Free Game Town

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

~ the obit ~

The oldest surviving page from this service is a notice answering a question, and the question has three question marks on it. 정말요금이 안나가나요??? Does it really not cost anything??? It is dated 5 December 2007, the site was still in closed beta, and the operator was thanking its testers and trying to convince them that the thing they were using was not going to appear on a bill. Nobody believed it, because in Korea in 2007 nothing on a mobile phone was free.

It was called 무료게임타운, Free Game Town, and almost nobody called it that. Everybody called it 무게타, Mugeta, which is what the domain said. KTF opened it properly in April 2008 for its own subscribers and nobody else, reachable by dialing 36979 and pressing the SHOW key, or through the 매직엔 button that was already on the handset. The model was borrowed openly from DeNA's Mobage Town in Japan, and the Korean press said so at the time.

By August 2008 it had 58 games and a quarter of a million subscribers, a hundred thousand of whom had arrived in the first six weeks. Seventy-two percent of them were teenagers and forty-three percent were women, which is not the audience anyone was building mobile products for in 2008. The same article that reported those numbers also reported, flatly, that the service had 뚜렷한 수익원이 없다, no clear source of revenue, and that advertising was planned for later.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what free meant ~

This is the part worth being precise about, because "free" in a mobile context usually means free content on top of data you are paying for. Here it meant both. The December 2007 notice spells it out: the 정보이용료, the content charge, and the 통화료, the traffic charge, were both handled at the network so that neither one reached the subscriber. 한시간을 이용하셔도, 10시간을 이용하셔도 쭈욱 '무료'. Use it for an hour or use it for ten hours, it stays free the whole way.

A carrier was eating the packet cost of an entire entertainment service to keep people on its network. That was not an arrangement I ever saw from where I was sitting. Turkish mobile data in 2008 was metered and expensive enough to think about before opening anything, and an operator quietly paying for your evening sounds, from there, like a misreading of the tariff.

~ two million people on feature phones ~

By January 2010 Entaz was reporting a million and a half subscribers and seventy-odd games. It was also reporting thirty-five thousand user communities running inside the service. Your avatar was called a 모바타. By September 2010 the cumulative membership had passed two million, and the catalog had come down to about thirty games, with cafes and avatars filling the rest of the screen. That is a social network that happened to be made of games, on handsets with number pads.

There is one uncited but very specific claim attached to the end of this, and it deserves recording with its uncertainty intact: that new signups stopped on 1 September 2011 because of the regulator's ban on collecting resident registration numbers. If that is true, the service spent its last eleven months unable to admit a single new member.

~ then it cost money again ~

In November 2010 Mugeta shipped an iPhone version, and the whole premise fell over. The announcement had to carry a disclaimer that on the iPhone, over 3G, data charges applied normally. The one thing the product was for, the thing two million people had refused to believe for three years, was a property of KTF's feature-phone network and could not be carried onto a smartphone that the carrier did not control in the same way.

The iPhone build arrived with half a million mobile novels attached to it, which gives some sense of what the place had become by then. It was no longer a games portal with a chat room bolted on.

~ the summer the host went dark ~

I want to be honest about the death date, because the usual sources are not. The Korean Wikipedia article has carried a 출처 필요 banner since 19 November 2009 and has three footnotes in total, one of which points at a newspaper link that is dead and was never archived. The 1 August 2012 date is in that article with nothing behind it.

What can be checked is the bracket. A Mugeta subdomain was still answering with a normal 200 on 6 June 2012, and from 17 August it served a bare CentOS Apache test page behind a 403, which is a machine that has been wiped rather than a service that has been closed. In between, on 2 August at 13:01, somebody edited the history section of the Wikipedia article from an anonymous address, and an edit that October is commented 무게타 종료. That is a contemporaneous log rather than a reconstruction, and it puts the switch-off one day before somebody sat down to write it up. No Korean outlet covered the closure at all.

Whether a farewell notice was ever posted cannot be settled either, and for a reason worth knowing: mugeta.com was serving a robots.txt reading Disallow for everything through 2011 and 2012, so the Archive has no pages from the service's last two years. The silence there is a crawler being told to go away, not a company saying nothing. Entaz itself was fine. Founded in February 2000, it had a hundred and fifty-five staff and about twenty billion won of revenue. By 2011 it was putting out App Store and T Store hits. Its old domain spent a while as a Sedo parking page and is now a Chinese casino squatter. The English-language freegametown.com, an unrelated Flash games site sitting on a confusingly similar name, outlived it.

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