LINE Play

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

~ the obit ~

LINE Play handed you a character and a room, then sent you somewhere else to have a conversation. The chat that made LINE worth installing stayed in LINE. This was the other app, the one where you dressed the avatar and arranged the furniture, then walked it into other people's rooms to see what they had done with theirs. For a lot of the people who used it, that split was the appeal rather than a flaw. Messaging is something you do with people you already know. A room is something you make first and show afterward.

NHN Japan launched it on 21 November 2012, a few months after LINE itself had become the default way an entire country sent messages. It went out to that installed base as a separate download and it moved fast: a million users in 2013, twenty million by 2015, past thirty million by January 2016 when the company started calling it the largest avatar community in the world, and around forty million after that. The shop had a couple of thousand virtual items in it on day one and never stopped adding.

The category it belonged to barely exists outside east Asia. Avatar worlds built around a room you decorate had a continuous line running through Cyworld's minihompy in Korea and a shelf of Japanese equivalents, and they were understood there as a normal thing an adult might keep for years. Elsewhere the same idea kept getting filed under children's products and dying young.

The reason this one never got near me is the app underneath it. LINE did not become a messenger in Turkey. WhatsApp was already the default before LINE had a Turkish button, and nothing shifted that, so the messenger's whole map was drawn before LINE Play existed. An avatar world that hangs off a messenger inherits that messenger's borders exactly. Its account was a LINE account and its friend list was a LINE friend list. The countries where it could grow were the countries where somebody else had already won the messaging war on its behalf. Products that ride on a platform get the platform's reach and never more than that.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the room ~

The avatar was small and round-headed and endlessly adjustable, and the room behind it was the actual product. You bought furniture and wallpaper and placed it, and then people came in and left comments. A lounge area let you talk to strangers, and hearts worked as the currency of approval that told you a room had landed.

What kept people in for years was that the room accumulated. Anything cosmetic you ever bought stayed yours, so a five-year account looked like a five-year account, and that history is the thing you cannot export when the servers stop. A chat log can be downloaded. A room cannot.

~ what the shop sold ~

The business was clothes and furniture. Items were bought with in-app currencies that you topped up with real money, and a good share of them came out of draws rather than off a shelf, so the price of a specific outfit was however many attempts it took. This is the standard Japanese mobile model and LINE Play ran it for a decade without much drama.

It also explains the long tail. A game that sells you progress dies when the content runs out, because there is nothing left to reach for. A game that sells you appearance can run on new outfits alone, which is cheap to produce, and that is why the thing survived eleven years in a category whose whole generation had already gone.

~ the refund window ~

The shutdown was run properly, which is rarer than it should be. Downloads and currency sales stopped on 18 April 2024. The service itself ended at three in the afternoon Japan time on 20 May. Refund applications for unspent currency opened on 30 May and ran until 28 August, and support stayed staffed until 30 October, more than five months after the last person logged out.

One line in that notice does more to explain the product than any press release it ever put out. Refunds were available to players in Japan, Korea and Taiwan who had signed in through LINE. Forty million registered avatars over eleven and a half years, the biggest thing of its kind the company could point at, and when the money had to be handed back there were three places worth building a process for.

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