World of Demons

» see platinumgames.com/works/world-of-demons as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In June 2018 World of Demons went on sale in Malaysia and Singapore and nowhere else. That was a soft launch, the thing a studio does to watch a game behave in a small market before taking it wide, and it never went wide. The game was pulled from the App Store that September without receiving a single update, and most people who had been following it assumed it had been canceled.

It had not been. PlatinumGames, the Osaka studio behind Bayonetta and Nier: Automata, rebuilt the whole thing and shipped it again on 2 April 2021, this time on Apple Arcade for iOS and macOS. Ryoya Sakabe directed and Koji Tanaka produced, with Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda writing the yokai. You played a samurai who recruited the monsters he beat, and it was drawn in brushed ink, which is the house style the studio carried over from Clover Studio and Okami. PlatinumGames said that apart from the art and the concept, nothing in the 2021 release was the same as the 2018 one.

Apple Arcade was where that version lived and the only place it lived. There was no paid download and no port to anything else.

~ the case file ~

~ the correction ~

On 5 January 2024 a notice appeared on the studio's official blog. The game was coming off Apple Arcade on 18 January, and copies already downloaded would stop working on 1 February. No reason was given. The post thanked everyone who had played since release and said nothing about where the game went next.

Then somebody edited it. The February date is still on the page with a line struck through it, replaced by 31 January, and a follow-up dated 29 January acknowledges that the schedule had been inconsistent. So the shutdown moved forward by a day, two days before it happened.

~ nothing to keep ~

A subscription exclusive dies differently from a game you bought. There is no shelf it sits on and no drive it survives on, because the install phones a server that has stopped answering. Guildlings left the same catalog the same way. When Apple Arcade removes a title, the people who played it for three years end up holding exactly what the people who never heard of it hold.

I never subscribed to Apple Arcade, and that is not a geography problem, since the service sells in Turkey the way it sells everywhere. In 2021 I was deep in drone cameras and edge inference. The games I actually opened that year were ones I had bought outright a long time earlier.

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