Embracer Group is ceasing to sell and support several mobile games formerly owned by Square Enix. The games will not only disappear from the stores, but will be completely unplayable.
These games are about: A few days ago, developer Onoma, formerly part of Square Enix, announced that several of their games will disappear from the Google and Apple app stores on December 1st. The in-game purchases within these games have already been discontinued.
From January 4, 2023, however, these games will no longer be available to buyers either. You become unplayable. While some of it is Free2Play, others were paid. The mobile games affected are:
This is the background: If the developer’s name doesn’t mean anything to you, that’s because they had a different name earlier in the year. The studio was originally called Square Enix Montreal and was part of the assets that the Japanese company Square Enix sold to the Embracer Group in May 2022.
The purchase was followed by a rebranding where the developer was renamed Onoma. However, less than 3 months after registering the new name, Embracer announced that Onoma would be closing.
“Welcome in the future”
There are these reactions: Some Onoma title buyers and players took to Twitter to comment on the news. They posted in Quote retweets since replies to the announcement are disabled. Most of them are far from happy with the way Embracer is handling the game shutdown:
MMO fans will be familiar with this practice. If a multiplayer game doesn’t attract enough players, sooner or later it will shut down and players will lose access to it. Because of this, a whole series of MMORPGs go offline every year.
In this case, however, Embracer’s decision is met with incomprehension, since Deus Ex GO can also be played offline. There was no explanation in the post as to why the 4 games mentioned are affected and whether others such as Tomb Raider GO could follow.