Love Live! School Idol Festival

» see lovelive-sif.bushimo.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Love Live! School Idol Festival reached Japanese phones on 15 April 2013, three months after the franchise's first television season started airing. It was built to do a job most licensed tie-in games are not trusted with, which is to be the place the audience goes between seasons. KLabGames wrote it and Bushiroad published it, and what came out was a rhythm game where you tapped nine circles in time with songs the franchise already owned, wrapped around a card collection you pulled from a gacha.

The English worldwide version followed on 12 May 2014. The game then kept growing for years past the point where a licensed mobile title normally flattens out. By September 2017 it counted more than forty million users across its servers, and across 2017 and 2018 the Japanese version alone took over 16.4 billion yen, close to 150 million dollars. That is money on the scale of the concert tours it was supposed to be advertising, which is the inversion worth recording here. The promotional item outgrew the thing it promoted.

The end came with two months of notice. On 31 January 2023 at four in the afternoon Japan time the paid currency went off sale, and the same announcement named 31 March at the same hour as the last moment the game would exist. Every server went down together, the Japanese one alongside the international builds. It had been running for nine years and eleven months. Its tenth anniversary fell sixteen days after the switch was thrown.

By 2013 I was in my late twenties and working in Ankara, and the apparatus this game sat inside is something I can describe but cannot claim. Games that ask for fifteen minutes every day and one card pull are a habit you either form or you do not, and mine went elsewhere. What reads clearly from outside is the machinery rather than the songs. There is a daily login and an event arriving every fifteen days, with a currency sold to shorten the waiting between them. That part is not Japanese. That part is every phone in every country.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it made its money ~

The rhythm half was free and generous. You tapped along to the tracks, you got better at the harder difficulties, and nothing about that loop asked for a card. The economy sat next to it in the form of a team you assembled out of character cards, each one attached to an idol the player already had feelings about, and the good cards came out of a summoning pool paid for with a currency called Love Gems.

Underneath sat an energy meter that refilled slowly and an event calendar that reset roughly twice a month, so the game always had a reason for you to open it and a reason for you to be short of something. It was successful enough to leave the phone entirely, into a Japanese arcade cabinet and onto the PlayStation 4, but the arcade and the console versions were souvenirs. The revenue was always the summoning pool.

~ the two month notice ~

KLab never gave a public reason and the announcement did not pretend to. What the notice did instead was sequence the ending precisely, which is the courtesy a live-service game can extend when it has decided: currency off sale first, two months of playing out whatever you already held, then a hard stop at a named hour.

Nothing was left afterward. The game validated everything against a server, so an installed copy on a phone that never updated is still an installed copy of nothing. Players who wanted to keep their accounts had a migration path into the sequel, which was the only thing anybody could carry out of it.

~ the sequel ~

Love Live! School Idol Festival 2 Miracle Live! arrived in Japan in April 2023, roughly where the original's tenth anniversary would have been. Its global version launched in February 2024. By that point the Japanese version had already been given an end date of 31 March 2024, and the global build that had only just opened was scheduled to close on 31 May.

So the sequel that inherited a decade of accounts and forty million users lasted about a year, and the international audience got a version of it that was dead on arrival by publication. The original ran for nearly ten. Whatever was working in 2013 was not something the franchise could rebuild once it had been taken apart.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »