Developer ENSAPIA Tokyo has announced that its long-running MMORPG Chocotto Land will shut down on March 29, 2027. A casual, pixel art fantasy game for PC and mobile many Japanese gamers remember as a nostalgic part of their childhoods, the game has been running for an impressive 20 years (releasing in 2006 in a “pre-launch phase,” followed by its official launch in 2007). Notably, the developers don’t cite financial reasons as the cause of the upcoming shutdown.
Alongside regular in-game events and updates, Chocotto Land has evolved significantly over the years as a game, with the developers adding new classes, a job-change system, new maps, gameplay features, and enemies among other content. However, according to the new announcement, the game has long faced the issue of aging infrastructure. While the developers had been considering various solutions, such as migrating to a new system, the game’s internal structure had, through years of updates, grown too complex to make any such attempt feasible. Given these circumstances, ENSAPIA Tokyo determined that continuing operations was no longer possible, leading to the decision to end services. The announcement has come as a shock to many Japanese players.
Notably, a similar fate befell Square Enix’s Dragon Quest of the Stars, which ended services in October 2025 after 10 years of updates. The developers likewise cited technical complications arising from the game’s old and increasingly complex development environment as the main reason behind the shutdown. At the time, industry professionals with experience in live-service mobile games suggested that the issue of accumulated technical debt, paired with the impact of frequent personnel changes at game companies, were a common problem long-running games face, so we could possibly be seeing more such cases in coming years.
In the case of Chocotto Land, the developers have announced plans to launch a “memorial” website, where players can look back on the game’s history, as well as a “memorial” app that will give fans access to designs from the game. Servers will officially close on March 29, 2027, at 10 AM (JST).
