Dragon Quest Rivals

» see dragonquest.jp/rivals as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Dragon Quest Rivals launched on 2 November 2017 on Japanese phones, a collectible card game built out of thirty years of Dragon Quest. Seven playable leaders at launch, one for each of the series' character classes, drawn from across the mainline games, Terry out of the sixth and Alena out of the fourth. Every card carried new art commissioned from ArtePiazza over Akira Toriyama's original designs, fully voiced, with animated attack effects. Tose developed it. Square Enix published it.

The opening was enormous. Seven million downloads in five days, ten million in nineteen, and on 5 November it reached number two on the Japanese App Store grossing chart with only Monster Strike above it. Ports followed the money. A PC version arrived through Yahoo's games portal in February 2018 and a Nintendo Switch version a year after that, before a Steam build in June 2020 replaced the Yahoo one on the morning it shipped.

Then the curve went flat and stayed flat. Fifteen million downloads was announced in April 2019, sixteen million that December, and after that the company stopped announcing. No milestone accompanied the relaunch in 2020, and none was published in the eighteen months before the end. Six million more downloads arrived across those two years, against ten million in the first nineteen days.

Square Enix announced the shutdown on 2 April 2021 at four in the afternoon and stopped selling gems in the same minute. The service ended on 5 July at 13:00. Unused paid currency was refunded in cash under Japan's payment services statute, and players were warned not to delete the app before the refund cleared because the company needed the account data to verify who they were.

~ the record ~

~ renewed in place ~

On 13 August 2020 the game became Dragon Quest Rivals Ace, a renewal in place rather than a sequel. Players kept their accounts and their collections, and what changed was a single-player story mode bolted on and the card-pack numbering restarted from one. It was a rescue attempt, undertaken because the decline was already visible from inside.

It bought 326 days. The producer's letter at the end makes the arithmetic of that explicit, noting that the shutdown was being announced on only the third card pack since the renewal, and that this was obviously not the ending anyone had planned for.

~ what the producer actually wrote ~

Shutdown notices in this genre are usually a wall of scheduling and a bow. This one came with something else. The producer wrote that, put honestly, the service was ending because they had not been good enough, and that although plenty of people were still playing three years on, the overall player count had been falling and a competitive game could not be run as a business on that. He finished by apologizing on behalf of the team for having built something they had wanted people to play for years.

The context he does not spell out is that the Japanese digital card market had been settled before Rivals arrived. Shadowverse launched in 2016 and owned it, and by the week of the shutdown announcement it was outdrawing Rivals on Steam by better than twenty to one.

~ the record of adventure ~

Square Enix built a memorial and attached a deadline to it. The archive, called the Record of Adventure, lets a player browse their final card collection and battle record, and it is still online today behind a Square Enix login. The condition was that you had to link your account to it before 5 July 2021. Anyone who did not is locked out permanently, which means the memorial is only visible to people who were paying attention during the last three months of the thing it commemorates.

The rest went. The separate card-database site was switched off alongside the game and now redirects to the farewell page. There was no offline client and no successor; Square Enix has not made another Dragon Quest card game since. The final Hero Cup, the national tournament the game had run twice a year since 2018, was played out on 30 May 2021 after the death notice had already gone up, with the online qualifier deliberately widened to a thousand entrants so that more people could be in the room at the end.

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