Destiny of Spirits

~ the goodbye ~

Destiny of Spirits launched on the PlayStation Vita on 20 March 2014 in Japan and five or six days later in North America and Europe. It was free, it was online only, and its one real idea was geography. The Vita knew roughly where you were, and where you were decided which spirits you could pull. Japanese youkai came out of Japan, and the Mayan and Egyptian gods stayed where their mythologies did. If you wanted something from a region you were not standing in, you had to get it from a player who was.

The rest was turn-based combat wrapped around a collection. You merged spirits to strengthen them and rented other players' spirits with in-game points, while Destiny Orbs bought better summons with real money through PlayStation Network. Sony Computer Entertainment published it. SCE Japan Studio built it with Q Entertainment, the studio Tetsuya Mizuguchi founded after Rez and Lumines.

Reviews landed in the middle. Metacritic settled at 66, Destructoid gave it 6 out of 10, Push Square 7. The consensus was that the location mechanic was the interesting part and everything bolted to it was ordinary.

On 25 March 2015, one year and five days after the Japanese launch, Sony set the closing date. The servers went off on 30 June. Because the game needed a connection to log in at all, every installed copy stopped working on the same day. More than a million people had downloaded it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the map problem ~

A location-based game assumes players are spread across the map it draws. Destiny of Spirits drew the whole world and then needed bodies in every part of it, which is a bet on the install base of a handheld Sony was already struggling to sell.

The Vita never had much of a presence where I live. In Turkey it was a thing in a shop window rather than something people carried, and a game whose central mechanic is trading with the player standing in another country works badly when your own country holds almost none of them. The thinness compounds, too: fewer players nearby means fewer spirits worth trading for, which means fewer reasons to open the app tomorrow.

~ fifteen months ~

Fifteen months is short even for a free-to-play experiment. Sony gave no detailed reason and the usual reading applies, which is that a million downloads with a small paying core does not cover a live service, and the Vita's audience was not going to get larger.

The timing was unkind in a second way. Pokemon Go was two years out and would prove the location mechanic works at enormous scale, but it proved it on the phones everyone was already carrying rather than on a dedicated handheld with its own purchase price.

~ what q entertainment had left ~

Q Entertainment was founded in 2003 and is remembered for Lumines and Meteos, two games with a serious claim on their genres. Mizuguchi left in 2013. Destiny of Spirits, released the following March, sits among the last things the studio put its name on, and it shipped nothing after 2014.

So the game died twice over. The servers went dark in June 2015, and the studio that co-built it had already stopped working in any meaningful sense before that happened.

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