Samurai-Games

» see samurai-games.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

DMM runs a large part of the Japanese browser-game business, and for a stretch of the 2010s it tried to run the same catalog in two other languages. The English-speaking version is Nutaku, which is still going. The Chinese-speaking version was Samurai-Games, in Traditional Chinese, serving the Taiwan and Hong Kong market with translated versions of the same titles and the same split between general and adult editions.

The size gap between the two was never close. At DMM GAMES' own conference in July 2016 the company put Nutaku at three million members and Samurai-Games at two hundred thousand. That is the platform at what looks like its healthiest, already running at a fifteenth of its sibling, and it is the only membership figure anyone published for it.

It kept acquiring titles well past the point where that gap should have worried somebody. Pre-registration pages for new games were going up on the site in the summer of 2017, roughly a year before the whole thing closed and only months before the catalog started being dismantled.

~ the dossier ~

~ the shelf emptied first ~

The games went one at a time across ten weeks, each with its own page announcing its own ending, most of them timed to an odd hour of the morning. Kanpani Girls closed at four in the morning on 31 October 2017. FLOWER KNIGHT GIRL went on 8 December at one, Lord of Walkure on the 13th at ten at night, Kamihime Project on the 19th at two. The last one standing was Senki Tokkou, which stopped at two in the morning on 9 January 2018.

That left a platform with no product on it, and the platform stayed up for another five months. A capture of the game list from 11 March 2018 shows the page loading normally under its heading, with the navigation intact and the registration and login links where they had always been. Nothing was listed underneath them. You could still make an account. There was nothing an account would get you.

~ points that could not be given back ~

The currency was called SG Points and its terms are worth reading, because they explain why a dead storefront could be switched off without anybody being owed a refund. Points expired automatically 180 days after the day you bought them. They could be spent only on Samurai-Games itself, never moved to another DMM property. The company undertook not to refund them beyond whatever the law demanded. They would never be reissued under any circumstances, and never turned into cash. They could not be handed to another player or pledged as security.

Under those rules a player who stopped logging in was holding nothing within six months whether or not the service survived, and a player still active in June 2018 had bought points for games that had already closed. The terms also name the Tokyo District Court as the exclusive first-instance venue for disputes, so a Taiwanese customer unhappy about any of this was contractually pointed at a courthouse in another country.

~ the paperwork moved after the body was cold ~

The entity behind the site changed during the wind-down. The privacy policy captured in December 2017 names DMM.com as the company. The points terms captured in May 2018 name DMM GAMES instead. Both of those are after the games began closing and the second is four months after the last one went dark, which means somebody was still tidying the corporate paperwork of a platform that by then had nothing running on it.

The ending itself was brief and, for this kind of document, unusually direct about data. The front page thanked players for their long support, said the platform had closed all services after two in the afternoon on 21 June 2018, and stated that all personal information left on it would be deleted in full, with nothing leaked. Under that sat the same footer it had always carried, still claiming the site had been there since 2014.

~ the name before this one ~

Someone else had the domain first. In 2012 samurai-games.com was a free Flash game portal of the sort that filled the web then, hosting the usual browser fare, and its category pages came in Turkish as well as English. Plane games and tank games, sitting at URLs that were later reused for a Japanese publisher's Chinese-language storefront.

Nothing carried over. The archive shows the domain serving only a redirecting robots file from 2013 through to the end of 2015, and then DMM's platform appears on it in 2016 carrying its own claim about when it had started. Two unrelated businesses at one address, and a footer date I cannot tie to either of them.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »