The King of Fighters All Star

~ the goodbye ~

Netmarble released The King of Fighters All Star in Japan on 26 July 2018 and in Korea the following May. The worldwide version followed on 22 October 2019. It was not a fighting game. It was a side-scrolling action RPG that used SNK's fighters as collectible units, with a tap-to-combo system and a gacha banner for pulling new versions of characters you already owned.

By the time the global build launched, the Korean and Japanese editions had 14 million players between them who had collected something like a hundred million fighters. It had been the most downloaded title in both countries and the top-grossing iOS app in Korea. Netmarble had a hit, and the way it kept the hit alive was licensing.

The crossover list got long. Samurai Shodown was a natural one, since SNK owns it, but over six years the game pulled in fighters from Tekken, Street Fighter, Guilty Gear and Virtua Fighter, plus Gintama characters and a run of real WWE wrestlers. Almost every major fighting-game publisher licensed something into a Netmarble phone RPG. That is a fair indication of how much money was moving through it.

SNK's fighters reached Turkey through arcade cabinets and emulator ROMs years before any phone could run them, and for most people my age here that is still what the name means. What died in 2024 was a daily login bonus and a stamina bar with those same characters painted on it, sold into a mobile market I have never spent a lira in.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the license pile ~

The roster was the revenue engine and the maintenance problem at once. Every licensed fighter arrived with a move set and a place in a power curve that Netmarble then had to keep adjusting, and each new banner made the previous adjustment slightly wrong. Six years of that produces a balance table of several hundred entries.

When the end came in late June 2024, the stated reason was exactly this. Netmarble's team said it had become difficult to maintain balance across a character list that size. Gacha games normally close on a vague line about satisfying service. Naming an unsolvable design problem instead is unusual enough that it should be recorded.

~ one instant, two dates ~

Netmarble gave four months of notice. The service ended at 11:00 JST on 31 October in Japan, which was 19:00 PDT on 30 October in California: one shutdown, two dates on the same notice, depending on which side of the Pacific the player was standing. Most sources settle on 30 October 2024, so that is what this grave carries.

The Windows build Netmarble had shipped on 10 February 2022 went down with it.

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