Kendall & Kylie

~ the obit ~

Kendall & Kylie was a free-to-play role-playing game about becoming famous. You started in the hundred-follower club and worked upward by booking jobs and going on dates that doubled as career moves, each action costing energy that came back on a timer unless you bought more. The currency above money was called K-gems, and K-gems bought the exclusive clothes along with the right to skip the timer.

Glu Mobile made it and published it, which matters, because Glu had done this before. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood had come out in 2014 and made $43 million in a quarter, and Kendall & Kylie reused its whole shape down to the art style. The visible differences were small: this one played in portrait where the Kardashian game played in landscape, and it cut in live-action video of Kendall and Kylie Jenner talking to the player.

It landed in a market I was not in and was never going to be in. In 2016 I was a working engineer in Ankara in my early thirties, and the Jenner audience was teenage and largely American. What carries across is the mechanic, because the energy timer is the same device that Facebook games had been using since 2009, exported onto a phone and attached to a real person's name.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the launch week ~

The release was 17 February 2016 and the chart position came almost immediately. On its second day the game was the number one free app across all categories in the United States, and it stayed there for four days before dropping to number two by the end of 22 February. Sensor Tower put the iOS revenue for the launch period at around $3.5 million.

The context Glu cared about was its previous attempt. Katy Perry Pop had launched the year before and underperformed badly, and the trade coverage at the time read Kendall & Kylie as the proof that celebrity games still worked when the celebrity and the game were matched properly.

~ the six year middle ~

Then it ran for six and a half years without being news again, which is the normal fate of a successful mobile game and the part nobody writes about. Players kept posting looks to the in-game feed and Glu kept shipping events against them, with the follower number going up.

Underneath, the company changed hands. Electronic Arts bought Glu Mobile in 2021 for $2.1 billion, and the celebrity titles came with the deal. That is the same corporate event that eventually sat behind the Kim Kardashian game's own shutdown in 2024, where the licensing economics were reported as the problem.

~ switching it off ~

The ending followed the standard order. In-app purchases were made unavailable on 14 July 2022, so the game stopped taking money two months before it stopped running. It remained playable until 12 September 2022, and then it was gone from the stores and the servers both.

Glu's own help center still carries the sentence as a page title: "Kendall & Kylie has been shut down as of September 12, 2022." Everything a player had assembled over six years, the wardrobe and the follower count alike, sat on the other side of that login.

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