Capcom Online Games (COG)

» see capcom-onlinegames.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Capcom Online Games was an account system with a shop attached. You got a COG ID to log in with, a wallet denominated in a currency called CAP, a purchase history and the ability to pay by having it added to your docomo or au phone bill. Game pages hung off the side of that. It was Japanese in every layer that mattered, from the .jp domain down to the statutory commerce disclosures in the footer, and no English version of it ever existed.

It did not launch so much as get renamed. The portal underneath had been running since 2006 as Daletto, operated by a Capcom subsidiary incorporated that October with Capcom holding 80.1 percent and a Dwango subsidiary the rest. Capcom's board voted on 24 February 2011 to absorb the company outright, which took effect on 28 March, and the portal was relabeled on 23 June. The word Capcom used for the change was 生まれ変わります, to be reborn. Balances came across at par, one Darepo to one CAP, and the login ID became a COG ID. Even the passbook was renamed, into a purchase history.

The merger filing is the only place anybody published real numbers about this business. Daletto's last full year on its own produced 885 million yen of revenue and 143 million yen of operating profit, against net assets of minus 223 million. It had been technically insolvent and climbed out of it three months before Capcom swallowed it. Capcom's stated reason for absorbing it was that social games were growing fast enough to constitute an upheaval, and it wanted its online resources in one place.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the portal that outlived its games ~

The two games that gave COG most of its purpose both ended in the same December. Dragon's Dogma Online closed on 5 December 2019 and Monster Hunter Frontier Z on the 18th, and each of those endings belongs to its own obituary rather than this one. What matters here is what was left behind afterward.

One service survived them: カプとれ, an online crane game where you paid to work a real claw machine through a camera. On 1 October 2020 Capcom moved it off COG onto a new sign-in called CAPCOM ID, balances intact, and the claw machines are still taking money. From that date the portal had nothing live on it at all. It kept going anyway for another twelve months, maintaining logins for an account system that no longer fronted anything.

The top item in the front page's PICKUP slot, two days before the end, was an announcement of a memorial site for Monster Hunter Frontier Z. The game had been dead for twenty-one months and the portal was still leading with it, because there was nothing more recent to lead with.

~ everything but the why ~

Capcom posted the notice on 30 June 2021, giving ninety-two days of warning for a 30 September ending scheduled at two in the afternoon. The notice runs through the date, the list of what would stop working, the procedure for moving your ID and the policy on deleting your personal data. It offers no reason at all, not even the formula about various circumstances that Japanese shutdown notices reach for when they have nothing to say. Two archived copies taken weeks apart are word for word identical, so none was quietly added later.

There is one visible change worth recording without drawing a conclusion from it. In 2011 the footer carried the disclosure that Japan's Payment Services Act requires of anyone issuing prepaid value, because CAP made Capcom exactly that. By 2021 the footer no longer carried it. A refund form for unused CAP balances had its own fault notice in March of that year, three months before the shutdown was announced, and the shutdown notice never mentions CAP at any point. What those three observations add up to is not written down anywhere I could reach, so it will not be written down here.

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