LINE Akindo-sei no Little Peso

» see peso.game.line.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Peso was a prince. His people on Planet Akindo had been the best money-makers in the universe for generations, and he spent his days idle, doing nothing but spending money on his phone, so the King threw him off the planet. The game was about earning enough to get home.

It shipped on 6 April 2017 for iOS and Android. The whole of it was tapping. You tapped to make money and scouted residents to staff the shops on whatever planet you had stopped at, and rubies came out of a gacha that sold avatar clothes and furniture. A million people registered for it between 15 February and launch day, and everyone who logged in got the pre-registration rewards for passing that mark.

The character belonged to SoWhat, Imagineer was in on the build and LINE published. What they put behind it was unusually serious for a tapping game: a five-minute anime ran on TOKYO MX1 on Monday nights at 21:55 through the spring of 2017, produced at Fanworks, with the characters and items from the show turning up in the game. It was the first LINE GAME to get an anime at all. The show was sold on being funny and sort of educational, which about covers a cartoon whose actual subject is making money.

LINE GAME only existed if LINE was your messenger, and in Turkey it never was, which is why a catalog cull of this size went by without registering anywhere outside the countries where the app was the default. Fourteen months after launch, one day short of it exactly, the servers stopped.

~ the case file ~

~ six at once ~

At 15:00 on Tuesday 5 June 2018, LINE turned off LINE Cookie Run, LINE WindRunner, LINE DOZER, LINE Soccer Eleven, Little Peso, and the Gold Rush mini-game living inside LINE Play. Five games plus a sub-game of a sixth, all of them from the same publisher. The trade press had the story up by 15:56.

Nothing about the announcement singled this one out, and nothing explained it either. A platform that publishes its own catalog can retire a slice of it the way a retailer clears a shelf, and the notice that goes out reads like a stock list. The official site at peso.game.line.me has been answering nothing for years, and a search for the name on Japan's store today comes back with nothing at all.

~ the money afterwards ~

What LINE published on the day was a refund filing for prepaid payment instruments under Japan's Payment Services Act, naming LINE Corporation as the issuer at its address on the twenty-third floor of JR Shinjuku Miraina Tower. Unused paid balances could be claimed through a form at refund.line.me between 15:00 on 25 June and 15:00 on 31 August 2018. Anybody who did not file inside that window was excluded, in those words. Payments started going out from 5 September, in yen, to a bank account you typed in yourself.

LINE covered the transfer fee on domestic and foreign remittances alike, then said plainly that on an overseas one it would not be covering the receiving fee or anything a correspondent bank charged on the way. You could not use the form if you had played as a guest, because the form needed a LINE login to know whose balance it was reading. Gold Rush, being a mini-game, was left out of the form entirely and routed to a separate inquiry page. Read the paperwork rather than the press release and a Japanese mobile shutdown looks like this: a prince exiled for overspending, and a filing about the money his players had spent.

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