Love Live is the Lolcow of Idol Anime

This morning, Love Live's one remaining mobile app, "Link! Like! Love Live!", has just announced that it is ending service on June 30, 2026. This comes right on the heels of the announcement of Hasunosora's 106th class and an upcoming anime for the Hasunosora Girls' High School Idol Club. Even the team responsible for writing the game's stories was only made aware of the EoS just days before the public announcement. It leaves me wondering: what is going on with Love Live right now?

I call LLLL an "app" rather than a "game", because it's a kind of complicated situation. It was effectively a platform for fans to follow the Hasunosora Girls' High School Idol Club, a wholly virtual group. In the app, fans could watch stories and live performances, following the characters in real time. There were some game elements as well, including a rhythm game feature that was added around two years after the app first launched.

What makes LLLL even more difficult to report on is the fact that I've never had a chance to use the app, since it never released outside of Japan. It was a move that alienated the small but loyal western fanbase of Love Live, which is particularly odd, since Love Live is normally pretty good about throwing scraps to the overseas fans. In this instance, we were almost completely excluded.

Things seemed to be shifting when, alongside the announcement of Hasunosora's 106th class, it was announced that Hasunosora would be receiving an anime. Even if it wasn't officially localized, even a fansubbed anime would be a lot easier to follow compared to a mobile app. Both of these were set to release in January of 2027.

Then, not even a week later, this EoS was announced.

Love Live had a good thing going with School Idol Festival for a decade. SIF All Stars was a cool experiment mostly killed by a fanbase that refused to learn how to play the game properly. Both ended up shuttered for the biggest embarrassment in gacha gaming with SIF 2. It didn't even end up lasting a year, and the Worldwide release famously announced its launch and EoS in the same post. Now, after building hype with various upcoming events and announcements, LLLL is dying as the final remaining mobile presence for the Love Live franchise.

Back during the SIF 2 fiasco, defenders of the franchise claimed that Love Live's game ecosystem was still perfectly healthy, with the two games in the "Yohane the Parhelion" series and the then-upcoming Nijigasaki visual novel all on PC. The Yohane spinoff barely qualifies as a Love Live property beyond sharing characters, and it hasn't received any new content in over a year anyway. As for the Nijigasaki VN, it's managed a peak player count of 186, with an estimated 2-4k owners on Steam, so it certainly hasn't achieved critical acclaim. Comparatively, the Revue Starlight VN, a much less popular IP, managed 585 concurrent players at launch, with 5-6 times as many estimated owners.

I don't have any way to estimate how ticket sales are going for live performances, so I can only assume the franchise is still making plenty of money that way. Still, live concerts are only for the most dedicated of fans, so I have to wonder what the long-term plan is for the Love Live franchise if they consistently fumble their marketing methods so consistently and spectacularly. It's pretty embarrassing for one of the "Big 2" idol franchises to not have any kind of rhythm game presence, and it doesn't bode well for the continued health of the IP.