Multi Matching BB

» see kddi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

KDDI is a carrier. Among the things it sold in Japan between 2003 and 2011 was a way for a PlayStation 2 to know who you were. The service was called Multi Matching BB, it opened on 1 September 2003, and it took over from a dial-up version that had been running since June 2001.

It did not host the games and it did not make them. What it did was authentication and billing, the two unglamorous jobs that sit underneath an online match: confirming that you were a paying subscriber, then taking the money. The price was 945 yen a month and it did not vary, and it covered every compatible disc on the shelf no matter which publisher had made it. You needed a network adaptor for the console, and you needed a KDDI contract bought separately from the disc you had just carried home.

The first discs to use it came from Capcom and Bandai: Auto Modellista U.S.-tuned and Resident Evil Outbreak, then Monster Hunter and a Gundam game called Eugo versus Titans. Monster Hunter is the one that moved the numbers. It shipped on 11 March 2004 and went short in shops. By 31 March the service had passed 60,000 members, a figure KDDI announced in April while crediting the hunting game by name.

A PlayStation 2 sold in Istanbul was the same machine as one sold in Osaka, and several of the discs that ran on this service were sold in Europe too, under English names, with the online mode taken out of them. The hardware crossed the border and the permission did not.

~ the record ~

~ the subscription in the middle ~

The middleman arrangement is what makes it worth remembering. A player on one side, a publisher on the other, and a carrier sitting between them holding the account. Capcom did not have to build a login system and neither did Bandai, because 945 yen a month already bought one that worked across all of them. That argument held for most of the mid-2000s, and it was the only way a 2003 racing game and a 2004 hunting game could share a single bill.

It also meant the subscription was the product. You were not buying a game service so much as renting recognition, and the moment anyone else could recognize you for free the argument stopped working.

~ the last eight on the list ~

The decline shows up as a shrinking catalogue. SNK Playmore had put twenty-one titles on the network, including all twelve volumes of its Neo Geo Online Collection, and it pulled the lot on 20 September 2010. By the time KDDI published its own closing notice the following February, the list of supported games had eight entries on it, six from Capcom and two from Bandai Namco.

Both Resident Evil Outbreak discs were still there, and so were three Monster Hunter titles. Auto Modellista U.S.-tuned was on the final list as well, having been among the first four to arrive, still connected seven years after a PlayStation 2 racing game had any business being online.

~ who does this job now ~

KDDI announced the closure on 10 February 2011, in a numbered press release that is still on its website today. New signups stopped on 31 May, and on 30 June the service itself went. What makes the notice unusual is that it explains itself, which most shutdown announcements decline to do: the network services provided by the console manufacturers themselves had spread, and those services now handled billing and authentication as well. Compatible titles had thinned out, and customer use had thinned with them.

That is a company describing its own obsolescence in the flattest possible language. The job did not disappear. The console makers had simply absorbed it, and a player buying a game in 2011 no longer thought of logging in as something a carrier sold separately, any more than they thought about who owned the wire.

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