Square Enix’s 10-year-old mobile game grew so complex it became difficult to manage without serious bugs, producer reveals 

Square Enix recently announced that Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius and Dragon Quest of the Stars will be ending services in Japan as of October 31, 2025, shortly after both mobile games celebrate their 10^th anniversaries. While financial factors are possibly at play too, a notice from Dragon Quest of the Stars’ producer reveals that the main cause for the shutdown are technical complications arising from the game being 10 years in the making. 

Addressing players in an August 25 Square Enix Bridge entry, Dragon Quest of the Stars producer Naoki Mutou says that keeping the game running for as long as possible has been his highest priority ever since he took over as producer in 2022. “However, due to the production and development environment growing increasingly complex, I realized that it would be difficult to keep the service running at a satisfactory level.” 

Mutou-P goes on to explain what he means by things becoming complex. “Thanks to your support, Dragon Quest of the Stars has been able to accumulate an enormous amount of content throughout the years. The game has continued to expand through a variety of new equipment of skills too. While this is something to be happy about, it has also made it increasingly difficult to manage elements of the game, make balancing adjustments and keep developing the game without glitches.” 

According to the producer, the sheer number of functions in Dragon Quest of the Stars’ game program has required tireless work from the development team to prevent unexpected behaviors and bugs from happening. But as of recent, “we have finally reached a point where it is no longer possible to keep the game running without impacting players.” As such, Square Enix decided it would be best to use the 10^th anniversary as an opportunity to wrap up the story and end the game. 

It’s not known whether similar issues prompted the imminent shutdown of FF Brave Exvius too, but this is no doubt a problem many long-running live-service games are beginning to face. Japanese gacha game programmer and technical blogger Eihigh notes (based on personal experience) that, “after 10 years of operation, a game’s code accumulates so much technical debt that it’s impossible to pay it back. Releasing new features always takes utmost priority, so there’s no testing, the tech stack is outdated, and it’s impossible to tell which code is safe to delete and which code must never be touched.” These issues grow in severity if personnel changes take place and developers who were present from day one leave the team. “Every day you’re working in fear that your changes will make the game implode because of some past specifications you don’t even know about.” 

On a related note, Square Enix’s long-running MMORPG Final Fantasy XI faced the end of its server lifetime around 2024, and the company considered ending support for it as a living game (they were going to put it into a permanent maintenance mode). Thankfully, FFXI still had so many players logging in daily that Square Enix found it worth their time and resources to update the game’s infrastructure.