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The story
Mobile games built on popular IPs like “Bungo Stray Dogs,” “Love Live!,” “Final Fantasy,” and “Sword Art Online” have been shutting down one after another. IT journalist Hiroshi Mikami analyzed the trend, saying, “Young people today don’t play social games. TikTok is enough for them, and games feel like a hassle. What they want is ‘tipa’ (time performance — getting maximum value for minimal time spent).” The 5ch thread reacting to this article erupted with pushback against the “tipa” theory itself. Opinions split over why young people are abandoning social games, with comments like “It’s not about tipa, it’s a rejection of the exploitative gacha system” and “Casual players are being abandoned, which is why hardcore titles like FromSoftware and Resident Evil are thriving.”
No wonder they’re “shutting down”… The dark reasons behind the wave of mobile game “service terminations” as young people turn away
What on earth is happening in the mobile game industry?
“Lately, mobile games (hereafter ‘mobile games’) built around popular IPs (intellectual properties) like ‘Bungo Stray Dogs,’ ‘Love Live!,’ ‘Final Fantasy,’ and ‘Sword Art Online’ have been ending their service one after another,” says a gaming magazine writer.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Japanese social games really aren't designed to be fun to actually play.
Except for Final Fantasy, none of these are really "popular IPs."
They're anime-otaku stuff.
No history.
No brand power.
And there's never a genuinely new entry.
He's actually pretty well known as an IT journalist though.
That's why harder games like FromSoftware's or Resident Evil are doing well.
In contrast, Square Enix leaned into casual players and failed.
>Square Enix leaned into casual players
Isn't it the other way around?
Aren't "casual players" here basically the general public/mass audience?
I feel like both FromSoftware and Resident Evil are pushing Square Enix closer to a "depopulated village with no children being born" kind of state (a dying, shrinking community).
Though apparently they're getting even dumber from short-form videos instead.
Spreading your own baseless delusions as fact is way more "tipa"-efficient.
No, that's actually correct.
They've stopped even playing social games and just kill time with short-form videos.
The era where "killing time" automatically meant "playing games" is simply over.
Of course, even past your 30s, not touching gacha games at all is still the best move.
Who knows.
They might be dropping cash on "tip" donations for streamers instead.
Probably donation tipping.
I think the #1 hobby among teenage girls was "oshi-katsu" (fan-support activities for idols/influencers).
No, it's not that they're chasing "tipa."
It's just that they're sick of the exploitative gacha structure, and the smart ones who haven't gotten hooked yet are rejecting it before they fall in.
It's just that gacha is hated — framing it as "tipa" is way too broad a claim.
Re: #1 just wants to say "tipa," that's all.
Gacha has nothing to do with it either.
They watch short videos just because they're trending.
They watch just to keep up with conversations so they don't get left out.
They played social games before for the same reason — just going along with everyone else.
In the past people got their info from TV and magazines; now the trendy info source just happens to be short-form video.
Short-form video → the algorithm automatically picks something entertaining, and you know if it's fun within the first second.
Games → you have to choose what to play yourself, and it takes several minutes before you know if it's fun.
As a result, only the proactive, high-attention-span "cream" of young people can still play games at all.
Nah, that's too broad a claim lol.
It's more like polarization — there's definitely a split by class/tier —
but lately parents are finally catching up with the times,
so even in ordinary households, plenty of families can properly judge what's good or bad and pass that on through education.
What it really means is that game ads are losing to short-form video.
Square Enix and other social-game makers run their ads in between short videos,
but those aren't received as an intriguing game introduction — they're just perceived as annoying noise.
So the games themselves never get any interest, and without interest people don't buy them or spend money on them.
Within the first second, viewers go "yeah yeah, another boring, generic game ad" and just scroll past.
That's exactly why something like a Nintendo Direct is so valuable and important — a broadcast that a huge, wide cross-section of people actively choose to go watch and pay attention to.
The ultimate winners of modern consumer culture.
There were way more nouveau-riche types like that back in the day.
Are you underestimating the Bubble-era generation or something?
The era of posting "yay I got the character I wanted!" on social media and getting likes is over too.
That has nothing to do with "tipa" — it's just a money pit with no point in playing.
They're satisfying their need for validation on social media, and feeling like they're sharing the experience with streamers (lol) and influencers —
isn't that a legitimate form of social interaction?
He's on TV news programs a lot.
Same with that "Ishi-something" guy too.
Still no Switch 2 Fold yet?
They don't even do anything themselves anymore — they just swallow whatever falls in front of them.
This is beyond "the masses are pigs" at this point.
They're more like sea squirts or sponges — creatures that just passively filter-feed.
Can't be helped, that's just the world we live in.
Even we were spoiled by grandparents who knew postwar hardship, and got fed until there was food to spare.
For today's kids, that same spoiling has just extended to content and pleasure.
It's the "happiness" humanity has always been chasing.
He's a huge celebrity with 300 regular TV appearances.
There's no Japanese person who doesn't know him.
Those can't all be regular slots though.
For these "dopamine kids," tipa just means how much dopamine they can squeeze out per unit of time.
Early on, they keep the difficulty low so you don't quit, so you're just stuck mashing buttons through dull, repetitive battles.
Partway through, tedious progression systems, grindy repeat-farming, and item-collecting side quests start piling on — with "do this or your character growth stalls" pressure.
Growth is slow, and you can't fill out your roster without gacha-pulling constantly.
Only after you understand the systems, assemble a decent roster on your own, get your characters built up, and push well into the content do you finally reach the point of an actual game — "think for yourself, build your team, and see if your strategy works."
Even with expensive, flashy production values, the cost-performance and time-performance are both terrible.
And the content itself is aimed at mass appeal, so there's nothing distinctive about it — just formulaic drama you've seen a hundred times before.
But it's still convenient since you don't need a game console.
Background and key points of this topic
Free-to-play mobile games have long relied on gacha-based microtransactions as their main revenue source, but in recent years they’ve faced criticism that “gacha preys on gambling psychology,” along with competition for people’s free time from fully free short-form video platforms like TikTok. Where the thread split was over how to interpret young people’s exodus from social games: as a shift in consumer behavior toward “valuing tipa (time efficiency),” or as “a rejection of the gacha payment structure itself.” The former position aligns with Mikami’s analysis, while the latter counters that “tipa is just an excuse — the real issue is distrust of gacha.” Neither view goes beyond speculation. It’s also worth noting that Hiroshi Mikami is an IT journalist who appears on TV news programs, not a gaming-industry expert — a detail that isn’t obvious from the original article or headline alone, which is part of why some thread commenters said they’d “never heard of him.”
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “Mikami: ‘Young people today don’t play social games. TikTok is enough for them, games are a hassle. What they want is tipa’.”
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