Everyone wants to join the games as a service because they provide lucrative benefits. What few want to accept is that they are also a risky market. The audience is volatile, they always navigate legal limits, and government changes can end plans that have been in the works for years in just a few months. That’s why it shouldn’t surprise us that so many games of this kind fail. Even when some big creators almost end up in jail because of them.
The latest game that has announced its closure is Dragon Quest Tact. An RPG by Square Enix, a spinoff of the Dragon Quest franchise, that allows us to create a team of monsters to battle. All of this with gacha mechanics.
The game will close on February 29, 2024, just over three years after its global launch on January 27, 2021. The reasons given by its developers for this decision have been a radical change in consumer trends, which makes it difficult to continue maintaining the game. However, this only applies to the international version. The Japanese version of the game will continue to operate as usual, receiving support from the studio.
While it is true that Dragon Quest Tact has not made much noise in the West, it has been in the news for an incident related to the game itself: it was part of an insider trading offense. Yuji Naka, co-creator of Sonic, used his knowledge about the game to, along with two other former Square Enix employees, buy 162,000 shares of Square Enix before the game’s announcement. All of this with the expectation that their price would increase and they could be sold at a much higher price.
The move didn’t go very well. Yuji Naka had to go to trial, where he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and fined 1.2 million dollars. And while the prison sentence was suspended, the fine was not. Something that seems to foreshadow the future of Dragon Quest Tact.