Board 8 > Final Fantasy Record Keeper was ended?

(+) Yeah! (+)

wtf??? does this happen with mobile games often? it kinda seems crazy to take away the ability to play a game like this after people have invested so much into it

Personally, I started playing earlier this year and really enjoyed it. I've been somewhat treating this as the ** YEAR OF FINAL FANTASY ** as I play through every FF after falling in love with FFXIV. I've gone through all the Pixel Remasters and am just closing in on beating the Weapons and finishing 7.

I played FFRK when I was earlier in the pixel remasters and thought it was really cool, but wasn't familiar with the characters from most games. I was looking forward to trying it again when familiar with more of the characters.... just booted up and its gone!

I'm so mad right now

it happens VERY often. In fact, the games that last longer than a year or especially 2 years are in the minority.

Sorry you lost a game you enjoyed. It really sucks! Final Fantasy in particular has already shut down like 4 mobile games

Yeah, this happens with a lot of mobile games. The mobile Dr. Mario just shut down not long ago, for example.

Record Keeper lasted 8 years, that's pretty good for a mobile game.

Yep, it ended on September 29th. It was a real bummer!

Ignoring the half-hour or so I played around launch I started playing for real in April or May 2021 and continued through the end. I managed to clear all of the content pretty close to f2p (I made three purchases for a total of $45, and I definitely got more than that much value out of the game).

That's nuts, I remember the ffrk topic being a b8 mainstay for a while.

I can't imagine ever spending money on a gacha game knowing it's all going to be deleted sooner rather than later

banananor posted...

That's nuts, I remember the ffrk topic being a b8 mainstay for a while.

I can't imagine ever spending money on a gacha game knowing it's all going to be deleted sooner rather than later

The main reason it really surprised me was that theres a Japanese version of FFRK which was six months ahead of the global version (and which is still running). Since translation is presumably a pretty minimal cost for a game like this I figured wed have at least six months past the death of the JP version but apparently not

banananor posted...

That's nuts, I remember the ffrk topic being a b8 mainstay for a while.

I can't imagine ever spending money on a gacha game knowing it's all going to be deleted sooner rather than later

You pay to get enhanced time out of when you do play. I mean yes the money is "lost" but it's no different than buying food at a fancy restaurant.

I have no regrets supporting a game I really liked.

I don't really agree with just "you get enhanced time" and thats it. These games are so based about unlocking things over time and increasing your collection - so suddenly losing it all is pretty crazy. It makes me disincentivized to care about progressing in things like this if I should expect it will all disappear, and probably disappear soon!

I can understand when a game just isn't successful and a company probably can't continue to run it, or when it's a large MMO with a lot of costs associated with keeping it running vs the small player base on it, but when it's a big company like Square Enix, keeping something like this up would be trivial. It's even just a single player game so the size of the player base doesn't matter! If you disable the microtransactions and stuff it could likely just run as a standalone single player game with no strain on their servers.

It's really silly for something like this to just be gone completely...

Incidentally the Japanese version of the game is still running, it's only the English version that died off.

CoolCly posted...

but when it's a big company like Square Enix, keeping something like this up would be trivial.

You'd be surprised, Square Enix has shutdown A TON of mobile games over the years (they already announced server closure for that FFVII Battle Royale game). Though something like Record Keeper should have low maintenance cost since it's pretty much a browser game (and I recall that the Japanese version can be played off a web browser).

And while the English version wasn't making that much money it was still more than many mobile games out there that are still running. So I'm thinking it's possible that they didn't have the staff to keep the game running.

CoolCly posted...

I don't really agree with just "you get enhanced time" and thats it. These games are so based about unlocking things over time and increasing your collection - so suddenly losing it all is pretty crazy.

Ultimately with any game about collecting items, the value of the items is in time spent using them. You buy you get more time to use the items, and you get to use then sooner

It's unfortunate for the game to shut down but that isn't to say there was no value. You aren't paying for the item you're paying for time either spent to get the item or time you're able to use the item relevantly for content (if you take your sweet time earning the free currency, such items are often power crept out)

It sucks but yeah. It's what you're paying for.

Anyway my theory is the game is starting to trend hard towards losing money in JP and wand they killed our game first to not sour the JP players too much on any future gachas they may create, basically using our game as a sacrificial lamb to give JP players a warning.

When you play a mobile game, you have to play it with the expectations that the game will not even last a year.

(Which is exactly why I don't play them).

CoolCly posted...

I can understand when a game just isn't successful and a company probably can't continue to run it, or when it's a large MMO with a lot of costs associated with keeping it running vs the small player base on it, but when it's a big company like Square Enix, keeping something like this up would be trivial. It's even just a single player game so the size of the player base doesn't matter! If you disable the microtransactions and stuff it could likely just run as a standalone single player game with no strain on their servers.

It's really silly for something like this to just be gone completely...

With MTX-heavy mobile games like this, a large portion of the game is often run off the servers. It should be possible to make an offline version of the game and keep it going, but most devs don't find that to be a worthwhile endeavor, unfortunately.

Was this... your first service game?

This is how it works and why I always buy physical copies of things

Honestly, the thing I hate most about the mobile gaming climate isn't the horribly predatory business model (though that is, of course, utterly reprehensible)- it's the fact that a lot of these games have great artwork and sprite work, sometimes really good (if padded) plots, and it's all completely wasted on barely-there gameplay and thrown away after a couple of years.

Companies should be required to not only allow fan-run servers for defunct games, but release the necessary code as part of the shutdown process. It'll never happen, but it would make these pieces of crap so much less infuriating if something could be salvaged from them.

BlackMageJawa posted...

Honestly, the thing I hate most about the mobile gaming climate isn't the horribly predatory business model (though that is, of course, utterly reprehensible)- it's the fact that a lot of these games have great artwork and sprite work, sometimes really good (if padded) plots, and it's all completely wasted on barely-there gameplay and thrown away after a couple of years.

Companies should be required to not only allow fan-run servers for defunct games, but release the necessary code as part of the shutdown process. It'll never happen, but it would make these pieces of crap so much less infuriating if something could be salvaged from them.

How is this any different from all the work done on random steam games that end up selling 7 copies among the other 100,000 steam games out there

masterplum posted...

Was this... your first service game?

This is how it works and why I always buy physical copies of things

Buying physical copies of service games doesn't help. You still can't play them after they shut down.

MacArrowny posted...

Buying physical copies of service games doesn't help. You still can't play them after they shut down.

I mean non service games, movies etc

I own quite a few Switch games at this point and they're all physical, so I get the mentality. I only have some digital 3ads games because I got the system a little late and some games (like Layton vs.) Barely even seem to have existed in physical format.

i remember this one particular mobile game getting a tie-in anime on release where they went really meta, even doing an episode talking about how to avoid shutting down in the near future. it was pretty fun

... it only lasted a year or two before that actually happened (and it was a travesty, the game was excellent, with 3d realtime tactics gameplay where you controlled like 4 iirc extremely customisable vehicles (you could pretty much turn them into tanks or mechs and anything in between with the parts you got from the gacha), and it had a great and unique art style, plus these paper mario-esque cutscenes. was honestly really disappointed when that one went down about 5 years ago). the dark side of the games as service model

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epR_4xBJ1GA