ニコニコアプリ (Niconico Appli)

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

~ the goodbye ~

The origin story is on the record and it is not especially flattering. Presenting the idea at a Niconico event in February 2010, Hiroyuki Nishimura said that mixi Apps were doing well and Niconico wanted to ride the trend. Both halves of that sentence are made out of a Japanese internet with no export edition. Japan kept mixi almost entirely to itself, and the site these games were being bolted onto had a personality built out of comments scrolling across the picture. None of it was designed to be legible from anywhere else, and it never became so.

It opened at 15:00 on 9 December 2010 with fourteen titles, run by Niwango, the Dwango subsidiary that operated Niconico at the time. Niwango was absorbed into Dwango by merger in October 2015, so the platform changed hands halfway through its life without changing anything a player could see. The games were free to start and charged for items in Niconico Points, the site's own currency, with a ceiling of 10,000 points a month on anyone under eighteen from December 2012 onward.

The games themselves were never Dwango's. Third-party studios built and ran them, and the terms of service said so plainly. Dwango disclaimed responsibility for the lot while passing each player's public profile through to the studio behind whichever app they opened. Koei Tecmo had a title on it. Square Enix and Falcom were there by licensing. The opening lineup ran to a Captain Tsubasa management game, a Harvest Moon spin-off, a Hokuto no Ken pachislot machine and a hostess-club dating sim, and that spread held to the end.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the game that played beside the video ~

The feature that justified the whole enterprise was called player mode. A game ran inside the player frame next to a video you had going or a live broadcast you were watching, with the comment stream still flying over the top of everything. The other option, 大画面モード, was plain fullscreen, which is what every competing browser game portal already did.

Player mode worked only on the Flash builds of the video and live pages. When Niconico moved those pages to HTML5 there was nowhere left to put it, and Dwango abolished it on 1 August 2017 at ten minutes past two in the afternoon, with the stated reason being the HTML5 migration itself. Three titles still supported it on the day it went. The standalone game pages were explicitly unaffected and ran on for another six years.

~ who was actually allowed to build one ~

At the 2010 reveal the promise was that anybody could develop an app for it. The thing demonstrated on stage was not even a game. It was a drawing tool that let you scribble over the video and leave the scribble there for whoever came next, which is the same asynchronous trick the comments had been doing since 2006.

Twelve years later the lineup held 37 titles, every one of them from a licensed studio, and the only developer-facing link anywhere on the site was a button reading 「アプリを提供したい」 that opened a corporate inquiry form. There was no public SDK and no documentation behind it. The open platform had turned into a storefront you got into by emailing the sales department.

~ three rows and no refunds ~

Dwango announced the ending on 28 March 2023 and published a schedule with exactly three rows in it. The announcement itself came first. Then in-game billing stopped on 28 June, and finally the service and the website closed together at noon on 27 September.

The notice does give a reason, which happens less often than it should: the browser game market had contracted, and Dwango judged that it could no longer run something users would be satisfied with. The questions underneath it are answered more bluntly. Niconico Points already spent inside a game would not be refunded. Some titles would finish before September on schedules of their own, so you were told to check each one yourself. Asked whether save data could be carried anywhere, Dwango declined to answer and pointed at the studios.

On that same noon in June when the billing stopped, Dwango also closed Game Atsumaru, its other browser-game platform, under a separate announcement it had made three months earlier.

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