Gundam Conquest

~ the eulogy ~

Kingdom Conquest was Sega's mobile strategy game, and it already has a headstone here. Gundam Conquest took that machinery, swapped the fantasy kingdoms for the Universal Century and the timelines that came after it, and shipped under a Bandai Namco license. Pre-registration opened on 27 November 2013 with Sega Networks named as the provider, and the game went out that December.

It ran three modes that barely belonged in the same application. War dropped four color-coded factions onto one map to fight over territory, with as many as 800 players in a single engagement: Blue for the Earth Federation, Green for Zeon, Aqua for the Earth Alliance and Purple for ZAFT and Celestial Being. Alongside that sat a construction game in which you held a colony and developed it, and an action mode that let you drive a single mobile suit yourself with up to three other people.

It worked for a long time. The game passed five million downloads and ran just short of five years.

Gundam is a gap in my own reference set. The 1979 series never reached Turkish television the way it reached the rest of Asia, and the franchise got here late and over the internet, so I know it as reading rather than as childhood. A game built for Japanese men in their thirties who remembered the original broadcast was addressing a memory I do not have.

~ the dossier ~

~ the refusal to inflate ~

The interesting decisions here were all about time. Machines were designed to stay useful for a year or more after release, with later reinforcement planned in from the start, and the team deliberately held off on adding new rarity tiers, because number inflation shortens the usable life of everything already sitting in a player's collection. When Season 11 introduced a system for strengthening skills, it was built around sacrificing something else to do it rather than handing out a free increase.

That discipline cost the game in legibility. Bandai Namco wanted the kind of commercial where somebody cheerfully demonstrates the game in a single line, and found there was no single line, because the thing could not be summarized that way. So from February 2015 it ran a serial in Famitsu instead, Nettou! Gankon Doujou, teaching readers how to play. A game that needs a magazine column to explain it has already chosen its audience.

The audience it chose skewed older than the smartphone norm. Coverage at the time put the difficulty down as the reason the player base sat up in its thirties and forties, among people who had watched the original Mobile Suit Gundam go out on television. In December 2017 the producer, Yasushi Kawashima, told Famitsu that the game had reached a fourth anniversary because the team had committed to looking after the customers it already had rather than chasing new ones.

~ the vita year ~

There was a console edition, and it is the shorter story. Gundam Conquest V arrived on PlayStation Vita on 28 July 2015, and its servers closed on 28 July 2016, twelve months later to the day.

The phone version lasted considerably longer. Bandai Namco gave notice on 30 August 2018, stopped selling the in-game CP currency on 26 September, and ended service on 29 October. Pulling the currency off sale a month ahead of the end is the courtesy version of a shutdown, and it is worth marking, because plenty of games in this graveyard were still taking money in their final week.

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