Square Enix has announced that it is cancelling the mobile spinoff Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link. In a statement on the game’s website, Square Enix apologized to fans who were anticipating the game. The announcement also mentioned that Square was still hard at work on Kingdom Hearts IV perhaps to allay fears that this cancellation might indicate problems for other games in the sprawling Disney video game series.
Kingdom Hearts: Missing-Link was announced in 2022 alongside Kingdom Hearts IV. It was billed as a mobile action game that made use of GPS technology to give players the ability to “travel the world without stepping outside,” according to one trailer. However, apparently that goal was a bit too lofty as Square Enix wrote, “We determined that it would be difficult for us to offer a service that players would find satisfactory over a long period of time, leading us to the decision to cancel development.”
Square Enix’s statement provided insight as to the reason for a game’s cancellation – something most game studios do not often offer. And while making any game is a miracle, making a successful live-service game is like asking for lightning to strike the head of a pin in a forest. After all, how many live-service games (some of them even made by Square Enix itself) were released only to die shortly thereafter while the concurrent player counts for Fortnite, Roblox, and Call of Duty remain largely unmoved. So it’s a rare and refreshing bit of honesty, especially in an industry as opaque as game development, that Square Enix was willing to name the reason for cancelling Missing-Link and I hope more studios follow suit in the future.
But it’s not all bad news for Square Enix. As reported by Gematsu, Square has also started a new partnership with the Tokyo Broadcasting System Television. Known as TBS, it’s a Japanese TV and media company which produced Takeshi’s Castle – an internationally popular physical competition show known in the US as Most Extreme Elimination Challenge or MXC. TBS started its own games division in 2023 and with Square Enix, the two companies will work on a new gaming property.
