Yo-kai Watch World

» see youkaiww.gungho.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The game only ever worked in Japan, and GungHo was precise about it. Every download figure the company published carried a footnote saying the count was domestic and de-duplicated across the two stores, which is the kind of asterisk you add when the number is the point. The game was announced at a press event in Ebisu on 27 June 2018 and was already live when the presentation started.

It was a location game rather than an augmented reality one, a distinction worth keeping because the press blurred it immediately. You walked around actual Japan on an actual map, and the map was Google's. Yo-kai appeared wherever you happened to be standing, and you caught them to fill out a collection. A camera mode let you put a monster into a photograph, which is where the AR label came from, but the thing underneath was a GPS trace on a licensed map.

It went to number one on the App Store's free games chart the day it launched and number one on Google Play the day after, with half a million downloads inside three days and a million by 11 July, fourteen days in. BUMP OF CHICKEN wrote the theme song. The game could also read Bandai's Yo-kai Watch toys over NFC and convert them into experience points, which is the detail that settles what kind of product this was: a game that talks to the toy aisle is a game for children in Japan, whatever the gacha economy around it looked like. In December Google gave it a Best of 2018 award for innovation.

GungHo announced the end on 7 September 2022 at noon and closed it on 23 December 2022 at noon, which is 107 days of warning and more than most companies give. Paid currency stopped selling the moment the notice went up, and the quest line wound down on 30 November. The farewell letter called the run long and short at once. Measured properly it was four years and just under six months.

~ the record ~

~ built on someone else's map ~

The reason is published and first-party, which is unusual for this kind of death. GungHo wrote that the closure followed the end of Google Maps Platform Gaming Services. The company had talked to several parties about continuing and concluded that keeping every element of the game intact through a move was not possible. Not a revenue problem and not an audience problem. The floor was removed.

That makes this a slightly different object from the other dead walking games. Most of them ran out of players or money. This one was closed because the company that supplied its map stopped supplying maps to games, and a game whose entire premise is a map has nowhere to stand after that. GungHo could have rebuilt on something else and said plainly that the rebuild would cost features it was not willing to lose.

~ the encyclopedia ~

The strange part came after. On the day the servers stopped, the app did not go dark and did not leave the stores. It updated itself in place into Yo-kai Watch World Memories, a free offline encyclopedia holding the monster dictionary and the photo mode, with each player's own movement history carried across from the final version.

The published plan gave that record two months. The September schedule said distribution would stop on 21 February 2023 along with the website and support. Instead it ran until 15:00 on 27 February 2026, which is three years and six days past the date GungHo had announced for it, and it was still being maintained near the end: a notice in December 2025 asked Android users to update over a Unity vulnerability. Somebody kept signing off on patches for an encyclopedia of a game nobody could play.

It is gone now in the ordinary way. Apple's lookup returns nothing for the app and both store pages are 404. The old host redirects every path to GungHo's corporate homepage, so a status check on that address returns a healthy 200 that is really just a company website. The franchise around it is alive, with Puni Puni still updating this month. The walking game is gone, and the encyclopedia it turned into went with it.

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