Digimon Links

~ the goodbye ~

Digimon Links opened in Japan first, on 24 March 2016, under the title デジモンリンクス. Bandai Namco Entertainment built it as a raising game before it was a battle game. You kept Digimon and evolved them, then sent teams of three out against other teams of three in command battles. The screenshots sold the battles. The evolution tree was the part people actually opened the app for.

The English version followed about eighteen months later, in the first week of October 2017, and it went out under the name Digimon Links while the Japanese app kept Linkz with a z. That was the whole localization difference anyone outside Japan ever noticed. The two builds ran on separate servers with their own event calendars, and for a while nobody had any reason to think they would end up sharing a death date.

Digimon reached Turkey as television, dubbed, pitched at kids a few years younger than I was when it aired. I knew the creatures on sight the way you know a cartoon you never sat down for. The phone game arrived long after that and was aimed squarely at the people who had sat down for it, grown up and employed and willing to spend money on an Agumon. That is a narrow audience and it never included me.

Bandai Namco announced the end on 27 May 2019. Sales of DigiStones, the paid currency, stopped on 27 June. The servers closed on 30 July 2019, in Japanese and in English, on the same day.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the digivice problem ~

Digimon has a structural issue that Pokémon does not. The premise is a creature that lives inside a device you carry, which means every Digimon product is making an implicit promise that the creature persists. The 1997 virtual pets kept that promise in the crudest possible way: the thing was a sealed LCD unit with a battery, and it kept running until you stopped caring or the battery died, and either way the ending belonged to you.

A live-service phone game inverts that completely. The creature you raised for three years lives on a server in somebody else's building, and the promise lasts exactly as long as the quarterly numbers justify the hosting. Digimon Links was a good version of this. It still had the problem.

~ the numbers that were true ~

On 18 December 2017 Bandai Namco handed out up to a hundred free DigiStones to mark 7.77 million downloads worldwide. That figure is the only hard number the game ever published about itself, and it counts installs across both language versions rather than players. It is also the high-water mark, because nothing bigger was ever announced after it, and the shutdown notice eighteen months later came with no numbers at all.

~ what players kept ~

Nothing, in the literal sense. No offline mode existed and nothing could be exported, so the Digimon went with the servers. What survived was the account history on Bandai Namco's side and whatever screenshots people had taken, which is the standard inheritance for this entire category of game.

The franchise moved on immediately. Digimon ReArise had already launched in Japan in 2018 and went worldwide in October 2019, about two months after Links closed, so the audience was handed somewhere to go before it had finished leaving. ReArise then shut down worldwide on 21 April 2022 at noon Japan time, with DigiRuby sales stopping two months ahead of it. Same company, same shape, thirty-three months on.

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