When a gacha game starts showering you with everything for free — maxed-out characters, skins, packs — you should be terrified. Food Soul (食物语) players have been terrified for months. But the official shutdown announcement still hit like a truck, and what followed with the so-called 'companion version' sent blood pressure through the roof.
On April 17, 2024, the development team behind Food Soul posted its shutdown notice on Weibo. The food-personification gacha game, published under Tencent, was officially calling it quits. The NGA forums erupted immediately.
The dev team followed up with a more detailed explanation on Weibo, outlining their plans going forward. But instead of calming players down, this statement poured gasoline on the fire.
To understand the drama, you need to rewind to Food Soul's darkest hour. This food-personification title used to be a powerhouse in the female-oriented gacha market — all-male playable characters, customizable protagonist gender, an affinity system with 'clingy' and 'confession' voice lines, full-on waifu/husbando energy. The turning point came when they released an SP ("Sacred") variant of Beijing Roast Duck, one of the game's most popular standard characters. Both waifu collectors and meta players revolted. The game eventually recovered, but that SP incident set the gears of fate in motion.
The real gut punch came around the anniversary last summer. From that point on, the game's operations went completely haywire: two fully-maxed food spirits given away for free, skins handed out just for logging in, all paid packs removed from the shop, and not a single limited or rerun banner for months. For roughly half a year, there was virtually nothing to spend money on in the entire game. Players cut straight to the point: this was deliberate revenue tanking to justify a planned shutdown.
This bizarre state of affairs dragged on for months. The Weibo super-topic (超话, a dedicated discussion forum on Weibo) was flooded with players trying to raise awareness and protest, but the official accounts remained silent. When the shutdown announcement finally dropped, one veteran player summed it up: 'It finally keeled over and died.'
A more detailed analysis emerged in reply #18 from a player who'd spent two years in the game. She pointed to Tencent's strategic pivot: 'Once the parent company set its sights on launching Aola Star 2 (奥拉星2), things started going downhill fast — anniversary livestreams canceled, half-year passes gone, character production slashed, the previously stable schedule completely abandoned.' In other words, the game was essentially bled dry to feed another project.
But the truly explosive part of the shutdown announcement was the 'companion version' (陪伴版). According to a summary posted in reply #17: all existing save data would be deleted. Players would have to start completely from scratch in this new version. The official promise was that the companion version would be entirely free with no monetization, extra rewards, and less grind.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of players had zero faith in this plan. The account handling the companion version was identified as the Food Soul anime's official account, not the game's own — a massive red flag for anyone expecting real support. And then came the kicker: players who protested in the Weibo comments were allegedly threatened by the official account.
The comment section was a warzone of emotions. Some popped champagne: 'Good riddance — I quit the moment the Sacred Duck SP dropped and never looked back.' Others were conflicted: 'It's finally dead, meow... complicated feelings. Time to move on and find the next one.' Players also noted that the entire food-personification genre was on life support: Cuisine Dimension (料理次元), Cuisine 14, and Cuisine 15 had all shut down. Cuisine 17 was apparently still hanging on, and Food Contract (食之契约) was another survivor.
As for that SP Beijing Roast Duck — it's become a dark meme in the community. 'My memories are still stuck at the Beijing Roast Duck SP, the place where fate's gears started turning,' one player wrote. 'I also quit because of the Roast Duck SP,' said another. A single controversial character update ended up becoming the epitaph for an entire game.
From six months of suspicious freebies to a companion version that erases your save data to allegedly threatening players who speak up — Food Soul's shutdown is a masterclass in how NOT to handle a game's end-of-life. The last big tree in the food-personification genre is falling, and underneath it stand tens of thousands of players who once genuinely loved this game.
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