Yu-Gi-Oh! Online

» see yugioh-online.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Turkey is not on the list. When Konami closed Yu-Gi-Oh! Online it offered refunds to players registered in Canada, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, and told everyone else that their cards and their unused points would simply stop working.

The service ran from April 2005 on a single site, yugioh-online.net, with country-select pages for the United States, Europe, Oceania and Japan. Konami developed and published it, running it out of Konami Digital Entertainment. It went through three generations. The original was replaced by Duel Evolution, and the last was Online 3: Duel Accelerator, which Yugipedia dates to December 2009 and which Japanese Wikipedia says left beta into full service on 5 March 2010.

Japanese Wikipedia records an in-game event marking registered accounts passing two million, though it attaches no date to it, and that is the only scale figure anyone has put on the service. Konami published no concurrent-player numbers at all.

Booster Pass sales stopped on 30 March 2012 at 20:00 Pacific, exactly six months before the end. The service itself went off on 30 September 2012 at 17:00 Pacific, one instant that landed at one in the morning UTC and ten in the morning on 1 October in Japan. Every region died together.

The notice gives its reason in four words. Due to internal decisions. Konami's text calls the whole run one adventure that started in 2005 and says nothing further about why it was ending. The players' own theory, recorded on the fan wiki without a source, was that hackers had beaten the game.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a duel cost one point ~

For the first two generations you paid to duel. A Duelpass cost money and gave you thirty Duelpass Points, one of which a single duel spent. It also came with a card and ten Mileage Points. New accounts were handed ten points free. Both players took a card from a pack of their choosing once the duel was over, so the money bought you the match and the match paid you back in cardboard. The promotional passes bundled with Shonen Jump in the US and V-Jump in Japan each carried a unique Red-Eyes variant, which players nicknamed USA and VJ and traded at a premium.

The ways to buy points were strange even for 2005. There was a Duelpass 150 bundling five passes, suspended in the United States after fraud, and a USB Duelpass Key worth three passes, sold off the shelf at Toys R Us and Target in the US and Mexico. In the UK you could text for one, a pound for fifteen points. Duel Accelerator threw the whole model out and made dueling free, selling Booster Pass points for cards instead, which meant that from 2010 onward you could no longer lose money by playing badly.

~ seven countries got their money back ~

The shutdown FAQ is the document worth keeping. Unused Booster Pass points stopped working. So did the cards and the avatar items, which players had been buying with real money for seven years. Refunds went only to accounts registered in the seven countries above, with the details promised for 1 October 2012 at 17:00 Pacific, a day after the lights went out.

Part of that list is consumer-protection law doing its job. The rest of it is an accident of where the account-creation form happened to be pointed in 2005, and the FAQ shuts the door on fixing it in a single line: players' countries of registration can not be changed. A player in Rotterdam was made whole. A player in Berlin held the same cards and was not.

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