The Evil Disney Mobile Game I Love I Shutting Down, And Ironically It Just Turned Into A Great Game

I was pretty brutal to Disney Mirrorverse when it launched. I think it was the most betrayed I’ve ever felt by a game before, which, to be fair, is partly on me for getting my hopes up about a mobile game made by Kabam in 2022. It just had so much going for it. Its multiversal take on Disney heroes and villains gave us a rich world to explore and character designs that felt instantly iconic. The marketing made it look like a sprawling RPG with a deep story about the Dark Mirror, The Fractured, and the Guardians of the Mirrorverse. McFarlane Toys even created a whole line of action figures for it.

It seemed like it was going to be a huge game, but then all we got was the same old warmed-over gacha game slop, packed with predatory systems, dozens of different currencies, and insurmountable grind, and so many ads that sometimes it was hard to figure out where the actual games was. Mirrorverse was so close to not being mobile game trash, but in the end it was held back by all the things that give mobile its deservedly terrible reputation.

I stopped playing Mirrorverse shortly after launch, but eventually returned to it this summer during what you might call a mental health crisis. I found it to be largely the same game, albeit with a couple of years of added content and characters, which was always my favorite thing about the game. I learned a bit about the recent hardships at Kabam, which has gone through two major waves of layoffs in the last couple years that effectively reduced Mirrorverse’s team down to a skeleton crew. Development slowed but continued, with new characters and story chapters added infrequently throughout the year.

On September 17, just ahead of the release of the newest character, Cinderella, Kabam announced on the community Discord server that it was time to pull the plug on Mirrorverse. All in-app purchases were disabled immediately, and the servers are scheduled to go offline on December 16, 2024.

I’d only got back into Mirrorverse in July and my total financial investment in the game, though still high enough that I’m embarrassed to reveal, pales in comparison to a lot of players who have been into Mirrorverse since day one. To find out that it’s going away forever, even though the writing has been on the wall for some time, is hard to accept. You can see it in the reactions from people on the Discord as they work through the stages of grief.

The #feedback-and-suggestions channel is filled with calls to sell the game to another studio or release the files so the community can rebuild the game on their own. Players are hopeful for spin-offs, sequels, or relaunches that will never happen, and community managers don’t have the heart to tell them that this is it. The game is going to die in December and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

This is the reality of live-service games that is particularly painful when it comes to mobile. Whether you’ve dedicated your time, your money, or both, it’s hard to accept that all of that investment is about to be erased and you’ll have nothing to show for it. There are no short-term goals in games like this. There are no refunds in a situation like this, just a hollow “thank you” and the lingering feeling of being duped.

With ten weeks left before the plug gets pulled, it’s fascinating to see where the game is today. To Kabam’s credit, it’s handling the shutdown in the most gracious way possible by transforming the game from a free-to-play microtransaction nightmare into something that actually rewards you for your time.

All in-app purchases have been removed and replaced with a new currency called Mirror Fragments that you can earn by the tens of thousands simply by logging in and completing challenges. Those fragments can be spent on all type of progression material the game offers, from relics and gems to motes, signets, books, and gold. You can also spend fragments to buy specific five-star guardians from a pool that rotates once a week. No more loot boxes, no more pay-to-win, just a clear progression path that’s fun and rewarding.

It’s kind of like Kabam put a few thousand dollars in everyone’s account and told them to go nuts, but even better, because you still get to play the game and earn your own progress. The difference is now that progress is actually meaningful and measurable over a few days and weeks, rather than months and years.

Ironically, it took Mirrorverse shutting down for it to finally become a great game, and I can’t help but wonder if it would have been more successful had it been more like this from the start. I don’t pretend to know the economics of making or monetizing a mobile game, but I know this version of Mirrorverse is one I look forward to playing every day, rather than being punished for missing one.

I’ll join the copium train and say that I hope this isn’t the end for Mirrorverse. The world of Mirrorverse and its interpretation of Disney characters is incredible, and it feels like such waste to throw it all away now. There’s already a full-length novel tie-in and a prequel manga that came out earlier this year, so while I don’t know if there’s an audience for it, it would be great to see the story continue in some way. Mirrorverse deserved better than this game, so I don’t blame the people who aren’t ready to let it go.