Square Enix is axing yet another one of their live-service mobile games despite it being under their most recognizable and valuable IP. By January 11, 2023, services for the battle royale game known as Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier will be shutting down.
This free-to-play title came out in November 2021, designed to add to the growing Compilation of Final Fantasy VII to tell the story of the Shinra Electric Power Company’s formative years and its ruthless army of mercenaries known as SOLDIER.
In the traditional battle royale format, up to 75 players with customizable characters engage in one-life combat in an ever-tightening circle on a large map. While running around on the lookout for enemies, players procure material and weapons in a bid to be the last one standing.
Unfortunately, despite the high popularity of the Final Fantasy VII brand, the experience failed to be profitable enough for Square Enix to justify its ongoing existence. Even with regular updates, the company believed that it simply could not deliver the quality it wanted to.
“It is with a heavy heart that we are announcing the end of service for Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier. We will be ending service at 07:00 UTC on January 11, 2023…Despite all our efforts to bring you regular updates with fresh and exciting content, we haven’t been able to deliver the experience that we were hoping to, and that you all deserve, so we have made the extremely tough decision to end service for Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier.”
“We would like to thank you all for supporting us over the past year.”
This is sadly not the first time that Square Enix has pulled the plug on a mobile game that many players invested hundreds of hours and, perhaps, thousands of dollars. MOBIUS Final Fantasy was another successful mobile RPG, a part of the same series that managed to deliver cutting-edge 3D graphics and boasted a strong playerbase, but was eventually shut down a few years later.
Going back even a step further, Square Enix pulled distribution of the full-length single-player mobile JRPG series Chaos Rings from both the Google Play and App Stores only a few years after the series was released. Instead of bothering to update the franchise to work with modern mobile operating systems, they made it impossible to play for both new and returning players who paid the hefty price tag for it.