Since November 1, a lot of Japanese arcade cabinets have lost the online half of what they do. SEGA Fave, the SEGA subsidiary that runs the company's arcade and toy business, has suspended its ALL.Net network and Aime card service after an unauthorised third party got into some of its servers, according to reports from AUTOMATON and Kotaku.
SEGA's own notice could not be checked directly for this article, so everything below is attributed to those two outlets' reporting of it.
What happened
AUTOMATON reports that SEGA Fave announced on November 2 that some of its servers had been hacked by an unauthorised third party, and that the affected servers are tied to ALL.Net, SEGA's arcade game service, and Aime, its arcade card system. According to AUTOMATON, SEGA Fave suspended both services from 6:00 AM UTC on November 1 while it investigates, affecting arcades nationwide. Kotaku puts the start at 3 p.m. local time in Japan on November 1; by our conversion, that is the same moment.
Kotaku reports that SEGA updated its notice on November 2 to say the investigation is expected to take some time. Neither outlet reports a date for services to return, and Kotaku notes that the nature of the unauthorised access has not been disclosed.
What SEGA Fave says about data
According to AUTOMATON, SEGA Fave said its initial investigation found no evidence that information about users or business partners had leaked. Payment-related information, including credit card details, was not leaked or affected because it is managed on separate servers, AUTOMATON reports. Kotaku likewise reports that SEGA said no customer or business partner data had been breached and that payment information was not stored on the affected servers.
AUTOMATON reports that SEGA Fave will post an update in the News section of its official website once the investigation and security checks are finished and it has decided when to resume services.
What is switched off
AUTOMATON lists the SEGA Fave services still unavailable as of November 2 at 9:00 AM UTC:
- online play for ALL.Net-compatible titles
- arcade location information on the official websites of ALL.Net-supported games
- .NET services for ALL.Net-compatible games
- play using Aime
- play using PrizeON
- SEGA Lucky Kuji Online
- new SEGA ID registrations
This matters because of how these cabinets work. As AUTOMATON explains, many SEGA arcade machines use ALL.Net to talk to SEGA's servers, and players tap an Aime card so the machine can pull down their scores, ratings and items and send them back after a session. Kotaku describes ALL.Net as the network that gives Japanese arcade machines online matches, leaderboards and shared save data.
Which games are hit
AUTOMATON reports that SEGA Fave games such as Initial D The Arcade and Maimai DX CiRCLE PLUS are temporarily unplayable, and that Bandai Namco's Taiko no Tatsujin and Idolmaster TOURS, which use ALL.Net's infrastructure, are affected too. Kotaku also names Taiko no Tatsujin and Initial D: The Arcade, and says Bandai Namco licenses Aime for Idolm@ster TOURS and Taiko no Tatsujin.
Kotaku reports that rhythm games in particular depend on the service, that social media users have shared photos of arcades with popular machines closed to the public, and that some operators are running games in offline mode only so they stay playable.
Not the first outage this autumn
Kotaku reports that SEGA had already taken the same services down for several days at the end of October to deal with a PHP exploit, and that when it brought them back it limited Aime and ALL.Net access to Japan, which drew complaints from international fans.
Ollie's take: The card tap is the quiet heart of a modern Japanese arcade: it is the thing that turns a coin-op session into a running record of everything you have ever cleared. Two outages back to back is rough on the operators who pay for those cabinets, and the good news, such as it is, is that SEGA Fave says payment data sits elsewhere. Until there is a return date, a lot of regulars are back to playing like it is the nineties: no saves, no rankings, just the run in front of you.
Reporting notes
