Canned Dogs

Konami has announced that on the 31st of July, they will be having a graduation ceremony for their MMO game, Tokimeki Memorial Online. Basically that means they’re closing the server. Everybody that has previously had an account on the game can play for free from now till the 31st of July.

It has actually already been known since early this year that it was going to close in July, but now it’s called a graduation ceremony so everybody feels better. There were a lot of mess ups in game features, server problems and administration that caused the game to close in such a short period of time, but one of the biggest problems with the game was their treatment of fansites.

Websites that were not recognized as official fansites were not allowed to post any screenshots, and the list of requirements to qualify as a official fansite was not easy to achieve. Of the requirements, the biggest hurdles were that you are not allowed to talk about any other game aside from Tokimeki Memorial on your site, you are not allowed to link to any part of the official website aside from the main homepage, and that your site cannot allow user-submitted content.

Basically that means that all the large popular websites that talked about games could not qualify. And as anybody familiar with doujin would know, if you touch Konami’s intellectual property you will die. There was even a case where a large gaming site tried to post screenshots of the game but was ordered by Konami to close their site while threatening legal action.

So yeah, while the game was basically a game which focused on building a community, Konami destroyed their own community.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 11:47 am and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.