Pokémon Duel

» see pokemon.com/us/pokemon-news as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

It was a board game. Six figures to a team, each one a Pokémon molded as a plastic disc, and each disc carried a wheel around its edge divided into segments of different sizes. Attacking spun the wheel. A big segment was a likely outcome and a thin sliver was a prayer, so you could read a figure's whole character from the geometry printed on it before you ever used it. You got the figures from boosters, bought with gems, and fused the spares with coins.

It reached Japan first, on Android on 12 April 2016 and iOS a week later, under the name Pokémon Co-Master. The worldwide release in January 2017 carried the English title Pokémon Duel and went out on Google Play and the iOS store, plus the Amazon Appstore for anyone holding a Kindle Fire. The Japanese version kept its own name for its whole life, so the same game had two titles running in parallel for almost three years.

On 15 March 2019 The Pokémon Company published a page headed Celebrate 40 Million Downloads of Pokémon Duel. The generosity was specific. Log in on any of the ten days from 13 to 23 March and you took forty thousand coins plus two Rare Metal, which over the full run came to four hundred thousand coins and twenty Rare Metal. On top of that sat an Azumarill carrying the Huge Power ability, collectable any time up to 9 April.

One hundred and thirty-three days after that page went up, the Google Play description changed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ one line in a store listing ~

Android Police caught it on the morning of 26 July 2019 and reported the mechanism plainly: The Pokémon Company had updated the Play Store description to notify players that the service would end. The new text read that the game service will be terminated as of 10/31/2019 at 01:59 (UTC), and added that for details on the end of service, players should see the in-game Information.

A store description is not a press release and it is not a push notification. It is the text you scroll past on the way to the install button, which means the only people guaranteed to see it were people considering downloading a game that was about to stop existing. Everyone else had to open an app they had already drifted away from. Diamonds came off sale that same day, with refunds left open for recent purchases, and no explanation was offered then or since.

~ what HEROZ was doing there ~

HEROZ was founded in April 2009 and its reputation came from shogi engines. Its own site still describes the company's core technology as machine-learning methods accumulated through the development of shogi AI, now sold into whatever industry will buy them. On 20 April 2018, with Pokémon Duel live in every market it would ever reach, HEROZ listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange under the code 4382. The game had eighteen months left.

The firm's pages today list no Pokémon products at all. A contract studio has no obligation to keep a dead client's title on its shelf, and the omission is the ordinary kind rather than the pointed kind, but it does mean the most unusual fact about this game is now recorded nowhere by either company involved. Pokémon hired a shogi-AI house to build a Pokémon game, and both of them have moved on.

Which leaves the geometry. Forty million people downloaded an app that taught them to read probability off a printed wheel, and the day it closed was given to them in UTC, to the minute, in the paragraph underneath the screenshots.

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