What's the most dignified ending a game can have? The producer of Final Gear (重装战姬) decided to make a memorial video documenting the game's entire life cycle — from inception to death. But while the producer was getting sentimental, the comment section was busy digging up even juicier dirt: it turns out Bilibili once had to choose between publishing Final Gear or Arknights (明日方舟)... and they picked Final Gear. This might be one of the most legendary investment decisions in Chinese gacha gaming history.
The original poster shared the producer's now-deleted Bilibili memorial video titled 'The Past and Present of Final Gear,' along with dozens of screenshots from the video covering every phase of the game's development and decline.
According to multiple commenters, Final Gear was originally being developed as a single-player game — but Bilibili (a.k.a. 'Uncle,' a community nickname for Bilibili CEO Chen Rui) spotted it and forced a pivot to mobile. The rushed conversion was predictably disastrous. More crucially, Bilibili allegedly faced a binary choice for exclusive publishing rights: Final Gear vs. Arknights. They went with the former. One commenter put it perfectly: 'Uncle resolutely chose Final Gear over Arknights.' This comment became the thread's most viral moment, capturing the absurdity of the decision in one sentence.
A commenter claiming insider knowledge from a Bilibili-adjacent Discord group (comment #9) revealed that the real reason for choosing Final Gear was that the dev team was 'easy to control' (好拿捏) — meaning Bilibili prioritized operational control over the development team rather than game quality. Once Bilibili intervened in development direction, the result was, in the commenter's words, 'a pile of mess that everyone has seen.' The same commenter acknowledged that the game actually became decent after mid-to-late-stage overhauls, but the launch disaster had already destroyed any goodwill with players.
Speaking of the launch — 'disaster' might be an understatement. First, there was the evasion-stacking bug: players discovered that piling evasion stats could easily push combat power into the millions. It was useless in actual combat but let players dominate the leaderboards. A bug that could be fixed by tweaking one parameter was left unfixed for ages. Even after a 75% cap was eventually added, players found ways to exploit it further — leading one commenter to speculate that 'the original dev probably quit and the replacement couldn't figure out the code.'
Then came the infamous daily quest system. At launch there was no auto mode, no stamina system — everything was manual. Players could literally spend an entire day just clearing dailies. One commenter's description is soul-crushing: 'No auto at launch, no stamina cap, pure manual play — you could genuinely spend all day doing dailies.' This anti-QoL design immediately drove away casual players who had any interest in keeping their sanity.
Despite all this, the game wasn't entirely beyond saving. A veteran player (comment #1) noted that after being reworked into an idle game, the experience was actually quite chill, and monthly revenue hovered around 1 million RMB for a while. But hope was short-lived — a collaboration event with Evangelion (EVA) backfired badly, causing another mass exodus. The game finally shut down in 2024. On the day of shutdown, one player posted: 'Today is the 7th day since the game died. We miss you, old friend.' (Note: 'the 7th day' — 头七 — refers to a Chinese mourning tradition.)
The community was deeply divided on the memorial video itself. One camp saw it as the producer shifting blame with emotional manipulation — comment #15 was blunt: 'A sentimental blame-shifting video. If the producer had any spine or actually played his own game, the launch wouldn't have been this terrible. They brought this on themselves.' The other camp pointed squarely at Bilibili's interference: 'If this were any other game, I'd suspect blame-shifting too — but since it's Bilibili, I'm not surprised at all,' wrote comment #13. Comment #17 drove the point home: 'Parachuting incompetent executives is par for the course at Bilibili, nothing new.'
Looking back at Final Gear's life, it reads like a case study in how Bilibili's gaming publishing business operated: chosen out of a desire for control, sabotaged by outsider interference, losing trust from a catastrophic launch, and ultimately bled out by subsequent missteps. The decision to pass on Arknights in favor of Final Gear has become a cautionary tale in the Chinese gacha community. And that one line — 'Once Uncle noticed you, you were already dead' — might just be the most fitting epitaph any game has ever received.
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