Readyyy!

» see ready.sega.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Sega put up a teaser site on 9 December 2017. At a production announcement event on 14 February 2018 the company said it had auditioned 250 people and picked eighteen of them to voice the cast. Pre-registration opened that August, and from 9 November a web radio show ran for twenty five episodes, finishing on the exact day the game's closure was announced.

The launch date was fixed on 22 January 2019 and the game opened on 1 February, free on iOS and Android. Pre-registration had passed a hundred thousand on 26 December and tripled that by the 31st of January, the day before it opened. On 12 March Sega said three hundred thousand people had downloaded it. That is the last audience figure the company ever published.

It was a women's title with a male cast, sold to a Japanese audience on Japanese stores, and nothing about it was built to travel. The last content update the trade press covered landed on 15 April, and there was a SHOWROOM broadcast on the 25th. The closure notice followed on the 26th.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the audition ~

The eighteen were sorted into five units, the largest with five members and the smallest with two. Character production was handled by Production I.G, with Hideki Irie producing for Sega's third production group and Akiko Takada directing. The scale of the audition is the part that lingers: 250 people read for a game that would be open for less time than the radio show that advertised it.

~ the money back ~

Sega stopped selling the in-game diamonds at eleven on the morning it announced the closure, two months before the servers went down. That part is not a courtesy. Japan's Payment Services Act obliges anyone who has issued prepaid value to hand it back, and the notice cites the statute by name, article 20. Unused paid diamonds came back at ten yen each.

Claims opened at five on the evening of 28 June and shut at two in the afternoon of 17 September. Refunds went out by bank transfer at each month end, with Sega covering the transfer fees and warning that the whole process took about a month and a half. The FAQ carried one more line, the kind you only learn from a shutdown: delete the app before you claim, and the money stays with Sega.

~ what outlived the game ~

The franchise did not stop when the game did. Sega's site kept posting news into September. The fifth CD came out in August 2019 and the sixth that November, and the discs kept coming until a ninth in June 2022. A voice-actor series ran on Rakuten TV from November 2019 to March 2022. A monthly fan club on pixivFANBOX opened in August 2020 and ran until the last day of March 2023.

Then in February 2023 the project went to crowdfunding, asking six million yen to finish a digital memorial release and record one more song for all eighteen characters. It closed on 31 March having raised 12,437,970 yen, slightly more than double, with rewards shipping that July. By then the operator was Wavemaster rather than Sega. A game that Sega could not keep open for five months was kept going for four more years by the people who had been there for it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »