Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier will shut down on January 11, 2023
Square Enix has announced that they will shut down the FF7-themed mobile game Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier on January 11, 2023, at 07:00 UTC/GMT (02:00 AM EST, 23:00 -1 day PST). The company also immediately removed the feature to purchase additional Shinra Credits with real money, although players can still use the existing credits until the eventual shutdown.
The First Soldier is a free-to-play battle royale game. It also has a storyline that takes place in the FF7 universe 30 years before Cloud Strife's story begins. The mobile game launched simultaneously worldwide on November 17, 2021.
Today's end-of-service announcement also appears globally, even though The First Soldier has not even reached its first anniversary yet. By the time of its shutdown, the game's lifespan would barely last for a year and almost two months.
Square Enix has been notoriously known for releasing many games-as-a-service titles in recent years, but only to shut them down after a short period. The company has Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis—a mobile compilation of four FF7 spin-offs from Advent Children to Dirge of Cerberus—as a free-to-play game. But The First Soldier's short lifespan may even put Ever Crisis' into question as a literal existential crisis.
Outside of the Final Fantasy series, Square Enix also released the PlatinumGames-developed Babylon's Fall as a live-service game. Despite having paid physical and digital releases, the title is online-exclusive and thus will be rendered completely unplayable when the company shuts down its server on February 28 next year.
You can also read Square Enix's end-of-service announcement for Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier right below.
After almost a year of jumping around on chocobos, mashing it up in melee battles, and sniping from the rooftops of Midgar Undercity, it is with a heavy heart that we are announcing the end of service for FINAL FANTASY VII THE FIRST SOLDIER.
We will be ending service at 07:00 UTC on January 11, 2023.
Despite all our efforts to bring you regular updates with fresh and exciting content, we haven't been able to deliver the experience that we were hoping to, and that you all deserve, so we have made the extremely tough decision to end service for FINAL FANTASY VII THE FIRST SOLDIER.
We would like to thank you all for supporting us over the past year.
Although there is only a little less than 3 months until service ends, we will continue to make updates during this time, so we hope you will continue to enjoy FINAL FANTASY VII THE FIRST SOLDIER until the very end.
10/12/2022 (Wed.)
-From everyone on the FF7FS team