Kingdom Conquest

» see kingdom-conquest.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Kingdom Conquest was two games wearing one app icon. On the strategy side it was a city builder of the Travian school, where you laid out buildings, raised an army, joined an alliance and fought over a shared map that reset at the end of every season. On the other side it dropped you into a third-person dungeon in 3D and let you hit things. Sega shipped that combination free on the iPhone in 2010, when neither half was a normal thing to find on a phone.

The release order is the odd part. It came out in English, in North America and Europe, in November 2010. Japan did not get it until 20 January 2011, and when Sega announced the Japanese launch it headlined the press release with the words finally unbanned in Japan, as though its own game had been held at the border. A Japanese company built a game in Japan and sold it to the English-speaking world first, then imported it home as a curiosity that foreigners already knew about.

It worked. A million downloads by May 2011, and three million by May 2012. Apple's year-end chart for 2011 put it at number one for top grossing across every app in the Japanese store, and it had spent 138 days at the top of the free ranking by the time that chart was published. Sega later said the game's success was part of what pushed the company into mobile seriously, and that Sega Networks exists partly because of it.

None of this is a Turkish memory, and the reason is unusually hard to pin down. The English build was a genuine worldwide release, on twenty App Store countries by May 2011 and still expanding, so it may well have been installable here. Nobody published the storefront list, and the game was never localized past English and Japanese.

~ the case file ~

~ the singaporean alliance ~

The producer, Kazutaka Karashima, gave an interview the week the game closed and was candid about how little Sega had expected from it. The internal view before launch was that it would probably fail. The beta polled the network hard enough to make an iPhone 3G physically hot, which he described as a state short of playable. There was no battle log and no war system. There was also no mechanism for ending a season at all. A Singaporean alliance won that first beta season. Because nothing had been built to reward a winner, the only prize Karashima could produce was a congratulatory message in English, posted from the official Twitter account, which he was running himself.

~ two games that could not see each other ~

The Android version arrived on 9 December 2011 and ran as a separate service. An Android player and an iPhone player could not share a map or join the same alliance, and were in practice playing different games with the same name. Unifying them was one of the selling points of the sequel.

That split showed up again at the end. Karashima said the reaction to the shutdown divided cleanly by platform: the iOS veterans, who had been there since 2010, were angry, and the Android players mostly were not. They had never been allowed into the half that people were grieving.

~ moved on rather than switched off ~

Sega announced the closure in May 2014 on the official site and ended the service at 13:00 on 31 July. The stated reason is more specific than most. Four years in, the architecture still ran on weak handsets, which Karashima named as its remaining virtue, but the servers and the app had been extended as far as they would go and nothing more could be added. Weighed against where the players had drifted, Sega folded everything into Kingdom Conquest II.

The migration was funded rather than symbolic. Anyone who moved carried over a commander card and their dungeon equipment, plus 15,000 in premium currency, with extra packs scaled to how many monsters they had collected. Eighty-nine worlds had opened over the life of the game, against thirteen or fourteen at the Japanese launch. The sequel took the survivors and ran until 31 August 2017.

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