Evil disney mobile game i love turning off, and ironically it turned out to be a great game

I was pretty cruel when the Disney Mirrorverse started. I think this was the most let down I've ever felt from a game before, which, to be fair, is partly down to me getting my hopes up for a mobile game made by Kabam in 2022. . Its versatile take on Disney heroes and villains gave us a rich world to explore and character designs that felt instantly iconic. The marketing made it seem like a sprawling RPG with a deep story about Dark Mirror, The Fractured, and Guardians of the Mirrorverse. McFarlane Toys even created an entire line of action figures for it.




It looked like it was going to be a great game, but then what we got was the same old warm-over gacha game slop, full of predatory systems, dozens of different currencies, and unsafe grinding, and so many ads that it sometimes had. Hard to find where the actual game was. The Mirrorverse mobile game was very close to being trash, but in the end it was held back by all the things that gave mobile its deservedly terrible reputation.

I stopped playing Mirrorverse shortly after launch, but finally got back into it this summer after what you might call a mental health crisis. I found it to be largely the same game, albeit with a few years of added content and characters, which was always my favorite thing about the game. I learned a bit about the recent difficulties at Kabam, which has gone through two major waves in the past few years that effectively reduced the Mirrorverse team to a skeleton team. Development slowed but continued, with new characters and story chapters added infrequently throughout the years.


On September 17, a new character, Cinderella, appeared on the Community Discord server before Kabam announced it was time to pull the plug on the Mirrorverse. All in-app purchases were immediately disabled, and the servers are scheduled to go offline on December 16, 2024.

I only returned to the Mirrorverse in July and my total financial investment in the game, although still very high that I'm embarrassed to reveal, pales in comparison to many players who have been in the Mirrorverse since the early days. To find out it's going away forever, even if the writing has been on the wall for a while, is hard to accept. You can see this in the responses from people on Discord as they work through the stages of grief.


The #feedback-and-suggestions channel is full of calls to sell the game to another studio or release the files so the community can rebuild the game themselves. Players are hoping for spin-offs, sequels, or relaunches that will never happen, and community managers don't have the heart to tell them it is. The game is going to die in December and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

It's a reality of live-service games that's especially painful when it comes to mobile. Whether you've dedicated your time, your money, or both, it's hard to accept that all that investment is about to be wiped out and you'll have nothing to show for it. There are no short-term goals in such games. In such cases there is no refund, just an empty “thank you” and a feeling of being cheated.


With ten weeks to go before the plug is 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, transforming the game from a free-to-play microtransaction nightmare to 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 thousands by logging in and completing challenges. Those pieces can be spent on all kinds of progression content the game has to offer, from relics and gems to motes, signatures, books and gold. You can also spend chunks 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.


Kabam put a few thousand dollars in everyone's account and told them to go crazy, but better yet, because you can still play the game and make your progress. The difference is that progress is actually meaningful and measurable in days and weeks instead of months and years.

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


I'll join the copium train and I hope this isn't the end for the Mirrorverse. The world of the Mirrorverse and its interpretation of Disney characters is incredible, and throwing it all away now feels like such garbage. 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 nice to see the story continue somehow. Mirrorverse deserves better than this game, so I don't blame people who aren't ready to let it go.

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