Gears Pop!

» see gearspop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

By 2019 i was in my mid thirties with an engineering job and no room in a day for a game that expects a session every few hours. Gears Pop! was built entirely for that room. i never installed it, and if i had, it would not have survived a week on my phone.

Microsoft announced it on 10 june 2018 at E3, on the same stage as Gears 5 and Gears Tactics, which tells you exactly what job it was given. The franchise was being handed a whole year, and one of the doors into that year was supposed to be a free game on a phone. Mediatonic built it in London with The Coalition and Xbox Game Studios published it. Funko licensed the vinyl proportions that gave the thing its name.

It arrived on 22 august 2019 for iOS and Android, with a Windows build alongside, about a month before Gears 5. What you actually got was Clash Royale with cover. Two players fed tokens onto a playfield, the tokens became Gears characters at Funko scale, and the wrinkle over Supercell's version was that units would take cover the way they do in the shooter.

Reviews were polite rather than warm. Metacritic settled at 64 on iOS and Pocket Gamer gave it three out of five while calling it decent, and the complaint underneath nearly every writeup was the free-to-play machinery. A million people were in it within a week of launch, which is the number Microsoft wanted and also the number that means the least. Phone games collect a million people the way a billboard collects a million eyes.

~ the dossier ~

~ the shape of the thing ~

The genre it copied is one of the hardest to hold. A lane battler lives on a slow drip of new cards and constant balance work, because the whole economy is people paying to shorten a wait. Stop shipping and the wait becomes the entire product. Supercell staffs Clash Royale like a live service because it has to, and a licensed spinoff from a studio that also has other clients does not get that headcount.

Mediatonic said as much when it ended. The stated reason was that ongoing development was no longer feasible, and the studio spelled out that keeping a game alive means more than leaving servers switched on, because it also means fixing what breaks and answering people who write in. That is an unusually frank thing for a publisher notice to say out loud, and it is correct.

~ the day it died ~

The notice went out on 29 october 2020, in the app and on the game's own site. In-app purchasing had already been switched off the day before, and every purchase made in the ninety days leading up to 28 october was refunded automatically without anybody having to ask for it. Then the servers stayed up for a further six months, which is more grace than most phone games get, and Mediatonic spent that window running the popular events again and raising the drop rates on legendary pins so the last players could finish their collections.

The timing around the studio is hard to miss. Fall Guys had launched on 4 august 2020 and turned into one of the biggest things of that year. The notice that Gears Pop! could no longer be maintained went out twelve weeks later. Nothing in the announcement connects the two, and nothing needs to.

~ what the servers took with them ~

Every match was arbitrated on a server, so on 26 april 2021 the game became an icon that opens onto an error. There is no offline mode to fall back to, no single-player campaign left behind, no archive build. The delisting was total.

gearspop.com still resolves. It answers on plain http and on https alike, and both of them land you on xbox.com in the games section, which is a redirect to a storefront rather than to anything that replaced it. The address survives as a funnel. The game it was named after is gone in a way that a cartridge never is.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »