Sailor Moon Drops

~ the eulogy ~

A match-three puzzle on a magical girl license, released when I was thirty one and writing vision code in Ankara, was never going to find me. I know the franchise as a name, the way you know something that was everywhere in the nineties without ever sitting down in front of it. The game I only met as a shutdown notice.

Sailor Moon Drops arrived on iOS and Android in Japan on 3 September 2015 and worldwide on 12 April 2016. It was a match-three: six crystal shapes in six colors, one per Sailor Guardian, cleared three at a time across five maps that followed the plot of the first anime adaptation. Over fifty characters were playable once you counted school uniforms and seasonal costumes as separate collectibles, which the game did. Gems bought extra moves when a level ran out of them.

It reviewed fine. Critics put it beside Candy Crush Saga and Marvel Puzzle Quest and nobody claimed it was doing something new with the genre. It was a competent match-three wearing a famous coat, which is what a licensed puzzle game is built to be.

The end was announced on 28 January 2019. The English version stopped selling gems that day while the Japanese version kept selling them until 28 February. The servers went off on Thursday 28 March at three in the morning UTC. Bandai Namco gave no reason at any point.

~ the dossier ~

~ who actually built it ~

The publisher was Bandai Namco. The developer was Beeline Interactive, which is a stranger credit than it looks, because Beeline was Capcom's mobile subsidiary and its best known product was Smurfs' Village. So one Japanese giant's casual-games arm made the Sailor Moon puzzle game for a different Japanese giant, on characters belonging to Naoko Takeuchi and her publisher.

That arrangement is completely normal now, and it is also part of the arithmetic that killed it. Outsourced development costs more than doing it in-house, and the license takes its cut before anyone counts a profit.

~ the petition ~

Players started a Change.org petition asking Bandai Namco to keep the servers running. It was polite and it was pointless, the way these petitions always are, because a shutdown notice is the end of a budget conversation that happened months earlier.

What it was actually asking for was the collection. People had years of characters and costumes sitting in an account that would stop existing on a scheduled Thursday, and there was no offline mode and nothing to keep.

~ what three million downloads is worth ~

The game passed three million downloads by February 2018. The shape of that number says more than the number: the first ten months averaged around 100,000 installs a month, the last fifteen averaged around 66,000.

Fan analysis at the time worked the rest out with standard free-to-play ratios and landed near 238,000 dollars a month in revenue against perhaps 140,000 active players worldwide. Set a Sailor Moon royalty and an outsourced development contract against that figure and the margin thins quickly. The closure date also sits three days before the end of Bandai Namco's fiscal year, which is where products like this tend to go.

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