Reward for Removal

Safe travels, little friend.

Many games let you accumulate plenty of creatures or units. Since you (usually) don't have to fit them into physical space, the only limit is your storage space. That storage space is usually limited, so many games, including most Virtual Pet games, give you some way to get rid of unwanted units. Often, this consists of selling, trading, or giving them away to other players or mechanics like the Pound in Neopets, where you can send your pets to a pool where other players can choose to adopt them.

But not every unit is going to be one that someone else will want. If the game you're playing has Breeding Sim mechanics, players generate hundreds or thousands of rejects while they're breeding for specific traits. If you're playing a game with gacha mechanics, you're likely to end up with duplicates while drawing for your goal. Not only do these unwanted creatures clutter up their owners' accounts, they can also raise concerns for the game's server space for web-based games.

To remedy this problem, many Breeding Sim and other games have a feature that gives the player some sort of reward for permanently removing unwanted creatures from the game, keeping them from eating, breeding, or otherwise taking up space. To avoid morbid implications, it's usually described as them being released into the wild, sold to an NPC, or if they're more sapient, sent on a mission or higher calling rather than being killed. However, these explanations' reminiscence to saying your pets were sent to a nice farm upstate doesn't go unnoticed, and many players of Darker and Edgier persuasions interpret it in fan works as them being sacrificed or Released to Elsewhere. Some more Black Comedy-tinged games or titles where the creatures are clearly non-sapient may explicitly describe it as sacrificing them or sending them off to unethical experiments.

In order to incentivize players getting rid of their units in such a permanent manner, the rewards games give for them are often quite good, in many cases including exclusive items. This means that in games with Breeding Sim elements, player economies often develop with players breeding creatures specifically to send them off in order to farm the rewards. Sometimes there are also incentives to make effort in training pets to send off, via higher-level creatures dropping better rewards or there being bonuses for specific traits.

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Examples:

