Foamstars was Final Fantasy maker Square Enix’s attempt at a live-service party game. The shooter took some inspiration from Splatoon but had its own twist on goo-based arena combat. Unfortunately, the finished game struggled to find an audience. Like Sony’s failed hero shooter Concord, it’s now being abandoned. Unlike that game, however, Square Enix will keep the lights on so fans can keep playing if they want.
Foamstars’ Party Goes On season will go live on December 13 and run through January 17, 2025. After that, “season updates for Foamstars will be coming to an end,” according to a new blog post by the game’s operations team. While this means there will be no further seasons, the game’s servers will remain online, and there will be some in-game “Foamstars Cup” competitions that continue after that point.
“Furthermore, to ensure that new players can fully enjoy Foamstars, previous Season Passes will be made available again,” the post reads. “Players can switch between Season Passes at any time to proceed along the Season Pass track of your choice and obtain items from past seasons. This will make it possible for players to obtain all the items from each season.”
Foamstars, which revolves around augmenting battlefields with color-coded, elevation-changing foam and “chilling” your enemies, released to little fanfare back in February. Despite debuting as a free PS Plus game, the otherwise $30 live-service shooter missed the two-week honeymoon period multiplayer games tend to get on console, and never managed to recover. Foamstars went free-to-play in October, but that doesn’t seem to have moved the needle much.
It probably didn’t help that the game was a PS4 and PS5 exclusive and unavailable on Xbox and PC. Following “disappointing” sales for both Final Fantasy XVI and Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, Square Enix has stated it will move back to a multiplatform strategy, potentially looking at more day-one releases on both Steam and the Nintendo Switch.
The good news is that anyone who did have a soft spot for Foamstars, or wants to check it out now that it’s being sunset, can still play. Unlike Concord, which Sony unreleased within two weeks of its poor launch, taking the servers offline and refunding players for the game whether they wanted to keep it or not, the Foamstars party, such as it is, will continue kicking for the foreseeable future.
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