Rayark: Cracks in a Music Empire

On January 12, 2012, a music rhythm game called Cytus launched on iOS. Within one month of going live, it reached number one in 14 countries. It held the number one spot on Japan's music game charts for 29 consecutive days. The company behind it — Rayark — was a 16-person team founded by six Taiwanese with a capital of NT$30 million. Thirteen years later, in 2025, Rayark remains Taiwan's most recognizable mobile game brand, but the keywords surrounding it have shifted from "genius" to "what a shame." This article traces the rise of a music empire, and the origin of its cracks.

What an Arcade Machine Taught Them

Rayark's story begins with a failure.

In 2008, Yu Ming-yang was in his first year of graduate school in the Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia at National Taiwan University. He and two friends founded "Hypaa Studio" and developed a large-machine touchscreen music game called THEIA. That same year, Korean company PENTAVISION released DJ Max Technika on arcade platforms — similar gameplay to THEIA, but comprehensively surpassing it in music quality, interface design, and overall polish.¹

Yu Ming-yang said: "We thought fun gameplay would sell — but the market response taught us that visuals and music matter enormously."²

That sentence became the underlying logic for all of Rayark's subsequent products: gameplay is only the foundation; aesthetics is the moat.

In September 2011, the team established Rayark Games at a building on Jinshan North Road in Taipei, raising NT$30 million as start-up capital with a founding team of 16, shifting focus from arcade to mobile games.³

Cytus and Deemo: The Two Pillars of a Music Empire

In January 2012, Cytus launched on iOS.

The gameplay involves tapping notes in sync with a moving scanning line — simple and intuitive. But what truly made it stand out was the quality of its art and music. Science fiction-styled visual design and high-caliber original electronic music gave Cytus a distinct identity in a sea of similar mobile music games. It reached number one in 14 countries within a month of launch, held Japan's music game chart top spot for 29 consecutive days, and accumulated over 6 million downloads worldwide.⁴

In November 2013, Deemo launched. If Cytus was sci-fi electronic music, Deemo was classical piano. Players play piano in a fairy-tale-like black-and-white world; the music shifted from electronic to classical and lyrical, and the art style from cool sci-fi to warm hand-drawn illustration.⁵

Deemo became Rayark's biggest commercial hit. Its soundtrack charted on Japan's Oricon. The sequel, DEEMO II, surpassed one million downloads in its first week.⁶

📝 Curator's note
Cytus and Deemo established Rayark's brand formula: music game × high-quality art × narrative packaging. This formula gave Rayark a unique position in the global mobile game market, but also became a frame that constrained every subsequent attempt.

Stepping Outside the Comfort Zone: Implosion and Sdorica

Rayark did not stop at music games.

In April 2015, Implosion launched. This was a 3D action game with graphics quality approaching console-level for mobile games of the time. It used a paid download model on the App Store with no in-app purchases. Upon launch it won the 2015 iOS Game of the Year and recognition from the Bahamut ACG Creation Competition.⁷

Implosion proved Rayark's technical capability to cross genres. But the business model for action games is completely different from music games — music games rely on continuous DLC music pack updates to maintain revenue, while action games are a one-time purchase.

Then came Sdorica.

This was Rayark's boldest attempt: a mobile RPG, conceived in 2013, entering development in 2014, originally scheduled to launch in 2016, pushed to 2017, then pushed again to officially open beta on April 19, 2018.⁸

After launch, problems erupted one after another. The servers had underestimated player numbers, and in-game events kept going wrong. On June 27, 2018, Rayark changed several characters' ability values without announcement (including reducing Black Pucci's taunt and changing the four-soul technique limit from 3 to 2, and nerfing core team member Angelica SP), triggering a player trust crisis. On July 12 they released a "Bounty Pack" sold exclusively at convenience stores — priced at NT$5,000 (containing 2,500 crystals and 2 dragon tears) — which was lambasted as "utterly lacking in sincerity."⁹ Within four months the game slid from its peak, becoming a turning point in Rayark's reputation.

💡 Did you know?
Rayark rarely failed with music games or action games, but stumbled with an RPG requiring long-term operations. The core competency for music games and buy-once games is "making a great product"; the core competency for RPG operations is "continuously serving a community of people." These are completely different muscles.

The Cracks

In March 2020, Rayark's music director ICE, under his personal name, created a song containing Morse code supporting the Hong Kong protest movement. After the incident was exposed, ICE left Rayark; Rayark's China proxy agent, Longyuan, announced that the games would undergo revisions.¹⁰

This was Rayark's version of a "political landmine" incident. Unlike Red Candle's symbol controversy, Rayark's handling was to let the person leave and have the game adjusted to comply — choosing to protect the China market.

In January 2022, DEEMO II launched. The producer in an interview emphasized wanting to give the game a "cinematic feel," but the market response fell short of the original's.¹¹

In 2024, a post appeared on the PTT C_Chat board that sparked discussion: "How did Rayark just quietly disappear from the market?"¹²

The answer to this question is brutal: Rayark did not disappear — but its presence thinned. Cytus and Deemo built brand prestige, but subsequent products failed to achieve equivalent cultural penetration. Sdorica's operational missteps depleted the trust of core players. The Implosion: Never Lose Hope animated film, crowdfunded since 2015, has still not been officially released. The gaps between new product launches have grown longer and longer.

The People Still Here

Rayark's situation is the most typical predicament after an independent Taiwanese game studio succeeds: the first product explodes through passion and talent; subsequent products require organizational capability and operational discipline.

The market ceiling of music games determined that Rayark had to expand its categories — but every expansion dilutes the original brand identity. The players of Cytus and the players of Sdorica are completely different people; serving both groups under one brand name can easily result in both groups feeling "Rayark has changed."

But Rayark remains one of the few brands in Taiwan's gaming industry that can be named in the global market. Cytus's 6 million downloads, Deemo charting on Oricon, Implosion winning iOS Game of the Year — placed in Taiwan's 2025 mobile game market, these achievements still have no second company able to replicate them.

Yu Ming-yang learned in 2008 from an arcade machine that nobody bought: "Aesthetics matter." Seventeen years later, that sentence remains Rayark's greatest asset — and possibly its greatest constraint: when you define yourself as "the people who make the most beautiful games," the market's tolerance for your mistakes goes to zero.

Further Reading

• Taiwan Game Industry and Digital Entertainment — The panorama of Taiwanese gaming from licensing to original IP
• Red Candle Games — Another path for Taiwanese indie games: telling stories with history
• Daiyu Twin Swords — The starting point where Taiwanese games told stories in Chinese

References