Monster Hunter Frontier (2007 - 2019)

2007 - 2019

dead asia

capcom's permanently online monster hunter, subscription funded and never once released in the west. it opened on windows in japan on 21 june 2007 and kept expanding onto hardware until six platforms were sharing the same servers, several of them consoles that had already been discontinued. two full rewrites arrived as monster hunter frontier g in 2013 and monster hunter frontier z in 2016. capcom made the final month free, closed the japanese servers on 18 december 2019, and let taiwan follow eight days later.

~ the obit ~

Monster Hunter Frontier ran from 2007 to '19, which is more or less the exact stretch when I had a broadband line and hours to lose. it still never came anywhere near me. in fairness, it was a subscription game that never launched in the West. The online games that actually reached Turkish players in those years came through Korean publishers and free-to-play servers. a monthly fee in yen for a PC client that assumed you read Japanese was never gonna be one of them.

Capcom put it on Windows in Japan on june 2007 (if memory serves). for whatever reason. The idea was to take a series that until then had meant a few people in the same room with their consoles linked together and make it permanent. back then. that the content kept arriving instead of stopping at the edge of a disc. for whatever reason. anyway, you paid every month and the hunting ground stayed open.

i was not paying attention by then, but anyway. more or less. Then it started spreading across hardware in a way almost nothing else has managed. Xbox 360 came in june 2010 and moved ninety-three thousand copies in its first week in Japan.

by then. PlayStation 3 followed. The Wii U came after that (roughly). by the end both remaining Sony machines were talking to the same servers. Six platforms live at once, several of them long outta production.

this happened more in the english speaking internet than where i was, the updates were big enough to need their own names. anyway. Monster Hunter Frontier G in '13 was a rewrite rather than a patch. monster Hunter Frontier Z in 2016 did it again. anyway, capcom announced the end on 19 june '19, almost exactly twelve years after the servers had first opened.

~ the rap sheet ~

Born	21 june 2007, Windows, Japan only
Peak	six live platforms at once, 93,000 Xbox 360 copies in week one
Killed	18 december 2019 in Japan, 26 december in Taiwan
Lifespan	twelve years
Made by	Capcom
Killed by	Monster Hunter: World selling everywhere Frontier was never allowed to go

~ the day it died ~

i saw this from a distance, mostly, the last month was free. more or less. Capcom dropped the subscription in november 2019 and let anyone in for the final stretch, which is a decent way to finish and also an admission that there was nothing left worth protecting. The Japanese servers closed on december 2019. The Taiwanese service, run by Capcom's own office there, went eight days later on 26 december.

~ what got buried with it ~

Frontier had twelve years of monsters that exist nowhere else in the series. An online-only game leaves no disc behind (name escapes me). there is no copy of this you can buy secondhand and play by yourself in a room. by then. The private server projects that turned up afterward are the only reason any of it runs at all. what they run is a reconstruction rather than the thing itself.

~ the long tail ~

this part i was not really around for (cant remember the exact year). anyway, capcom did not need it by the end. for some reason. Monster Hunter: World had arrived in 2018 and sold to the whole planet, including all the places Frontier was never allowed to go. it did that without asking anyone for a monthly payment. for whatever reason. Frontier had spent twelve years proving that people would pay every month to keep hunting. World made that unnecessary by selling them a copy instead.

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