Sega Mobile Friends (セガ モバイルフレンズ)

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

~ the eulogy ~

Sega Mobile Friends opened on 20 August 2001, and everyone called it Sega Moba. It was a loyalty card for Sega's game centers that happened to live on a handset instead of in a wallet, and the one-line explanation on the site never got more complicated than that: play at a Sega shop, collect rewards on your phone. Joining cost nothing and there was no annual fee.

The mechanism was unusually physical for something marketed as mobile. Your membership card was a barcode served to you by the Sega Moba phone site, and the thing that read it was a dedicated terminal in the arcade called MobaNavi. It asked for a four digit PIN and for the genre of game you had been playing, and then it credited twenty visit points. Once per day across the whole chain, and not at all if you had walked in without playing anything.

In July 2004 it joined the first batch of services to support Osaifu-Keitai, the FeliCa wallet built into Japanese handsets, which is the register it is filed under today. It ran for ten years and nine months and ended on 31 May 2012. Sega published no reason that survives, and the register that records the date does not carry one either.

~ the dossier ~

~ the kiosk with a printer ~

Spending the points meant going back to MobaNavi and choosing what you wanted. The terminal subtracted the balance and then printed the reward onto receipt paper from a printer built into its body, and you carried that slip to a member of staff, who then did the actual thing. A hundred points came back as a hundred yen of play. In arcades with medal games, a thousand points bought a thousand yen of medals.

Look at the shape of that loop. The points were digital and the identity was a barcode on a phone screen, and then the redemption was a piece of paper handed to a person standing behind a counter. Nobody designing a loyalty scheme today would put a printer halfway through it, and nobody in 2001 could have left it out.

~ the edy years ~

Arcades that had installed Edy, the prepaid electronic money, ran a second and separate version of the whole scheme. In those branches MobaNavi would not give you visit points at all. You had to pay with Sega Edy, and Sega Edy could mean a dedicated Sega Edy card or a phone carrying the Sega Moba app and the Edy app together. There was a third way in, a credit card called SEGA PASSPORT with Edy on board.

SEGA PASSPORT died first, on 31 March 2009. Sega then shut Edy off across its amusement facilities entirely on 30 June 2010, which left the Edy branches without the payment rail their version of the points scheme had been built on. Sega Moba carried on for nearly two more years with the Edy half of it gone.

~ what a point was worth ~

Edy branches had their own hardware too, a Sega in-store information terminal you touched your Sega Edy to in order to read your balance. As of November 2009 it paid five percent of the day's Edy spend back as points, plus the visit points on the first transaction of the day. The same terminal converted Sega Moba points into something called game points at one for one, and a game point was worth a yen inside an Edy arcade.

So a point was a yen, sometimes, by a route that required you to understand which of two Sega loyalty currencies you were holding and which kind of Sega arcade you had walked into. The scheme was not complicated because Sega wanted it to be. It was complicated because it had been built in 2001 and then had a payment network bolted onto one half of it.

~ nine months with nothing ~

After 31 May 2012 the arcades had no points program at all. That lasted until 18 March 2013, by which time the amusement business had been moved into Sega Entertainment, and what came back was Ponta, a points network run by a company outside the Sega group.

Sega had spent ten years running its own currency on its own terminals, and the replacement was a tie-up with somebody else's points network. Nobody wrote down a reason for any of it. What the record holds is two hundred and ninety-one days between the two dates.

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