BlazBlue Alternative Dark War has announced its end of service, a short lived venture since its initial launch in February 2021. The announcement can be found on the official website and Twitter.
Fighting game community personality Jiyuna pointed out how the game suffered a massive drop in earnings, an 83% decrease in 5 months, grossing ~$55,000 from August reports. Out of the mobile games released in Japan during that period, it was ranked 998. He compares it to Uma Musume, which had also launched in February, earning ~$87 million in the previous month.
Effective immediately, BlazBlue Alternative Dark War will no longer have in-app purchases, with end of service planned for 31 January 2022, 13:00 JST. Refunds will be available for any remaining paid premium currency as required. If the Granblue Fantasy collaboration was meant to reignite interest, it clearly wasn’t enough.
We tried out the game for ourselves in our first impressions here. After suffering a number of delays, it’s just unfortunate that the game had to turn out this way. It could have potentially worked better as a mobile fighting game since that is arguably its primary identity, but these speculations will do nothing.
We’ll see if the game tries any last hurrah, giving out freebies before the servers shut down. The notice does not include any plans for offline mode if you were interested in the story, so that’s that.