A Highly Anticipated Final Fantasy Game Has Been Canceled
Square Enix is shutting down the Chocobo racing game, Chocobo GP.
Square Enix, the Japanese multinational gaming conglomerate, is shutting down support for Chocobo GP, a spiritual successor of Chocobo Racing on Nintendo Switch. The company announced that there would be no further large-scale updates for the game that sports Final Fantasy characters and that the sale of in-game premium currency has been stopped. At the same time, Square Enix is bringing Lara Croft and two Tomb Raider hit games to Nintendo Switch, whose Joy-Con controllers still suffer from a design flaw.
According to Kotaku, the Chocobo GP racing game won’t receive any content updates in terms of characters or tracks, signaling the impending end of the game, which was released less than a year ago. Given that the company ended the sale of the game’s premium currency, gamers with Mithril on their account better spend it because the currency itself will become void on January 6, 2023. However, players would still be able to buy items that belong to the ongoing Season 5 through other means, and those purchases will include items that were sold during the previous seasons.
As for the Chocobo GP itself, Square Enix said that the game would remain playable on Nintendo Switch, though they haven’t specified if the overall support for the game and its live-service component will remain unaffected for the time being. However, while this change falls heavily on the Nintendo Switch fans of Chocobo Racing successor, it appears that the iOS and Android versions of the game remain unaffected. The question is: for how long?
Square Enix is ending the support for Chocobo GP only nine months after the game was released on Nintendo Switch, which might attest to the game’s poor performance with the audiences. Whether or not that’s the case is irrelevant at this point; the game is perfectly fine, but the greed-fueled implementations, like the ones seen in the infamous Diablo Immortal, are probably what ruined the Chocobo Racing successor for audiences.
Square Enix launched the spiritual successor to 1999’s Chocobo Racing this year for Nintendo Switch and even priced it at approximately $50, which is admittedly lower than what Nintendo usually charges for their titles. However, the company decided to monetize the game through in-game stores and paywalls, as if it was a free-to-play mobile game—in which case the monetization would’ve been fine. However, that wasn’t actually the case; the company even introduced a paid season pass and not one but three in-game currencies.
In recent news, most gaming companies are now making their monetization practices more transparent and are likely to continue doing so, following Epic’s court-ordered $500 million fine over monetization-fueled privacy malpractices. Loot boxes are disappearing from gaming, thankfully, and the companies such as Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts (who would’ve thought?) are slowly removing such monetization mechanics from their gaming titles.
As for the Chocobo Racing successor, the game allows players to race familiar characters from Final Fantasy games and even use some of the game’s most recognizable skills to battle opponents on racing tracks that echo Nintendo’s Mario Kart series—which was almost called something horrible.
