I wanted to get people's opinions on what they thought the main reasons were that Luminaria ultimately failed. We all saw it coming from a mile away, but the characters, story, music, and art all kept us here for one reason or another. I think there are 3 or 4 main reasons for why this happened, and I want to talk about how much each of them was likely to contribute to the ultimate decision to pull the plug.

First, and most obvious, was the lack of compelling repeatable content (often referred to as end game). The raids were, to put it bluntly, not fun, and barely anyone did it. The top 500 from last event was empty even in JP for every character except the banner character. If the gameplay was fun, it would have gotten more people to play the content and spend to get equipment to play in the raids. Which leads to the second point.

There wasn't any reason to spend money. The story scaled with your power level, so there was no reason to pull the gacha to play the story. You couldn't even look at the costume cosmetics you pull on your first trip through. Secret missions don't scale, but unless you're a completionist there's no reason to spend money to complete secret missions whose only rewards were more gacha currency (and in ep 2, level up stones).

However, these issues belie a more serious issue the game had: acquisition and retention. Let's talk about acquisition first, cause you can't have retention without acquisition. The game launched poorly, even more so in Global than in JP (because of the voiceover complaints). The poor word of mouth can't have helped the game, even if the story was stellar. The team worked incredibly hard incredibly quickly to fix as many of the issues with the game as they could, but by then it was a little too late. But what about advertising? I'm not entirely certain why Bandai Namco decided to barely advertise the game once they had solved some of the big issues. Even with a poor monetization model, acquiring more users to interact with your product NEEDS to come first, or else you won't have the money to continue development. Without the audience, there's no point in developing a good monetization model. I'd rather get 1% of 1 million players spending $1 each than 10% of 1,000 players spending $50. They could have gotten the audience now and then figured out how to monetize them later. Which makes me think the real problem is my final point, retention.

Like I said before, the game has excellent writing, characters, art, and music. I love the game. But with that said, it is a game that demands your time. Most gacha games, even the most hardcore grindfests, have a small task you can do in between tasks at work, home, or on the bus or train commute (important in Japan), that will make you feel like you are making a little progress in your time killing game. But Luminaria doesn't really have that. The raid has a lot of friction in getting into a group of 4 people, secret missions demand a lot of your attention and have you banging your head against it unless you're overgeared. What the game has is its story episodes, and that requires you to sit down with headphones on and be ready to be immersed in the arguably excellent content.

I saw a lot of people complaining that they needed to increase the number of episodes they released, and in my mind that was the last thing they should have done. I like this game, enough to visit this subreddit and write this long post about what went wrong, and even I am not caught up with the story. As of this writing I just finished Leo ep 2. And I forced myself to dedicate a lot of time to the game in order to get that far. Don't get me wrong, the game is worth it, but it asks a lot of the player, not in money but in undivided attentive time, to get what you want out of it. Because of that, the retention is incredibly poor episode to episode. Leo ep 1 had 22,000 likes on JP. Leo ep 2 has, as of this writing, 1,430. That's nearly a 95% drop off in that specific engagement metric (I'm not smart enough to guess if the people who played ep 1 or the people who played ep 2 are more likely to have "liked" the episode, so we'll generously assume they're equally likely). And that in my opinion is what they needed to solve. The quality of the story was excellent, but no one wanted to play it. I guarantee, even if the revenue was just as bad as it is now, if Leo ep 2 also had 22,000 likes the game would not be shutting down. They would be feverishly trying to monetize the player base, but they wouldn't be shutting down. Maybe they'd try charging a monthly subscription to see new episodes a week or two early, or have a timer between chapters that you could pay to skip past. But make no mistake, the reason the game ultimately failed in my opinion, was because the market for it was too small.

If you read to the end, thanks. I would love to hear other opinions on this. I'm super bummed out that this is how it had to end. I think with the free time I'll gain back with this, after I finish all the episodes I haven't played yet I'll go check out Sekina Aoi, the main scenario writer of Luminaria's previous light novel series, Gamers. I watched the anime years ago and really liked it, and even went back and watched his previous anime Seitokai no Ichizon, but I never read the light novels, and now feels like a good time to go and check out his previous work.