Popular (well, in very relative terms to us 
) Beatmania IIDX score tracker and community VJ Army (named after a multi-part 6th style song by good-cool featuring the works of several different video artists in its several sections) has announced that it will be shutting down by the beginning of June 2009.
After over five years, over 800,000 score entries, over 3,500 user registrations, three (maybe four?) servers, over 1,000 items sold on Play-Asia, and nearly 200,000 forum posts – it’s closing time.
Today, May 3rd, begins a phased shut down of the VJA/PNN network, to completed by June 6th of this year.
There is a laundry list of reasons as to why this decision has been made – some are mundane, others are personal. There are four that matter the most:
- In terms of coding talent, the three programmers/designers (myself, Rura, and liggum) who have primarily developed both sites over the last 5 years have no time/energy to continue to maintain them, let alone finish the things we started.
- In terms of the forums, we are out of moderation staff who have the energy to wrangle what is best described as an energetic community. Back in 2004/2005, the forum could have survived without constant moderation, but it cannot now.
- Traffic analysis for vjarmy.com revealed something I hadn’t banked on: the focus on the site has shifted away from primarily being a score site to primarily being a forum.
- The fate of CS Bemani titles seems a bit up in the air at the moment, with the confusion surrounding the Empress CS “announcement” and the fact that we haven’t seen a PNM CS title since mid 2007.This shutdown will close VJ Army (both versions), Pop’n Navy, and the forums. (Due to the uniqueness of the content and the value to the community at large, RemyWiki will remain in operation.)
I realize that this plan is a deathblow to a community that has flourished for the last five years. There is never a good time to close a service like this one; I know you all wouldn’t be coming to the site if it didn’t mean something to you. I apologize for any difficulty or pain this may cause.
Throughout the shutdown, I will be striving to make as much data exportable as possible. Your scores will be exportable into an XML file, the song database(s) will be published in a variety of formats, and so on. Anything that’s worth exporting, will be. Also rest assured that I am not selling off the site or handing everyone’s email addresses to spammers. Upon closure of the site, the user database will be deleted.
This is sad news for us all, and we give our condolances.
Don’t forget, you always have us. I’m gonna see if we can make the ads less intrusive though too while we’re at it. But anyway, this is a sad loss.
Oh yeah, I also forgot to post about this, but speaking of good-cool, his third album crazy operation and the Pop’n Music 17 THE MOVIE soundtrack will both land on July 24th.