Samsung stole all your Gaming Hub eggs and you barely noticed

Whenever a developer removes a feature without anyone batting an eye, you can usually assume they made the right call. As far as I can tell, that’s exactly what happened when Samsung quietly removed its egg-hatching minigame from the Gaming Hub mobile app.

The feature disappeared with the latest Gaming Hub update, version 8.0.00.19, which started rolling out late last month. As far as I can tell, a couple of Reddit users casually mentioned the change, and… that was about it. No outrage, no farewell posts. Does anyone actually miss it?

If you’re unfamiliar, the egg-hatching minigame was Samsung’s attempt to gamify the Gaming Hub app itself. It offered missions based on the games installed on your phone, but the payoff was fairly modest.

Completing missions let you unlock and hatch creature eggs, which in turn unlocked new Gaming Hub profile pictures. That was pretty much the entire loop.

I spent some time with the minigame, but it always felt like it was missing a strong enough incentive to keep me engaged. More often than not, I’d forget I even had an egg ready to hatch after finishing enough missions, which is probably not ideal for a feature built entirely around anticipation.

There is an upside to this update, even if Samsung essentially confiscated all our virtual eggs without much prior notice.

Missions are gone and new eggs can no longer be unlocked, but Samsung did at least unlock every profile picture that was previously hidden behind the minigame. All the creatures are now freely available, no hatching required.

So while the gamified unlock system is gone, the rewards survived. Gaming Hub users now have unrestricted access to everything that was previously trapped inside those eggs, which feels like a fairly graceful exit.

Sure, it’s less rewarding to get everything without putting in any effort. And it would’ve been nice if Samsung had allowed users to keep a history of their egg-hatching progress, if only as a badge of honor. But it’s still better than removing the creatures entirely and pretending they never existed.

Personally, I can’t complain too much about the change. No matter how many times I tried, I just couldn’t get invested in the egg-hatching minigame. Most of the time, I’d forget about it before my next gaming session.

That said, some users may have put far more time into it than I ever did. Hopefully, the fact that every creature is now unlocked and freely accessible is enough consolation for those (presumably few) hardcore egg-hatchers out there.

If you want to check out the fully unlocked list of creatures, just tap your profile picture in Gaming Hub, hit Edit, and tap the + button to expand the full list. That’s it. Everything the minigame ever offered is now right there, no missions required.