GAME Atsumaru

» see game.nicovideo.jp/atsumaru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

RPG Maker built an amateur game scene in Japan that the rest of the world only ever saw the exports of. GAME Atsumaru was where that scene published. Dwango opened it inside niconico on 24 November 2016 under the name RPG Atsumaru. The pitch was small and clear: you finished a game in RPG Maker MV and uploaded it, then it played in a browser tab with nothing to download.

The name dropped the RPG part as the catalog widened. In May 2021 it added support for games built in the older RPG Maker 2000 and 2003 through EasyRPG, which pulled a decade of abandoned projects back onto a live platform. An Akashic Engine hookup let a game be played inside a niconico live broadcast. Creators could take money through an incentive program or by selling items inside their own games.

My distance from this one is the language wall rather than the era. I was thirty-two when it opened and already writing software for a living. A browser-hosted game platform is exactly the thing I would have poked at, if a single word of the interface had been in English. It was not. The scene it hosted stayed Japanese almost all the way to the end, which is why the one game everybody outside Japan knows from it arrived by a different road.

~ the record ~

~ what came out of it ~

Nankidai published キミガシネ on Atsumaru on 28 August 2017. It is a death game built in RPG Maker MV where eleven people vote on which of them dies. It recorded 4.6 million plays on niconico. The English-speaking internet found it through a fan translation and knows it as Your Turn To Die. It got a manga adaptation and a light novel. A Steam release followed and it is still being played today. The platform where it first went up is not there anymore.

That was the pattern the whole way through. Atsumaru was a launch surface for people with no other distribution channel. The ones that worked moved on to Steam or to pages of their own.

~ the fall ~

Dwango announced the closure on 20 December 2022 and gave the reason without dressing it up: the browser game market had contracted. Flash had been dead for two years by then. HTML5 games had lost to phone apps and a browser tab was no longer where anybody went to play something.

New uploads stopped on 19 April 2023. The service ended on 28 June. Dwango did hand creators their project files back as downloads, so the games themselves were recoverable by anyone who still wanted them. What did not survive was the catalog itself. The play counts went with it and so did the chance of landing on something you were not looking for.

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