Sora to Daichi no Crossnore

» see sorakuro.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Everything about the launch said this one was meant to last. A real-time role playing game in full 3D, set on a continent called Hydra, with a summoning system keyed to constellations that pulled phantom beasts onto the field. Takahiro Sakurai and Akira Ishida were in the cast, which is the Japanese equivalent of opening a film with two names above the title. Aiming ran a promotion built around HIKAKIN, the biggest YouTuber in the country. Pre-registration passed 150,000 two weeks before release and reached 240,000 by the time the Android build went out.

It opened on iOS on 27 June 2016, Android the following day, and crossed a million downloads by 21 September. Three months from launch to seven figures. It had thirteen months left.

~ the case file ~

~ what it sounded like ~

On 2 December 2016, five months into the game's life, Aiming released its main theme as a standalone piece and named the composer. Nobuo Uematsu wrote it. This is the man who scored the first nine Final Fantasy games, whose battle themes are played by symphony orchestras in rented concert halls, and he was writing for a free phone RPG with a gacha in it.

That was not unusual by 2016, which is the point worth making. The mobile free-to-play market in Japan had grown big enough to outbid the console business for its own veterans, and it spent that money on exactly the things a console game spends it on, starting with a famous composer and a cast too expensive to assemble twice. Time was the one input it could not purchase. Uematsu's theme is eight months older than the shutdown notice.

~ the money ~

Aiming is listed in Tokyo under the ticker 3911, which means its troubles that year are public record. Sales for the first half of 2017 came in at 3.618 billion yen, down 17.4 percent, with a net loss of 949 million. By the nine-month mark the net loss had grown to 1.951 billion on sales down 28.2 percent. The full year closed at an operating loss of 2.949 billion yen and a net loss of 2.972 billion, against sales down nearly thirty percent.

No filing singles this game out, and none of the public commentary blames it. The company attributed the collapse to falling revenue across its existing titles and to money spent developing new ones. Crossnore was one of the existing titles, and the shape of its year, a strong launch followed by a slide, is what that sentence looks like from inside a single product.

~ how it ended ~

Aiming announced it on 16 August 2017 and gave players ten weeks. The game had turned one the previous month and had taken a substantial update for the anniversary, with an awakening system and alliance battles, which is not what a company ships into a title it has already decided to close. Something changed in those four weeks.

It ran until 14:00 on Thursday 26 October 2017. The next morning, 27 October, Aiming filed its third-quarter results with the Tokyo Stock Exchange and held the briefing that went with them. A game with a Final Fantasy composer's theme and a million installs was switched off less than a day before its publisher had to stand in a room and explain a two billion yen loss, and I cannot tell you whether anyone in that room said its name, because the documents do not.

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