Figureheads

» see figureheads.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

You piloted one mech and gave orders to the rest of your squad. Figureheads was a team shooter for Windows in which most of your side was machines you had configured in advance, and the skill it asked for had less to do with aim than with what you told those machines to do while you were busy elsewhere. Square Enix ran an early open beta on 25 February 2016, a full one from 6pm on 4 March, and started the official service on Friday 11 March.

A PlayStation 4 version followed exactly one year later, on 9 March 2017, sharing the same servers. An arcade cabinet called Figureheads ACE went into Japanese game centers that June on its own separate site. It was a Japanese service with a Japanese client, and there was never an overseas release to miss.

The closing schedule ran three and a half months. Square Enix posted the notice on Thursday 15 March 2018. Sales of the paid currency, GOLD, ended at the maintenance window a week later on 22 March. New client downloads were cut at noon on 28 June, and the service itself ended at 4pm on Saturday 30 June, taking Windows and PlayStation 4 together.

~ the record ~

~ the reason, in their own words ~

Shutdown notices almost always say the same nothing. They thank you and they name a date. This one instead listed three faults in the company's own voice, two of which were that commanding your wingmen was hard and that the rules were not simple. The third was that the game felt slow. The sentence those faults hang off is the part worth reading twice, because it says that most customers were leaving without playing a single match.

The same notice records what they tried. A PvE mode was added for players unwilling to be dropped straight into matches against other humans, and the balance and the game speed were tuned a little at a time. The PlayStation 4 release in March 2017 is described in the same breath, as another attempt at the same problem. Square Enix says retention among new players did improve. Then it closes the loop: no fundamental fix was reached, and long-term service was judged difficult to continue.

That is a publisher saying, in public and over its own name, that the problem was not money or competition but its own first match. Almost nobody writes that down.

~ the cafe at the end ~

Square Enix held the last event in a cafe in Ikebukuro on the final afternoon, running from 2pm to the moment the servers closed. Most online games die while nobody is looking at them; this one had an audience in a room, by appointment. The schedule published in advance put a countdown on the screen at 15:59, so the people sitting there watched the last minute arrive on a clock.

~ no numbers, one date ~

No player numbers were ever published, so the shape of the decline has to be inferred from the notice rather than a chart. The game's own domain redirects now. Its logo survives in an archived beta page as a white wordmark on a transparent background, 500 pixels by 150, invisible against anything pale.

The arcade spin-off outlived the home version by some months, and the Japanese Wikipedia gives it a date that nothing else supports, so it is not repeated here. The home service has a date you can check: 30 June 2018, 16:00 JST, with a reason attached.

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