ijji

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

~ the eulogy ~

ijji's best years line up almost exactly with my university years and I was nowhere near it. It was NHN's American arm, run out of California for a North American audience, publishing the same Korean free-to-play shooters that were filling PC rooms in Seoul. In Turkey that economy already existed and it was not on the web. It was Counter-Strike on a cafe LAN, paid for by the hour at the counter, no account and no download.

The portal opened on 7 July 2006. NHN was the Korean company behind Naver and Hangame, and ijji was its attempt to run the Hangame model in English: a single account and a single wallet across a shelf of games nobody paid to install, all of it behind a launcher called ijji Reactor. Gunbound came first that year. GunZ: The Duel and Soldier Front arrived in 2007, then Alliance of Valiant Arms in 2009.

GunZ is the one people still argue about. Its movement system was so exploitable that the exploits became the actual game, and the community gave them names and taught them to each other instead of waiting for a patch that would have removed the reason to play. Soldier Front was the straighter product, a military shooter that ran on modest hardware, which mattered when your audience was whoever happened to own a PC. In November 2009 ijji passed ten million unique registered users.

The thing I recognize from a distance is the wallet. G-coins, bought with real money, spent on weapons and cosmetics inside a game that cost nothing to enter. That model came out of Korea and it is now simply how games are sold, everywhere, including on the phone in my pocket. In 2007 it still looked to a lot of people like a trick that would not last.

~ the dossier ~

~ how the money worked ~

The pitch was that the game was free and the store was optional. In practice ijji ran the store the way Korean publishers had already learned to run it, with item durability and rental periods, so the optional part had a way of becoming the point. Western press spent years describing this as a curiosity of the Asian market. It was a curiosity right up until it became the default business model of the entire industry.

What ijji genuinely got right was the account. One login carried your identity and your balance across every game on the portal, at a moment when the Western competition was still shipping each title as its own island with its own password. Steam had worked this out. Almost nobody else had.

~ the day it died ~

On 5 January 2012 NHN sold one hundred percent of ijji to Aeria Games, another free-to-play publisher. Nothing about the games changed that day. The portal kept running for another six months while accounts were migrated, balances included, to Aeria logins.

Services came down on 22 July 2012. Two days later Aeria announced that Alliance of Valiant Arms had completed the move, along with Soldier Front and GunZ, to its own platform. The games survived their storefront by years, which is the reverse of how this usually goes. Aeria eventually closed Soldier Front on 29 January 2016.

~ what got buried with it ~

Portals are the part of games history nobody keeps. The titles get remembered because people played them and made private servers when the official ones went dark, and I have spent enough time on private servers of a different game to know exactly how that works. The launcher that held them together gets remembered by nobody, because it was never the thing you loved. It was the thing you clicked through to reach the thing you loved.

Ten million accounts existed on ijji and every one of them is now either an Aeria account or nothing. The brand went into a sale document and never came out.

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