Puzzle Fighter (2017)

~ the last words ~

Capcom Vancouver made Dead Rising games for eight years and one other thing. The other thing arrived worldwide on iOS and Android on 22 November 2017, a free-to-play revival of Puzzle Fighter, and it is the only non-Dead Rising title the studio shipped under Capcom ownership.

The source material was strong. Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo had been a competitive falling-gem game with chibi Street Fighter and Darkstalkers characters attacking each other through the puzzle board, and it was the rare crossover that worked on both sides: real fighting game tension, real puzzle game depth. The 2017 version widened the roster a long way past those two franchises, reaching into Mega Man and Resident Evil and six or seven other Capcom series besides. Dr. Wily in a gem battle against Ada Wong is, on paper, a fan's dream fixture.

Reviews came back mixed and specific. Destructoid liked it at 7.5 out of 10. Pocket Gamer gave it 2.5 out of 5. Metacritic averaged out at 64, and the complaint underneath those numbers was consistent: the gem matching was still good and the economy wrapped around it spoiled the rest. Characters came out of a gacha. Progression ran on energy. A head to head competitive game had a store between you and the roster, which meant the version of the game you were playing depended partly on what you had paid for.

Capcom gave up fast. The sunset announcement went out on 20 April 2018, five months after launch. In-app purchases were switched off three days later on 23 April. The app came out of both stores on 1 July and the servers were shut down on 31 July 2018. The Android edition had roughly 500,000 installs when it went. Capcom's stated reason was that Capcom Vancouver needed to focus on Dead Rising, which is worth remembering for two months later.

~ the record ~

~ the 1996 cabinet ~

The original was an arcade release that became a console staple on PlayStation and Saturn, then a dependable re-release on practically everything after that, including Xbox Live Arcade. Its whole structure assumed you had bought the game and were sitting next to your opponent. Everybody had the same characters because the characters came with the game, and the only variable was whether you understood diamond gem clears better than the person on the other stick.

~ what the store did to it ~

Free-to-play mobile broke that assumption in a way that mattered more here than it would in a single-player puzzle game. Once the roster is a drop pool and your stamina is a resource, the competitive claim gets harder to defend, and this was a game whose entire appeal was the competitive claim. The irony is that the puzzle code appears to have been fine. Reviewers who disliked the monetization still said the matches were fun, which is a strange thing to read in an obituary for a game that lasted eight months.

~ what capcom did on the way out ~

The wind-down was unusually generous for a dying mobile title. Capcom handed every remaining player 10,000 gems, then unlocked the three characters it had been selling along with two stages, so for its last three months the game was the complete version it had never been while anyone was paying. Then on 18 September 2018, seven weeks after the servers went down, Capcom closed Capcom Vancouver entirely, cutting 158 jobs and canceling the Dead Rising the studio had supposedly been freed up to make.

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