Sakura Revolution

» see sakura-kakumei.sega.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Sakura Revolution launched in Japan on 15 December 2020 and announced its own shutdown on 22 April 2021. Four months and a week. Sega published it and Delightworks built it, under the full Japanese title Sakura Kakumei, usually rendered in English as Sakura Revolution: Blooming Maidens. Before the reveal on 2 September 2020 it had been teased as Project B.L.A.C.K.

Both names on that credit are worth pausing over. Sakura Wars is one of Sega's prestige franchises, a Taisho-era series of games about young women piloting steam-powered mecha that had been running since 1996 and had just been rebooted on PlayStation 4 in 2019. Delightworks was the studio that made Fate/Grand Order, which is to say one of the highest-grossing mobile games ever released in Japan. A beloved Sega property handed to the people who print money on phones is not a combination anyone expected to end in seven months.

Sega's own statement, when it came, was careful and said almost nothing. The company noted that it had made diligent efforts to plan events and improve the game's systems, and that after considering the environment around the title and its future development it had concluded that operations should end. Premium currency sales stopped the same hour the notice went up, 22 April at one in the afternoon.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ two hundred and seventeen days ~

The first shutdown date was 30 June 2021 at 13:00 JST. In June that was pushed back three weeks, and the service actually ended on 20 July 2021 at 13:00 JST, which makes the game's whole operating life 217 days.

Between the announcement and the end, Sega finished the story. The fifth and final chapter went live in late May, so players who had bought in got an ending rather than a server light going out mid-sentence. That is more than most closing gacha games manage.

By early July the Sakura Revolution banners had been quietly taken off the Sakura Wars franchise homepage.

~ the numbers nobody could confirm ~

Here is where the story everyone repeats falls apart. In January 2021 a report claimed the game had cost over three billion yen to make and had taken in about 73.5 million yen in its opening month, ranking 215th by revenue. Those two figures are why Sakura Revolution has a reputation as one of the most expensive failures in Japanese mobile gaming.

Neither number has ever been confirmed. The outlet that carried the revenue figure in English issued a full retraction, writing that it was unable to determine the veracity of the reports. The chain behind it ran from a YouTube channel to a business site that had used the material without citation, and Sega has never published a development cost or a monthly revenue figure for this game at all. The shutdown is real and the date is real. The three billion yen is a rumor that outlived its own correction.

~ what you could still open ~

Sakura Revolution has an afterlife of a kind, and it is an odd one. Before the servers closed, Sega released a limited-function version of the app and left the download window open until 31 July 2021 at 12:59 JST. Install that bundle and the game stopped being a game: no battles and no gacha, but a viewer for the character models and the music, plus the full story readable from the beginning regardless of how far you had actually gotten.

So the thing Sega chose to preserve was the art and the writing, handed to whoever thought to grab it inside that ten-day window. Everyone who did not is holding nothing, because the bundle was never offered again.

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