• Burger King ran a promotion in the early The New '10s whereby unfriending 10 Facebook friends netted customers a free Whopper. Unfortunately, the way the process was structured meant that people were notified when their friends chose fast food over them, and the fierce backlash put the campaign to an abrupt end.
• Advance Wars: Merging two units below full health refunds the player based on how much excess health above the maximum the two units have together.
• Balatro:
• Reward for Removal:
  • The Erosion Joker adds 4 Mult for every permanently discarded card that makes the deck smaller than its initial card count.
  • The Castle permanently gains 3 chips for every discarded suit, which changes each round.
  • The Faceless Joker gives $5 if three or more face cards are discarded at the same time, while the Mail-In Rebate gives $3 per discarded rank, which changes each round.
• The Battle Cats lets you sell duplicate units rolled from the gacha for XP or — later — NP^note A currency used to unlock new abilities for cats, if they're taking up space in your storage.
• Cassette Beasts: Whenever you destroy a tape, you'll get a few resources and stickers.
• Clusterduck, a mobile game, has the Hole, where you "sacrifice" unwanted ducks. When you throw 10 ducks in The Hole, it unlocks the Duck-Off, a PvP battle using your sacrificed ducks that lets you get new duck parts from your opponent. Periodically, throwing ducks in The Hole will also unleash monsters that drop Cursed Eggs, the only way to get the high-rarity Cursed duck parts.
• Conception II: Children of the Seven Stars: Star Children you don't need any more, typically when they hit their Level Cap, can be sent to become workers in the city. This is framed as something they genuinely enjoy doing, and is actually necessary, as they'll upgrade the town's facilities. You can see sprites of them working in town from time to time, showing them hard at work.
• Cult of the Lamb: Sacrificing followers for assorted items and buffs is a big part of the game. You can even sacrifice your mentor Ratau to the Red Fox for extra ruthlessness.
• Dress Up! Time Princess: Sending away a pet rewards you with Feed, although you do lose Kitty Fame points if the cat in question is not new. The reward depends on the age and rarity of the kitten.
• Epic Seven: Selling allies can earn the player gold, transmit stones, stigma, and flowers that increase the target's star rank.
• Final Fantasy Tactics: Recruited monsters will lay eggs that hatch into more of their kind. If you're worried about hitting the party member cap, you can dismiss them. Or you can bring them into battle and having a party member with Poach equipped team kill them for items. This is the only way to acquire some items.
• Fire Emblem Heroes gives you Hero Feathers, a currency for raising the potential of your units, when you send unneeded heroes home. You can also Merge heroes with other copies of themselves of equal or lower rank, which grants them stat bonuses (up to the tenth time you Merge them) and extra Skill Points, while also reducing the Hero Feather cost of promoting them if they're under 5-Star.
• Flight Rising lets players "exalt" dragons, removing them from being customized, breeding, or otherwise taking part in game mechanics in exchange for treasure and helping their flight's standing in the weekly Dominance battles. It's explained in the game's lore as the dragon being sent to serve their deity and as the highest honor a dragon can receive.
• Gundam Breaker Mobile rewards you for destroying parts—the same parts you need to build and upgrade your Gunpla units. The rarer the part, the bigger the bounty of Scrap (a gear construction resource), Platinum Coins (an equipment currency), and especially Code Coins (a particularly rare bonus currency) you receive for your sacrifice. One strategy for those with the space and the time is to amass a number of parts of mid-range value, then destroy them en masse hoping to generate enough resources for your desired upgrade without sacrificing a much rarer Level 4+ unit.
• Lorwolf has "releasing" wolves, which removes them from your den and rewards currency, including tickets for the weekly festivals.
• In Luck be a Landlord, the Pufferfish, Jellyfish, and Sand Dollar reward you with a Reroll token, Removal token, and 10 coins, respectively if you manually remove them from the slot machine. The Diver can automate this for you by removing (not destroying) any of these symbols adjacent to him, permanently giving out extra coins per spin for each symbol removed.
• Monster Sanctuary has the Monster Army, where you can donate unwanted monsters and eggs and gain the items you'd gain from defeating them in battle.
• Space stations in No Man's Sky allow players to scrap any of their spaceships, not only rewarding salvage whose only use is in selling for a large amount of cash but also upgrades that can be installed on other spaceships. The Space Anomaly has a service for scrapping multitools that similarly turns them into valuable salvage and upgrades.
• Pixel Cat's End, a web game that grew out of a popular fan-made gacha adoptable set on Flight Rising, has the mechanic of sending cats to the city. When sent to the city, the cats drop packages containing currency and the postcard collection items, the latter of which can only be obtained from sending cats to the city or traveling.
• Persona 5: Being a spinoff of Shin Megami Tensei, the player will recruit a huge number of Personas through the game, but only be able to keep 10 in stock at a time. Aside from using the Fusion mechanic to get a new Persona, you can Execute one permanently to give another one either a new skill or a huge amount of experience points.
• Planet Zoo: As you're managing a zoo, animals will begin to complain if there's too many in an exhibit or habitat space. While you could theoretically just move some to another exhibit, the game offers two forms of selling overcrowded animals: a standard cash sell or releasing them into the wild for Conservation Credits. While cash is important to keep the zoo growing and maintained, Conservation Credits let you purchase more impressive specimens. And the higher rated your specimens, the better donations you get and the better the offspring, so the more cash or Conservation Credits you get from the sale or release. A frequent strategy in the game is actually to find either cheap-but-explosive breeders or high-magnet animals that require a high price and then milk them for Conservation Credits to fund the best animals.
• Pocket Frogs, a mobile game, periodically has requests from NPCs for frogs with specific genes, which reward large amounts of currency. Many of those requests involve the NPCs wanting the frogs for questionably ethical experiments which are almost certainly fatal.
• Pokémon:
  • You can "say goodbye" to your Pokémon toys in Pokémon Rumble, removing them from your reserves. When you do this, they leave behind some coins as a parting gift. Departing with certain combinations of Pokémon can also give you different, related Pokémon, such as departing multiple Porygon giving you a Porygon-Z.
  • Pokémon GO and Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Eevee! share the "transferring" mechanic, where you can send extra Pokémon to the professor in exchange for candy which lets you power up Pokemon of the same evolutionary line.
  • Pokémon Legends: Arceus: Some of the Pokémon on your pastures drop grit gravel (an item that increases the stat levels of your mons by one) after you release them out to the wild.
• Rebuild 2:
  • A caravan regularly comes around to trade items for food or vice-versa and also raise morale via prostitution. At one point the caravan owner offers to trade one of the female survivors for a rocket launcher, who is never seen again.
  • Assigning a survivor to assist the Mad Scientist will get them killed eventually in a lab accident, but it's needed for the zombie cure.
• Red Alert 3: Sending a vehicle into a Crusher Crane gives you a small amount of its cost back.
• Runescape: You can sell animals that you've raised on your Manor Farm or Dinosaur Farm to NPC buyers who will pay you in Beans, a special currency used to purchase upgrades for the farm and other rewards.
• Slurpy Derpy gives you a small bit of energy from sacrificing Derps and their evolved forms. Considering how expendable Derps are and the need to sacrifice them to make space for better Derps, this does become significant.
• Star Realms: Some cards have an ability that allows themselves to be removed from the deck, then provide a bonus.
• In Tomodachi Life, any children of your Mii couples whom you don't wish to live on the island will instead be sent off to travel the islands. This is necessary to activate the game's StreetPass features, as traveling Miis will send home letters periodically containing items they found while traveling. Adult Miis, on the other hand, cost $21 to remove from your game.
• Touken Ranbu: Discarding a sword or a troop grants you small amounts of materials needed for crafting or repair. Discarding swords is even a daily mission.
• Valthirian Arc 1 awards fame for graduating students. This fame is required to fulfill quotas.
• Warframe:
  • You can donate modular gear to vendors that produced them to earn standing with their syndicate in return.
  • The Helminth can be upgraded to subsume any standard (that is, non-Prime) warframe, both freeing up an inventory slot and adding one of that warframe's abilities to a reservoir of powers you can inject into other warframes.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Blades can be released from your roster at any time. While this isn't exactly a nice fate, as it returns them to a Core Crystal and wipes their memories, common blades will still accept it gracefully if you built a bond with them first. Makes sense, since gathering residual memories and returning to a core is part of their natural life cycle. This is incentivized by the items they give when released improving with the blade's rarity and affinity, with a completed chart for a 4-crown quality blade handing out the ultra-rare Ovedrive Protocol. Rare Blades, with unique appearances and more developed personalities, while still giving items will never take it well when they're released. This is implied to be because they need to survive a certain amount of time to start metamorphizing into a Titan.

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