Sunshine Ranch

~ the obituary ~

Sunshine Ranch is hard to carry across a language barrier, because the thing people loved about it was a language mistake. Rekoo, the Beijing studio that made it, had its Chinese staff write the Japanese, and the results came out off in a way native speakers found funny rather than broken. A pineapple was rendered as パラミツ, which is a jackfruit. Players started calling the game's whole register サンシャイン語, Sunshine Japanese, and then used it on purpose.

The game reached Facebook in March 2009 and mixi that August, within weeks of mixi opening its platform to third-party developers. Rekoo's founder Liu Yong later told TechNode the reasoning had been simple enough: a game that worked on Facebook ought to work on mixi. By early October it was the most-used application on the service, ahead of every Japanese title on there, and the press was labeling it 中国発, made in China, inside the first month.

The user numbers arrive almost monthly in the 2009 trade press. 1.3 million about a month in and 2.5 million by early November, then three million on 20 November. On 14 January 2010 it sat first on mixi with 4,309,215 users. That June, ITmedia's headline put it at five million, around 25 percent of everyone on the network. Rekoo set up a Japanese subsidiary in Shibuya on 27 October 2009 as a joint venture with the VC firm Infinity Ventures, which also put 1.5 million dollars in that December.

~ the case file ~

~ sunshine japanese ~

The translation was not a localization pass done badly by a vendor. It was written in-house by the people building the game, in their second language, and shipped that way. What came out was grammatically passable Japanese with the wrong words sitting in it.

The naming did not stop at the dialect. Fans shortened the game itself to サン牧, and coined サンミク for the mixi friends you played it with. Rekoo printed both nicknames in its own press release, which is how a company signals it has noticed the audience taking the product over.

On 10 November 2009 mixi handed Sunshine Ranch the grand prize at its first Social Application Award. A Chinese studio won Japan's social-platform prize with a game written in Japanese its own staff had got slightly wrong, less than three months after the platform opened to outsiders.

~ losing the platforms one at a time ~

Rekoo put the game on every Japanese social platform that would take it. Mobage in January 2010, in the first batch of partners on DeNA's new API, then Hange Game that August, Yahoo! Mobage on 21 September and aima nine days after that, with native mixi apps for iPhone and Android in March 2011. Then they began closing. aima went first, on 31 July 2011 at noon. Hange followed on 15 December 2011, also at noon, and Mobage went together with Yahoo! Mobage on 24 July 2012 at three in the afternoon.

That left mixi, which carried it for four more years. Rekoo announced the end on 28 July 2016 and switched it off at noon on 26 August, telling players it had concluded that continuing to offer a service they would be satisfied with had become difficult, and pointing them toward another of its farm games. Unused in-game currency stopped working with nothing given back for it.

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