Japanese Gacha Game Industry Deemed ‘Sinking Titanic’ by Developers

As spotted by Automaton Media, multiple Japanese developers have agreed that the country’s gacha game industry is a “sinking Titanic” and only has a limited number of seats reserved for those who can stay afloat, while the others sink.

This discussion was triggered by Square Enix sunsetting two of its longest-running gacha games: Dragon Quest of the Stars and Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. Seeing this, Suemaru, a mobile game developer, made the sinking Titanic comment and provided comments regarding the future of mobile developers if they were fired due to the game they were working on getting shut down.

Another mobile developer, Aizen76, agreed with the Titanic comment and also mentioned that it’s hard for those who have made a living with mobile games to transition to working on console games. However, the reverse is easy, according to them.

Aizen76 clarified in another post, translated via Google Translate, that the reason for this is due to console games valuing “complex, elaborate action and high-end graphics technology,” which can easily be applied to mobile games. On the other hand, mobile game developers value server technology expertise more, which is not really applicable to console game development.

Recently, several Japanese gacha games have announced their sunsets. In addition to the aforementioned Dragon Quest of the Stars and Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, the global version of War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius has also shut down.

On a related note, an upcoming gacha game, Duet Night Abyss, has announced that it is ditching its gacha monetization model in favor of a more traditional way: by selling cosmetics to players.