Love Live breaking barriers in the gacha space by hyping the launch of Love Live! School Idol Festival 2 coming this February...and then noting that the very same game will shut down on May 31st. The Japanese version launched in April 2023 and will close in March 2024.
You couldn't even parody a more succinct illustration of how volatile the f2p mobile and gacha space is if you tried.
This is even weirder than it might look to a lay person because there are absolutely cases of work on mobage localizations getting a belated start post-Japanese launch due to devs hedging bets and then those projects getting shuttered once it emerges that the Japanese version itself is shutting down. I've had that happen to me; I've gotten paid to work on dead mobage whose English versions never got announced (and I knew were a dead man walking the minute I got the request, but hey, the dev wanted to pay me for like two months of my time, so why not?).
Evidently the base content for this thing was probably finalized and ready to launch before these people decided to wind down the Japanese version, but, even if that happened, the call to make from a cost management and tax perspective would be to not go forward with a global launch. Just trash it like you would if the cancellation had been decided sooner, take the L, and write it off as a loss. Launching the game even in this capacity still requires paying people to do server maintenance and social media at minimum on top of adding potential ongoing localization costs related to that?
Genuinely baffling stuff! Pretty much my entire circle of localizer friends has been left flabbergasted any of this would come to pass and are at a loss for words as to why they would go to this trouble. And they're doing it while still enabling monetization! Absolutely wild!!!
