DJMax Technika Q

~ the goodbye ~

My arcade years in Turkey were internet cafe years, roughly 2002 to 2005, and what those rooms ran was Counter-Strike. Rhythm cabinets were a Korean and Japanese thing that never turned up in the places I sat in. Technika Q is the phone version of one of those cabinets, which puts it two steps away from anything I would have played.

The cabinet came first. Pentavision released DJMax Technika in South Korea in 2008: a two-screen arcade machine with a 22 inch touchscreen you played on and a 32 inch display above it for whoever was watching. It was the first rhythm arcade game built around touch instead of buttons, and the series ran to a third version before it was done.

Technika Q brought that to phones. Team ARES developed it for Neowiz Games, and it launched in South Korea on 13 October 2013 with a worldwide release on 25 March 2014. Notes appeared across the screen and you touched or dragged them in time. Accuracy ran as a percentage rather than a score, and the fever mode was capped at three activations per song.

It reviewed well where it got reviewed. TouchArcade gave it 3.5 out of 5, called the rhythm engine finely tuned and complained about the systems stacked on top of it, which is the standard complaint about an arcade game converted to free-to-play.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the songs people paid for ~

Neowiz announced the end on 16 January 2019 and disabled in-app purchases the same day. The app came off the App Store and Google Play on 28 February. The servers ran until 29 March.

The part players objected to was the music. Technika Q sold songs, and the app needed a server to start, so on 29 March everything anyone had bought became unopenable. DJMAX RAY, the series' other mobile entry, could still be played offline after its own service ended. Players asked for the same treatment and were refused.

~ why it went ~

By the end the game had not appeared in Korea's overall revenue charts for three months and sat somewhere in the twenties and thirties inside the rhythm category alone. The company's stated reason was that it could no longer provide the service at the standard it wanted, which is the polite form of the same fact.

~ 29 march ~

The shutdown happened on schedule, in the early afternoon Korean time. Five and a half years is a long run for a mobile rhythm game, longer than most of what launched alongside it, and it ended the way the genre usually ends: the audience moves to whatever is current, and the servers are the last cost left to cut.

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