Square Enix has officially announced the end of new seasonal content for Foamstars, its PlayStation-exclusive four-on-four live-service Splatoon knockoff that limped onto the scene in February. The final season will wrap up in mid-January 2025, marking yet another big-budget failure for the once-iconic Japanese company. It’s almost certain the game will be unceremoniously shut down sometime later next year.
Square Enix seems to be speedrunning its own collapse, shoving ESG mandates for “diversity” and “inclusivity” into its games. This has resulted in the censorship of classic titles, whether re-released or remastered. In the case of the recent Dragon Quest III HD-2D, they decided to butcher the late Akira Toriyama’s iconic character designs, making them less “sexual” and or “racist,” while stripping out male and female descriptors in favor of some bullshit “inclusive” language.
Meanwhile, their flagship Final Fantasy series has been thoroughly Westernized, with retroactive censorship updates to please their self-appointed “ethics department.” Breasts? Gone. Jiggle physics? Erased. And don’t even get me started on Final Fantasy XVI, which bombed despite being the first game in the series to feature same-sex couples.
The company has been hemorrhaging money, not just because their games are lackluster and riddled with ideological garbage, but also due to their reliance on Sony’s PlayStation. After admitting that both Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Final Fantasy XVI flopped commercially, Square finally decided to stop taking Sony’s bribes and is now scrambling for a multiplatform strategy to boost sales.
As for Foamstars, it was dead on arrival. The Splatoon-wannabe had a moderately okay launch, but thanks to Square Enix’s insatiable greed and inability to support their games properly, it floundered and was swiftly forgotten.
Square Enix tried pulling a fast one with Foamstars, offering it “free” for a month to Sony PlayStation Plus subscribers in a shameless attempt to reel in as many suckers as possible. But once the freebie period ended, consumers ditched the game in droves.
Much like Sony’s grotesque disaster Concord, Square had the audacity to slap a price tag on an online-only title with no story campaign, entirely dependent on frequent content updates and microtransaction-laden cosmetics to keep the lights on.
Predictably, the plan backfired spectacularly. When the beta period ended, Square were asking consumers to cough up $30 for a game cobbled together with AI-generated assets. To make matters worse, the cosmetic bundles cost just as much, if not more than the game itself.
Unsurprisingly, PlayStation gamers bailed en masse, resulting in a catastrophic 95% player drop just two months after launch.
While Sony mercifully pulled the plug on Concord after a couple of weeks, Square Enix is still riding the Foamstars train, either out of sheer stubbornness or because they’re too deep in the hole to back out now. Whether it’s an act of “good faith” or just blind desperation, one thing’s clear: this mess isn’t going away just yet.
And considering their long history of launching and then quickly killing mobile gacha games, it’s inevitable that Square will eventually kill off Foamstars for good.
Back on October 4th, Square Enix announced Foamstars would relaunch as a free-to-play title, a move that should’ve been made from the start. Predictably, the damage had already been done.
Consumers didn’t bother giving the game a second chance, with its free-to-play launch window seeing a staggering 97% drop in players compared to its original debut.
Tellingly, Square didn’t even attempt to port their online-only, live-service failure to rival systems or PC. What could’ve been a much-needed revenue stream for the struggling company, especially given that Final Fantasy XIV is carrying them financially has instead become yet another cautionary tale of greed and PlayStation exclusivity gone wrong.
The game’s final seasonal update, ironically titled Party Goes On!, is slated for release on December 13, 2024, and will wrap up on January 17, 2025. This will mark the end of Foamstars‘ planned content. Players will have access to previous seasonal rewards and can switch between them at will, but there’s a catch, not all content will be free.
Accessing the Premium Pass content will still require payment, which is almost guaranteed to generate no meaningful revenue for Square Enix or developers Toylogic.
In the end, Foamstars won’t be remembered for its gameplay but as yet another addition to Square Enix’s growing list of live-service failures. It joins the likes of Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad in the “soon-to-be-terminated” department, while Ubisoft’s XDefiant was also announced for shutdown this month.
With the company steadfast in its commitment to pushing “safe” games laden with diversity, inclusivity, and censorship, it’s unlikely they’ll learn anything from this debacle. Instead, they seem destined to keep doubling down on the same bullshit that have put so many others out of business throughout the year.
