Bilibili Reportedly Chose This Game Over Arknights — Now It's Dead: Heavy Armored Girl (重装战姬) Officially Shutting Down After Nearly 5 Years

If Bilibili had chosen differently between this game and Arknights, would the entire gacha landscape look completely different today? On February 26, 2024, Bilibili-published mobile game Heavy Armored Girl (重装战姬) officially announced its shutdown, ending a nearly five-year run.

The shutdown timeline laid out by the official announcement goes like this: starting February 26, 2024, all app downloads were pulled, payments stopped, and new registrations closed. On April 26, 2024, servers would go permanently offline. By July 12, all community platforms, social media accounts, and the official website would be wiped. After server closure, all account data and character progress would be permanently deleted — no backups, no mercy.

As compensation, the devs distributed an in-game resource package including 100 Elite Recommendation Letters, 5 Pledge Rings, 20 Critical Collapse items, and more. However, the original poster pointed out that the game's last meaningful content update was apparently back in October 2023 — roughly five months before the shutdown announcement. In other words, the game had already entered a state of what Chinese players call 摆烂 (bǎi làn) — openly giving up and running on autopilot.

For veteran players, the defining memory of Heavy Armored Girl is one word: 狂 (láo) — meaning 'prison-like.' One commenter recalled the launch era, where using a third-party speed hack at 8x speed still took a full hour just to finish daily tasks. Without the hack? Dailies could eat an entire day. A top-voted comment simply read: 'Quit after launch because it felt like doing hard time (坐牢).' Another asked: 'Is this that insane game where I spent an entire day grinding and still couldn't finish dailies?'

This soul-crushing daily grind drove away waves of players from day one. As one commenter put it: 'Binged it for a few days as a locust player, then burned out and bailed (蝗过几天，肝败吓疯润了).' Another said they rage-quit during the Evangelion collab event — not because the crossover was bad, but because the event grind was absurdly punishing. The '太牛逼了' (too hardcore) was clearly dripping with sarcasm.

But the juiciest gossip in the entire thread was about Bilibili's investment decisions from back in the day. One commenter revealed: 'Rumor has it that Bilibili had to choose between promoting this game or 粥 (zhōu, slang for Arknights derived from the homophone of 'K-nights'), and they picked this one.' If the rumor holds any truth, Bilibili once held the rights to promote two games — and chose Heavy Armored Girl over what would become one of the most successful gacha titles of the decade.

Another commenter tried to explain Bilibili's reasoning: 'Bilibili was practically obsessed with side-scrolling chibi action games back then, and they had zero experience with the tower defense genre, so...' In other words, Bilibili bet on the genre they were comfortable with rather than the genre that would explode. A textbook case of backing the wrong horse.

Still, some players offered a more measured take on the game's legacy. 'Pretty impressive it survived this long in the mobile game graveyard,' one wrote. 'Nearly five years — that's actually a solid run for a gacha game.' Several commenters also called for an offline version so the game could live on in some form, but the developers never acknowledged this request.

From the 'prison-like' launch grind to Bilibili's alleged decision to pick this over Arknights, to the final months of zombie-mode operations — Heavy Armored Girl's shutdown reads like a cautionary tale of 'what if.' Whether Bilibili truly chose between this game and Arknights may forever remain unconfirmed rumor, but that's exactly what makes it such a tantalizing piece of gacha gaming lore.