Marvel Tsum Tsum

» see marveltsumtsumgame.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Tsum Tsum is not originally a game. It began in 2013 as a line of small stackable plush toys in Japanese Disney Stores, the name taken from the verb tsumu, to pile up, and the whole idea was that the characters were shaped to sit on top of each other. The phone game came afterward and inherited the premise: you cleared screens by dragging chains through a heap of squashed little heads that were already a retail product. Everything about the format, including the market it was invented for, was Japanese before it was anything else.

The Marvel edition opened in Japan on 24 February 2016 and had a million users by its fourth day. It went worldwide that October, reaching more than 150 countries on the 26th, and crossed five million users before the end of its first year. The Marvel roster had been redrawn as the same stackable blobs, under a license that by then ran back to Disney anyway, which made the crossover less of a negotiation than it looked.

mixi announced the Japanese closure on 11 December 2017. Sales of orbs, the paid currency, ended at once, and for the remaining ten weeks anyone who opened the app got five free ones a day. The service finished at 23:59 on 22 February 2018, two days short of its second birthday.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ two games, two funerals ~

The global service died first and separately. It ended on 31 October 2017, barely a year after launching, and the Japanese game carried on without it for another sixteen weeks.

Anything that says Marvel Tsum Tsum shut down in 2017 is not wrong about the date, it is describing the other service. The two had their own launch days and their own closing announcements, and the only thing they really shared was the build. Treating them as one product collapses a year of Japanese operation that happened after the English version was already gone.

The ordering is the interesting part. A global release is usually the thing a Japanese publisher does to extend a title's life, and here it was the part that failed first, while the domestic service it was supposed to subsidize outlived it.

~ who actually made it ~

The credit most often repeated is wrong. XFLAG gets named as the developer, when XFLAG was a label mixi published under and mixi was the operator. The game was built by NHN PlayArt, with Walt Disney Japan on the development side of the arrangement as well. That matters because NHN PlayArt had already made this game once: LINE: Disney Tsum Tsum, the 2014 original, from the same studio with a different partner and a different license.

The Disney one is still running. Its most recent update landed on 14 October 2026, more than eight years after the Marvel version closed, which puts the question of what killed this one somewhere other than the format. As for the address, marveltsumtsumgame.jp still resolves, and what it serves in 2026 is a Japanese content farm posting Marvel listicles between articles asking which Avenger would be best at online casino games.

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