nicocas

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

~ the goodbye ~

Dwango put nicocas in the App Store on 12 December 2014, which is Niconico's own birthday. There was no press release. The reporter covering the launch for Weekly ASCII noticed the gap and drew the obvious conclusion, that this was probably a beta rather than a finished product. Three days later the company announced the app was ending. It went off at midnight at the close of 17 December, five days after it had arrived.

What it was, in that time, was an iPhone app for broadcasting yourself live. You logged in with a Twitter account rather than a Niconico one, which told you who Dwango thought it was competing with. The home screen was a wall of live streams tiled next to each other. Tap one to make it bigger, swipe sideways to land on whoever was broadcasting next to it. Streams ran fifteen minutes at a stretch with thirty minutes free in total, and past that you paid in a currency called Nicoin.

The withdrawal notice is a strange document. It opens 「長い間、nicocasをご利用いただき本当にありがとうございました」, thank you so very much for using nicocas all this long time, and then the next sentence says it feels as though the service only started a few days ago. Both halves are in the company's own notice, one after the other. Between them sits the only explanation anyone has ever been given: 「出すのは早すぎたという結論に達しました」, we have reached the conclusion that putting it out was too early.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a wall of strangers, three by five ~

The tile grid was adjustable, from three across by five down up to nine by fifteen. The ASCII reviewer tried the dense setting and wrote 「小さくするとめちゃカオス」, shrink them down and it is utter chaos. Watching on a PC needed Adobe Flash and a Niconico premium membership, and you could not comment from there at all. Everything that made it a product lived on the phone.

Kawakami Nobuo, Dwango's chairman, had announced it that September at the press conference for the KADOKAWA merger and called it the biggest service since Niconico Live. The trademark had been filed in August. For something pitched that high it arrived very quietly, and whatever Dwango saw in those five days, it never described it to anyone. Two outlets asked and both reported that the details were withheld.

~ the refund you had to follow on twitter ~

Because nicocas sold Nicoin from its first day, closing it triggered a statutory obligation. On 6 January 2015 Dwango published a 払戻し公告 under Article 20 of the Payment Services Act, signed by its president, offering to return unused balances. Claims opened that day and closed at midnight on 4 April. Miss the window and you were excluded from the procedure.

The method is the part worth keeping. Since the app's only identity was a Twitter login, Dwango had no email address for anyone. So the notice instructed holders to follow @nicocas_jp on Twitter and submit a form, after which the refunds desk would send a direct message asking for their bank details. The only route to a refund ran through following the dead app. Dwango shut the desk on schedule and recorded it in an addendum to the same page, which it had by then been editing for four months.

~ the record nobody cleaned up ~

Dwango used the name again. A second, unrelated nicocas arrived in August 2018 as an Android broadcasting app, and at the end of July 2019 it was renamed rather than retired: it is the Niconico Live app, and it is on phones right now. Japanese Wikipedia is blunt about the pair, saying only that they share a service name and are otherwise unconnected.

Except in one place. The 2014 app's App Store listing was never taken down, just updated and updated again, so the live record under ID 823479272 is today's Niconico Live app. Ask Apple when it came out and the answer is still 12 December 2014. A product still shipping updates today carries the birthday of a thing that lasted five days, because nobody ever went back and cut the record loose.

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