Summon Night Collection

~ the goodbye ~

Summon Night is a strategy RPG series that ran on Sony and Nintendo handhelds from 2000 onward, and what died here was the branch of it that lived inside a social network. It opened on GREE on 19 September 2012, collecting cards of summoners and the creatures they call, and a second service for Mobage followed on 26 November 2013. Bandai Namco Games held the license and provided the game; the building and the day-to-day running were done by Alt Plus, a listed developer whose own title Bahamut Brave supplied the underlying system.

The barrier here was registration rather than language. GREE and Mobage were social networks with games bolted into them, so playing anything inside either of them started with holding an account on a Japanese service that had no reason to exist where I live. That structure never translated outward, and for several years it was nonetheless the largest mobile games business anywhere.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the story ended in march ~

On 4 March 2015 the operators put out the closing date and started the final event on the very same day, which is tidier scheduling than most closures manage. The event was called 最終話 果たされる願い, the last episode, the wish fulfilled, and it ran until 16 March.

From 17 March a 常設版 took over: a permanent edition, meaning the content stayed available and nothing further was coming. The service then stayed open for another eight weeks in that condition before stopping at 15:00 on 13 May 2015.

Two months of a game deliberately left running after its story had been completed is not a thing the category usually bothers with. The cheaper move is to announce and close.

~ two platforms ~

Running on GREE and Mobage simultaneously meant two sets of platform rules and two separate audiences, neither visible to the other. It was the standard way to reach scale in Japanese social gaming around 2012. It is also why dates for games of this era contradict each other so often: there is a launch date for each platform, and trade coverage written later tends to keep one and quietly drop the other, or misreport the second. The retrospective gamebiz piece on this game puts the Mobage launch in January 2013. The 4Gamer story announcing that launch is dated 26 November 2013, which is the one I have used.

~ the sibling ~

Bandai Namco had a second Summon Night game on phones, Summon Night Memories, and that one closed on 28 October 2015, five months after this one. The series lost both of its mobile branches inside a single year and continued on handhelds and consoles, where it had always actually lived.

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