I think most of you are aware of this news by now, but in case you missed it (and were wondering what that last post was about), it boils down to this: Sailor Moon Drops is shutting down.

According to the official site, both games will stop service on 3/28. The English announcement refers to closing the servers, while the Japanese version says the more ambiguously-worded “operation not guaranteed after service ends”; my impression is that the game will no longer be playable after that date. No server = nothing for it to connect to.

The Japanese version is also going to disable purchasing of gems on 2/28, while the English version already has (not sure why the discrepancy, could perhaps be a legal thing). Already-purchased gems and items will be usable up until the end of service in March.

Though this announcement came completely out of left field, it does make the last few months’ weird event scheduling make more sense. The English version forewent the Christmas characters in favor of the anniversary events - since it looks like the game won’t live to see April - and the Japanese game had very little prepared past December. It sounds like they’d stopped producing new content a while ago, and the last few months have been mostly implementing what they had left. As sudden as this may seem, in retrospect it looks like the game might’ve been spiralling downwards for a while.

Without any special insight to the goings-on of the dev team, I can’t offer an explanation for why; the most likely reason is that it simply wasn’t making enough money to meet quota. Though it celebrated over 3 million downloads, the amount of players willing to spend money on it may have dropped off sharply after a certain point. Or it may be something related to the Sailor Moon license, as Drops is made by a third-party studio (Beeline Interactive). Maybe the license got pulled, or a contract didn’t get renewed, or something along those lines.

Whatever the reason, it’s certainly hugely disappointing, especially considering that they were starting to get into some new interesting things: more playable villains, extra side story maps, all the potential for pair characters… There was clearly a lot of stuff that they’d planned on including that never got implemented. We never got Mistress 9, or the five missing Space/Time Door events, not to mention the sheer amount of reruns. And the English version never did end up getting the Game Center, or a fair chunk of characters. :(

A change.org petition has been created to try to save the game, though honestly my hopes aren’t very high at this point. It can’t hurt to sign it, though - if nothing else it might show Bandai/Namco that there’s still a lot of support for super-cute Sailor Moon games!

As for what’s going to happen to this tumblr…

I highly doubt that there’s going to be another update to either version now. I’ll keep my eyes open just in case, but 1.29.0 is most likely the final version of the app. I’m probably going to go through and just do a full rip of it at some point, and put up a huge dump of all the assets so it’ll be nice and complete.

Without any new content, I won’t have any more updates to give, but the tumblr itself will stay up. With the game gone, there’s more reason than ever to have an archive of all the adorable characters and images! Everything’s backed up in a couple places, so it’s not going to disappear anytime soon. :)

I also want to say thanks to everyone who’s enjoyed this blog for the past couple of years! I started datamining the app just for fun (I wanted those puppets!!) and it…somehow turned into a whole thing? It’s been a lot of fun looking behind the scenes at how the game is made, and speculating wildly about what was coming next. I hope you all got something out of it too, even if it was just some really cute Sailor Moon puppets. :>