Square Enix has just announced today that the currently ongoing free-to-play mech shooter game Figureheads will be shut down as of June 30, 2018. Figureheads originally started first on PC from March 11, 2016, before eventually making its way to PlayStation 4 one year later on March 9, 2017.
Despite trying its best to entice mecha fans by adding collaboration mechs from Square Enix’s other famous mecha titles Front Mission and Xenogears, ultimately they were unable to maintain the service and decided to close both PC and PS4 versions of the game.
Square Enix has also provided a detailed explanation of the closure of Figureheads, which we have translated right below:
From the very beginning of the service, we performed expansions with an axis on a unique gameplay system that let players enjoy both shooting and strategy elements, and many people were able to play it.
We thought we could provide “an experience that could only be tasted with this game,” but on the other hand, more than half of the customers didn’t even finish a single match and ended up leaving the game due to reasons like “It’s difficult to control wingmen,” “The game rule is not simple,” and “The game speed is slow.”This was an extremely fatal situation for a versus game, but it was also a title with a trait that led people who took a liking to it to continue playing in the long term. So while we tried to keep this title’s gameplay system as much as possible, we intended to add more people to enjoy the game, including those who want to play modes other than versus, by adding a new PvE mode which could also let them get used to the controls. Also, as we adjusted the game balance and speed bit by bit, we were able to release the PS4 version of Figureheads on March 9, 2017.
Through various improvements and measures, more new people had continued to play compared to before, but ultimately we were unable to improve the core issues and decided it would be difficult to continue this service in the long term.
The Figureheads server will be officially shut down on June 30 at 16:00 Japan time (UTC+9). Before that, the client download will be terminated earlier on June 28 at noon in Japan.
[Source: Square Enix]
