DLsite Mobile

» see m.dlsite.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Eisys opened a mobile branch of DLsite on 2 March 2009, aimed squarely at the Japanese feature phone. It ran in the handset browser and needed Flash 2.0, on docomo and au handsets alongside SoftBank's. What it sold was the adult doujin catalog the PC store was already selling, trimmed down and rebuilt for a three-inch screen.

The rebuild is the part that took effort. A doujinshi was served panel by panel rather than as a page, because a page of Japanese comics on a feature phone is unreadable. Games were ported across close to whole. Everything streamed rather than downloaded, so nothing worked without signal. The guide page recommended you be on a flat-rate packet plan before you started. Prices sat at around half the PC figure.

It closed on Christmas Eve 2013, after four years and nine months. Eisys gave a reason for it, which does not always happen: smartphones had spread and the feature-phone market had shrunk, and after internal discussion the conclusion was to end the service. Its own pages never settled the birthday, though. The customer guide says 2 March 2009; the page written for the circles says the thing ran about four and a half years from May.

~ the dossier ~

~ a panel at a time ~

The catalog was never the whole catalog. A circle had to apply to have a work put on the mobile shop, title by title, and the guide page said plainly that this was not a reproduction of everything on the PC version. Mobile products carried their own ID prefix, RM. There were no reviews on them and no points.

Payment was deferred. What you spent on the phone was added to the invoice the PC account settled later, which meant the mobile shop never needed its own checkout, and also meant it never accepted the stored-value cards the rest of the Japanese web ran on.

~ one account, two libraries ~

You signed in with the same DLsite ID on both. That is where the connection stopped. Purchase history was not shared in either direction, and when a customer moved from a feature phone to a smartphone, DLsite's own help page told them their mobile purchases could not be re-downloaded on the smartphone service. This was true years before the shutdown. The two shops sat on one login and shared nothing underneath it.

So when the mobile half closed there was no migration to argue about. The two halves had never been joined, and nothing existed to carry across.

~ the year they gave you ~

Selling stopped on 24 December 2013, and reading carried on for a year after it. Anyone who had already bought something kept access until 24 December 2014, at which point the mobile data was deleted. Circles were paid out for everything sold up to the last day.

As ways of closing a shop go that is a generous one. Eisys could keep a library readable for twelve months and could not make it portable at all, because portability meant a join between the two stores and nobody built that join in 2009. A year of reading was the most anybody could offer a library that had only ever existed inside one handset.

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