Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage! (which you should shout every time you say it) is getting a collaboration event with Persona 5. The new event brings costumes based on Persona, as well as the song Life Will Change from the game itself for you to tap away to.
Colourful Stage is a rhythm gacha game, pulling from the world of virtual musicians with busy visuals and lots of anime characters. It’s good fun, with regular updates to increase the library, but unless you enjoy that style of music, you might bounce off it immediately. While the event is Japanese exclusive for the time being, the Persona 5 element has given some players the shivers.
There’s a joke among gacha game fans that when Persona 5 comes knocking, that game is effectively dead. Born out of a joke from a few years ago, where a few gacha games were hit with end of service around a year after Persona 5 collaborated with them, now it’s up to Hatsune Miku to survive one.
The joke is obviously not always true, with more games collaborating and surviving since things like Nier: Reincarnation shut down.
Persona 5 is everywhere, and I never see it coming
However, the bigger issue is that this is yet another Persona 5 collaboration in a sea of regular Persona 5 collaborations. Even outside of the gacha genre, Persona 5 has been seen in Sonic the Hedgehog, Smash Bros., and more.
Silicon Era had a hefty, detailed list in 2023, but it’s grown since then. Persona Central, a fan site dedicated to all things Shin Megami Tensei, even has an entire section on their website dedicated to reporting on collaborations. It spans back further than Persona 5 and is 27 pages long.
This will launch in Japan first, with it hitting the wider global servers later on. A comment thread on Reddit clarified that it’ll end 8/13/2025 at 23:59, and when asked “The collab or the game”, multiple individuals simply wound up in a several-comment-long thread repeating the same information and question.
Gacha games are prime examples why they should Stop Killing Games
Others are simply praying that the game isn’t on the way out in a year. Gacha games have been dropping like flies in the last couple of years, with 2025 no different. Tribe Nine, Black Clover Mobile: Rise of the Wizard King, the Chinese version of World Flipper, Eversoul in Japan, Gundam Tribe, and the list goes on.
Of course, the answer will always land on business decisions for a gacha game being shut down. Keeping online games alive is expensive, especially ensuring that they’re maintained and constantly updated. If the whole purpose, which is to make some cash off people like me (fools who like to gamble), isn’t working, it’ll get shuttered regardless.
A bigger issue with the gacha genre is something that persists across a lot of online titles these days, which is that, without a functioning server to talk to, the games are essentially lost. I’d love to go back to play the myriad of Square Enix shuttered gacha games (and Mobius Final Fantasy), but the games have had their servers killed, and there’s no way of reconnecting without a lot of work.
It’s why movements like Stop Killing Games have gathered so much attention. While the games are often free-to-play with pouring cash in as an option, there’s no way of going back once the publisher or studio decides enough is enough.
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