In the eve of its third anniversary, SAO Unleash Blading has announced that it will be shutting down its service.
The termination will take effect on 16th January, 2023 at 6 AM UTC with servers to still be available until then.
The full notice of SAO: Unleash Blading’s service termination reads as follow:
We regret to announce the closure of SAO Unleash Blading. Thank you all for your support and we hope you enjoyed playing. We will be keeping the servers open until 06:00 UTC Jan 16, 2023, so please continue to enjoy SAO Unleash Blading until the very end.
All items can be used until the last day, so if you have any items or Diamond Cubes in your account, please use them before Jan 16, 2023. Also, from today, we are disabling the purchase of Diamond Cubes.
For a month now did SAO Unleash Blading not bring any new content to the game. In fact, the last character that was added into the game was Halloween Eydis alongside an event which was only a rerun of a previous event.
Speaking of Eydis, both her and Sylvie are characters exclusive to the mobile game and there have been no announcement whether they will reappear in other media of the franchise.
However, Eydis did get to appear in Sword Art Online Alicization Lycoris as an additional playable character so her legacy still lives on.
SAO Unleash Blading was also supposed to expand on Kirito and Asuna’s journey in the Underworld and things were just heating up with the introduction of one of the lords of the Human Empire but that’s all lost now.
Based on AppMagic, SAO Unleash Blading had garnered over 59 million USD in terms of revenue with Japan being its biggest contributor. It peaked during its release, reaching over 6 million USD but has since been on a steady decline until last month where it gained only 73, 000 USD.
There is also a new SAO mobile game coming soon, SAO Variant Showdown, so that could also be contributing to Unleased Blading’s decline.
As of current, there is still one more SAO mobile game still standing, SAO Integral Factor and it has been doing so since December 2nd, 2017.
A tale of noble souls.
Sword Art Online's newest RPG game, based on the Alicization arc, featuring an all new original story and characters!