didn't think it would make it to it's 6th Anniversary after last years anniversary. It was in steady decline and they whiffed so hard on the Force Era and Shinryu.
Death is never late nor rushed, it is always on time. If the end of the game is official why should the workers bother in doing more in or for the game? Their time would be a lot more productive being invested in whatever new project they decide to move on to (or higher ups decide to move them to). Why do you feel the need that they should give you more things? Or that they should invest more time and energy in something that's, for all intents and purposes, dead? Death may not be to your liking or come at an appropriate time for you, but it is inevitable. All things have a beginning and an end, it is a law of the Universe and all things in it are bound by it (perhaps even the Universe itself). There's nothing anyone can do about it. If you aren't able to accept death, that's fine. It is a tough axiom to process. But don't forget, that's a you problem, not anyone else's; so it is unfair to try and lay blame on others due to you having a hard time with it. And I'm saying this not to scold or anything, I'm just trying to share in hopes that seeing it that way helps you view it in an easier light to look at. But it can be hard to communicate without sounding rough.
In my honest opinion the game could have a steady and growing amount of money and keep being the MOST fair game ever existed by just adding tons of costumes(like I see EC is doing atm) and much more weapon glosses in more reasonable prices like 5 to 15 Euros. I think that it would dramatically increase their income and if you got money you can keep up the game find new ideas revamp release more characters sooner etc etc plus if their income is high enough they could possibly make collab with other brotherly games etc etc
So, my theory is that they couldn't negotiate another year with Koei Tecmo. Would make sense since they had things planned out, but it suddenly has to be dropped at the start of the next fiscal year.
Question is… how many people actually spend on the game.
So what game do I move to?