October 30 Will Be a Sad Day for Final Fantasy Fans

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius is shutting down on October 30, Square Enix has announced. The Final Fantasy mobile game will be nine years old by the time that happens.

Developed by Japanese studio Alim, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius is a free-to-play RPG with gacha mechanics. It originally launched for Android and iOS devices in Japan in October 2015 before having a global release eight months later.

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius Shutting Down After 9 Years

Square Enix has now announced that it intends to shut down the game on October 30, just eight days following its ninth anniversary. Its servers will cease operations at 11:59pm PT on that date. The in-game notice announcing the RPG’s end of life saw Square Enix state that the decision to pull the plug on Final Fantasy Brave Exvius was “difficult” to make. The publisher also thanked the fans for their long-term support, which allowed the game to go on for as long as it did.

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius Revenue Has Reportedly Been Declining For Years

The last time the company provided an official update on the RPG’s player base was in late 2020, when it said Brave Exvius surpassed 45 million downloads across Android and iOS. This makes it one of the most successful Final Fantasy mobile games ever made. Since then, Brave Exvius fell out of the top 250 top grossing apps on both the Google Play Store and iOS App Store, and is currently hovering around 1000th place, according to data compiled by third-party market tracker AppMagic.

And while its revenue has hence apparently been on a steady decline for a while now, the same source suggests that the gacha RPG saw some noticeable revenue spikes during its crossover events, such as the one that added Parasite Eve‘s Aya Brea to Final Fantasy Brave Exvius back in September 2023. Even so, the effects of these promos reportedly diminished over the years, presumably because the game’s player base has been continuously shrinking. All of the game’s microtransactions were disabled on August 29, which is when its end-of-life announcement initially went live.

Square Enix Has Been on a Mobile Game Shutdown Spree Since 2023

Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius is far from the first Square Enix mobile game that found itself on the chopping block in recent times. The developer-publisher also shut down NieR Reincarnation, Full Metal Alchemist Mobile, and Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia in the first half of 2024. Prior to that, it shuttered Final Fantasy 7: The First Soldier in early 2023. In between these moves, the Japanese company has also been reevaluating some of its nascent mobile projects, which is what led to the cancellation of Just Cause: Mobile in July 2023, while the game was still in beta.

Source: AppMagic