In an announcement phrased so peculiarly it could almost be mistaken for bad news, the development team of Visual Arts’ dark fantasy mobile game The False Alice has apologized for “suspending its suspension of content updates.” In other words, following a three-year period of virtually no updates, The False Alice is finally receiving new game content, but for some reason, the developers are apologizing and distributing free in-game currency as compensation, to the amusement of players in Japan.
To provide some background, The False Alice’s developers announced in July 2023 that they would stop releasing new content for the game. Unlike many live-service titles though, they didn’t shut the game down for good. Servers have been kept in an operational state under the condition that revenue from in-app purchases continues to cover operational costs. To make this happen, Visual Arts implemented a live counter in the game that displays to all players how much in-game currency is being spent, and even revealed a full breakdown of how much it cost to run the game per month (1.95 million yen or about $13,600 USD at the time, including the cloud server fee, maintenance, chat systems etc.). The developers also added a “fundraising store” where players can spend gacha money to directly support development, giving them a way to keep the game online. Ever since, they’ve been making regular updates on whether they’d reached the amount needed for server for the month.
Given that The False Alice has practically been on life-support all these years, many believed it was approaching an imminent end-of-services announcement, so news of the upcoming “Valkyrias Saga” content update has come as a welcome surprise to players. Why the developers chose to announce it as a regretful “suspension of suspension of updates” is a mystery, but the approach has definitely succeeded in generating buzz for the title.
Meanwhile, The False Alice is set to get a full-priced visual novel adaptation titled False Alice: Retold Tale, coming to Steam in the fall of 2026 with English language support. The project was funded through a massively successful crowdfunding campaign on CAMPFIRE, which amassed over $400 thousand dollars or 1,283% of its goal. Much like the original mobile game’s main scenario, the upcoming title depicts the story of flawed girls, “Failures” who were born in the process of creating the protagonists of fairy tales and aim to become “the real thing.”
The False Alice mobile game is available for iOS and Android in Japan.
