Echoes of Mana

~ the eulogy ~

Echoes of Mana launched on 27 April 2022 for Android and iOS, a gacha action RPG built on the Mana series, developed by Wright Flyer Studios and published by Square Enix. You played either Quilto or Quilta and moved through worlds pulled from across the series, fighting in real time with a party of six where three were active and three waited in reserve. Characters and equipment came out of a gacha.

It was received as pretty and hollow. Reviewers liked the art and the music, which is the standard verdict on a Mana product, and disliked the gacha and the writing. One of them described the story as a parade of cute but vapid interactions. The game reached four million downloads by September 2022, a figure that sounds like success and is not, because on mobile the download costs nothing and the number that decides anything is what a small fraction of those players spend afterward.

Square Enix announced the end on 13 February 2023 and the servers went off on 15 May 2023, a year and eighteen days after launch. The stated reason was that the company could not maintain the content quality it wanted. I am forty two, which puts me a long way outside the demographic a licensed mobile gacha is built for, so my reading of this one comes from the business rather than from inside the game.

~ the dossier ~

~ born on a timer ~

A live service mobile game has to pay for itself continuously. There is no shipped-and-done state, because the content pipeline is the product and the pipeline has staff standing on it, so the month a title stops covering its own development it starts a countdown. Thirteen months is not unusual for a licensed gacha that misses. It is barely long enough to run a first anniversary event, which this one never reached.

The gap between announcement and shutdown was three months, which is the convention. Players get told and the paid currency stops selling, and whatever people already bought gets spent down before the lights go out.

~ the square enix mobile problem ~

The coverage points at something more specific than a weak game. Square Enix was running a lot of mobile titles simultaneously, and they were competing for one audience: people who like Square Enix properties and will spend money on a mobile RPG. That audience is not small, but it is finite, and a publisher shipping several gachas into it ends up bidding against itself for the same wallets.

The company's mobile graveyard from this stretch is crowded. Various titles across the Final Fantasy and Mana lines ran for a year or two and then closed. A back catalog deep enough to spin a mobile game out of any corner of it turns into a hazard once every one of those games needs the same core spender to turn up.

~ what closes with a gacha ~

When a gacha shuts down, what disappears is more than the game. Everyone who pulled a character paid real money for an item that existed on a server, and the server is now off. There is no offline mode and no equivalent of an old cartridge sitting in a drawer.

Mana has been running since 1991 and the console entries are still playable on whatever hardware you aim at them. Echoes of Mana was live for a year and eighteen days and is now unplayable by anybody, permanently, including the people who put the most money into it. That is the trade a licensed gacha makes with a back catalog: it borrows a series that outlives its own hardware, and it hands back a hole.

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