Sunsets are a reality in our line of coverage. They’re not a constant, of course, but there are a lot of MMORPGs that do not make it to the decade mark, and I don’t need to list all of them. You no doubt know of several of them. There are titles I have bought deluxe editions of and subscribed to for several months, meaning that when these games shut down I have sunk a rather unpleasant amount of money into a game that I can no longer play in any form whatsoever.
Why does that, in some way, hurt less than War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius shutting down its global version?
As the very premise of this Gachapwned column might suggest, there is something that is appreciably painful when one of these titles that you invested time and effort into winds up shutting down. And some of that comes from mayfly lifespans, which makes it that much worse to get invested. All of those hooks that get you invested in the game mean that your investment is very tangible… and it’s also far, far more fragile.
I bring up War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius not just because it shut down (though it did) but because it was a game that I very quickly decided I did not actually like. Sure, it had traces of Final Fantasy Tactics, but not many, and certainly not enough to make me feel it was worth continuing to play past a pretty early point. I had, in fact, sunk a little bit of money to draw a character in there once, but it was money I had to spend on my game budget, and ultimately, the fact that it was not to my taste just meant that it was a game I didn’t like and couldn’t refund.
Yet the fact that it shut down bugged me on a very fundamental level, despite the fact that I hadn’t been regularly playing the game and thus hadn’t really lost much of anything. And this was a game that made it to five years old! Why was this bothering me at all?
Well, I’ve already told you. We’ve spent the last several columns outlining the psychological hooks that these games work into you, several of which are actually not even bad things. You are not immune to propaganda, I am not immune to propaganda, and the result was that this stung.
Here’s the thing to understand: The time it takes to go from “I am not playing this game” to “I am invested in this game” is honestly pretty short for gacha games. That is very much by design. But it also means that from a development standpoint, you very much can run these games as an exercise where you get into the game, start selling your character packs, and then run that exactly as long as it takes for the money to runs out.
There are plenty of developers who do not look at their games this way. Cygames (makers of Granblue Fantasy, among others) have famously been more inspired by long-running titles like Final Fantasy XI (there was even a crossover event) and builds for the longer term. MiHoYo (of Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail fame) clearly wants to build for the longer term. But the point is that the same levers and hooks are there whether you’re making your game to run for a decade or for exactly as long as the balance looks good.
And this is a place where the business model specifically compounds all of the problems you might otherwise have with facing a sunset. Because if you bought, say, a CE of WildStar and a year of subscription, you are currently out that money, but you knew what you were buying into at the time and you received it. You could have spent a lot of money on a gacha game without even really internalizing it.
I don’t want to overstate this or make it sound as if somehow a gacha game sunset is the worst thing that can possibly happen. It’s more that it can happen suddenly, and unlike a lot of online games where the shutdown means the game is gone forever, there’s often a lot less warning. Not just because we don’t personally keep track of these games with the same diligence, but because many of their online features are often arranged so that you can’t even know how active the playerbase is in the first place.
For example, Granblue Fantasy is an online game in that you need to connect to its official servers to play. You choose backup summons from a list of other players. But there’s no way to immediately see whether those other players last logged in five minutes ago or five years ago. And that fact of being an online game that can be played in a mostly offline format is in and of itself deceptive because these games do have online components but also don’t rely upon other players to the same degree.
You can run around in Tower of Fantasy with minimal-if-any interaction with other players if you want. It’s easy to play the game as if it were a single-player experience. And it certainly kind of encourages you to think of it that way. But it is also just as reliant on servers as, say, Star Trek Online. You can find yourself enjoying a game that to your eyes barely looks like an MMO in the first place, but it winds up being one in a way that doesn’t just shut off online functionality but all functionality.
The parts of War of the Visions that interested me did not actually require an online server except insofar as it needed to make sure I wasn’t futzing with the game to give myself characters I didn’t actually have. Yet its shutdown felt just like that of WildStar, except that it wasn’t. This wasn’t an MMORPG I had chosen to play solo; it was a predominantly different experience that had all of the same vulnerabilities to playerbase numbers. And the moment it was not profitable to keep it online, it got axed.
In other words, it feels like a bait-and-switch in a way that just doesn’t happen with a lot of other games. There are plenty of single-player games that lose their online modes after several years. Gacha games more often than not rely on being just MMO enough that the developers have to run servers, but not enough that they occupy quite the same experience slot… and ultimately get subjected to the same brutal shutdowns, but even more suddenly.
You might argue that this is a good opportunity to try reworking these games, and in a fascinating case study, we actually have a game that did exactly that. So join me next week as we look at Mega Man X DiVE Offline, a gacha game that actually made a saving throw to keep itself playable in some form… and how the game actually highlights problems with that option, as well.
Many MMORPG gamers recoil from the term “gacha” – and for good reasons – but the subgenre is still raking in money from players, and it’s worth a deep-dive. In Gachapwned, MOP senior reporter Eliot Lefebvre tackles the highs and lows of the infamous gacha game genre and how it affects the MMO industry.
