Artery Gear: Fusion

~ the obituary ~

Artery Gear: Fusion opened in mainland China on 25 May 2021. It was a turn-based gacha about mecha girls, made by a studio called Access! and published by bilibili, and three million people had pre-registered before launch. The Japanese version followed on 18 November that year with half a million pre-registrations of its own.

Taiwan got a version in April 2022 under Komoe Game. The English build arrived on 14 June 2022 and picked up the audience gacha games actually live on, which is a small number of people who care a great deal. The art was the draw. The turn-based combat underneath it was competent without being the reason anyone stayed.

On 13 August 2024 bilibili disabled the recharge function and removed the game from every storefront the same day. The servers ran three more months and stopped at noon on 12 November 2024. Customer service answered for eight days after that, and then that stopped too.

~ the case file ~

~ what bilibili built ~

bilibili is a video site first. Its games division exists because the video audience and the gacha audience are close to the same people, and for several years it published and operated titles across territories itself instead of licensing them out market by market.

That arrangement is most of why Artery Gear died the way it did. bilibili ran three of the four services directly and licensed Taiwan to Komoe Game. A game split across publishers usually dies in pieces, weakest market first, over a year or two. This one did not get that ending. Komoe announced the Taiwanese closure on the same 13 August, for the same 12 November, at the same hour.

~ the august notice ~

The notice did the things these notices do. Payments went off immediately and the stores were cleared the same day, leaving a three-month window to spend whatever was already sitting in the account. What it never offered was a route for the game to continue in any form. There was no offline build and no promise of one, which is where it parts company with the gacha closures that ship a single-player version as they go.

~ the data wipe ~

The part players argued about was the wipe. bilibili's announcement said that once the servers closed nobody could log in again, and that account data and character records would be cleared in full. Plenty of closures leave the database alone out of simple inertia. This one said in advance that it would not.

So three years and five months of pulls resolve to screenshots. That arithmetic sits in the fine print of every storefront the game was ever on, and it still reads differently when the operator writes the date down and publishes it three months ahead.

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