Seisen Cerberus

~ the eulogy ~

Seisen Cerberus ran inside GREE, which in 2011 meant it lived inside a Japanese phone account. You reached it through the browser on a handset sold by a Japanese carrier, with the billing already attached to the SIM, and the iOS and Android apps that arrived later were wrappers around the same web game. Nothing about it was sold anywhere else, and there was no route to buy one of its coins from outside the country.

It opened on 18 April 2011, and GREE spent on it almost immediately. A television campaign went national from 25 November that year starring AKIRA and TAKAHIRO of EXILE, with a theme song called NEVER LOSE, and GREE announced the buy at around ten thousand GRP for the month. The company described that as one of the largest monthly volumes ever placed behind a single title, which is a claim about its own spending rather than a measured result.

GREE published it, and at some point the day-to-day moved to Funplex, a subsidiary GREE established in October 2015 to run titles whose first wave was finished. By February 2017 Funplex was announcing the game's collaborations, and that April it ran the sixth-anniversary event. The date of the handover does not appear in anything GREE published, which is ordinary for this kind of transfer. The operator's name changes on the notices and nothing else does.

The end was announced by 20 February 2018 and arrived on 18 April at three in the afternoon. GREE's own surviving page from that day is not a farewell but a refund form, covering the unused balance of the two coins the game had sold. Nothing in it says why the game closed, and nothing published since does either.

~ the dossier ~

~ the fifth anniversary present ~

For its fifth year the game was given an anime. Thirteen episodes with animation by Bridge, first broadcast in Japan in the small hours of 5 April 2016. The official site advertised the slot as Monday at 1:35, which is the Japanese convention for a program that actually airs after midnight, so the calendar date of episode one is the Tuesday.

The copyright line is the part worth reading. It runs: © 2016 GREE, Inc. /iQIYI.GREE.MEDIALINK.TV TOKYO. iQIYI is a Chinese streaming platform, and it sat inside the production committee rather than licensing the show after the fact, which is to say it helped pay for the anime before a frame of it existed. And it did not wait for Japan: the series went up in China as an advance release from March 2016, putting Chinese viewers ahead of the Japanese broadcast.

~ a hundred million plays somewhere else ~

On 6 June 2016 the production committee announced that the anime had passed a hundred million cumulative plays on iQIYI. The figure came from the committee rather than from iQIYI, which is the usual direction for a number like that, and it remains the largest audience anyone ever attached to Seisen Cerberus.

The game those plays were advertising could not be played in China. It sat on GREE, behind a Japanese account, selling two coins that a viewer in Beijing had no way to buy. A hundred million plays of a show about a product almost nobody watching it could reach.

~ six hundred and fifty nine days ~

The final episode aired on 28 June 2016. Six hundred and fifty nine days later the game stopped.

The arithmetic of the ending is the one thing about it that looks deliberate. Service opened on 18 April 2011 and closed on the same date in 2018, seven years to the day, on its own birthday. The Japanese trade press noticed and put it in the headline. Neither GREE nor Funplex ever explained the date or the decision behind it.

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