#oneaday Day 95: Octopath Archival

There's been a bit of consternation today over what appears to be an Octopath Traveller prequel… because it's only being released on mobile.

While some people — as always — have been getting irrationally, over-the-top angry about this, I can understand the discontent to a certain degree. It's not because I blindly dislike mobile games per se — longtime readers of MoeGamer will recall a fair amount of coverage on Granblue Fantasy, Fate/Grand Order, Girls' Frontline and Dragalia Lost — but instead it's primarily down to the "impermanence" of these games: the fact they can't be archived and enjoyed in the years to come.

Okay, we haven't yet come to a point where a big, high-profile game like Granblue Fantasy has reached its "end" and closed down, and it's entirely possible that Cygames and co will figure out some sort of solution for people to still be able to enjoy the games offline once the servers go down. It's not without precedent; I think it was Konami who, a few months back, took one of their mobile games offline but allowed its players to download all the data and continue enjoying it at their leisure. We talked about it on the podcast.

One potential issue with this, of course, is that with the way mobile games are structured and monetised, an "offline" version would need rebalancing somewhat to be more friendly to offline play. The successful games like the aforementioned are all successful because they're pretty friendly to free-to-play players, but there's still little denying that you can get yourself a significant advantage (or at least the chance at a significant advantage) if you pay up. How would that work if there's no means of paying any more? The game would have to be more generous with its "premium" currency, or simply provide alternative means of acquiring characters and other content that would typically be part of the gacha system.

And then you have the question of how that game is actually archived for future generations. Let's say some sort of disaster hits Apple and/or Google and their respective app stores are no longer available. On Android, this isn't so much of a problem because you can just sideload .apk files to install anything, but on iOS, as far as I'm aware, it's impossible without jailbreaking. Who will be responsible for maintaining these archives? Will the original creators allow their games to be distributed in this manner long after they've washed their hands of them? These are questions we don't yet know the answers to.

I think the reason why this is a big deal this time around is that it's a direct prequel to a commercially available game for which there is an archivable physical release on a non-mobile platform. This means that 20-30 years from now, someone will (hopefully) still be able to play Octopath Traveller, but might not be able to enjoy its prequel. That'd be a real shame; it's like putting an expiry date on art, and it's something I feel is happening more and more in gaming these days between post-launch updates, patches, DLC and all manner of other stuff.

And I don't see it getting better; people seem invested in going further in this direction rather than resisting it, all because of "convenience". I really hope this doesn't end up biting us in the ass in the future.