Final Fantasy 7 ‘s free-to-play battle royale game will shut down in Jan. 2023

Remember the Final Fantasy 7 Battle Royale Game that you could play for free back in November? No? Well, Square Enix announced via Twitter on Wednesday that the mobile game would be shutting down on Jan. 11, 2023 at 7 a.m. UTC, citing an inability to deliver “the experience we were hoping to.”

A mobile battle royale shooter set 18 years before the events of Final Fantasy 7, The First Soldier allows players to assume the role of a Soldier recruit embarking on missions in Shinra’s virtual reality simulator in order to bolster the mega-corporation’s private military. The game saw several regular content updates during its lifetime, but this apparently wasn’t enough to keep it afloat.

This is the only the latest shutdown in what appears to be an emerging trend among Square Enix’s live-service games, with the publisher announcing just last month that they would be ceasing the live service for PlatinumGames’ action role-playing game Babylon’s FallOn February 27, 2023 it will be exactly one year after its first launch.