Lonie Wu, Director of Community and Operations for GameSamba, took time from her very busy Anime Expo 2018 schedule to talk about the latest of GameSamba's mobile and web titles with GamePress.
Browser games are getting a little harder because everything is switching over the HTML. With HTML5 we have good opportunities to be on both web and mobile, since it works on both platforms. But we find that certain audiences like certain platforms to play on. So it’s just -- picking and choosing which game goes where.
We already have a browser game out right now. It’s not an official launch; it’s in open beta currently. It should be live -- full launch -- any time now! The mobile game will actually be a full MMO, which is different from the turn-based browser game. In my opinion, the mobile game is going to be way more worth it, but if you like browser games then you will like Fairy Tail: Hero's Journey.
Yep!
GameSamba Partnerships
Right now… Tokyo Ghoul: Dark War is our biggest thing because it’s live already. Our next biggest will either be Attack on Titan: Assault or Fairy Tail: Mobile, whichever comes first. All three of those actually will involve the partnership with Funimation, so you’ll be seeing them doing giveaways and us doing giveaways…
Yeah!
18: Dream World
18: Dream World has a really good storyline, and then it turned into an anime which brought it more attention! That and it being tied to Funimation -- because Funimation also had the license for the anime -- so we were able to do cross-promotions there like always --
Yup, exactly. We try to help each other out as much as we can.
The story is that you’re the main character and you have a helper guide who’s with you. You're confused and you don’t know where you are, and you're running through this dream world where you’re stuck. You're saving goddesses locked in a coma, and you have to fight to help them get their memory back. The goddesses turn into witches, and then the witches turn back into goddesses and become your helpers, and they do cool skills. All the characters have skills, and they all look super cool!
(laughs)
And the art’s really nice!
I think my favourite part of the story is connecting to one of the characters. I think it’s super easy for any person to connect to one of those characters because there’s so many of them.
Tokyo Ghoul: Dark War
I don’t really know what challenges they ran into, but I know we’ve been planning this PVP system since before the game was launched. And we’ve finally reached it! We had to have a PVP especially in Tokyo Ghoul: Dark War.
(laughs)
Yeah! We made sure we got that in there -- we’ve been working on it for a long time and it’s finally out. We’re excited about it.
Star Trek: Alien Domain
It depends on the game. I mostly handle the English speaking community, we do have German, French, Chinese, Japanese, it goes on! We have Portuguese also. But like, Tokyo Ghoul: Dark War is only in English territories, so it’s usually in English. If someone from another country has the game, or someone in North America wants to speak to us in another language, we will try, but…
Yeah. (laughs)
Fairy Tail: Hero's Journey
Yeah, the timing is so hard to get right on that. So it takes a while to optimize it to the perfect timing.
For Fairy Tail: Hero's Journey, so far right now.
No. I mean, we have more servers than one on Tokyo Ghoul: Dark War, they’re only separated by device right now, IOS or Android. So those servers are separated. Actually, our PVP that we just launched will be cross-platform.
No, they’re just on different servers, because we launched IOS after we launched Android so we want the IOS users to kind of catch up to the Android users before we shove them all together, because we don’t want them to feel overpowered by people that had a headstart.
(laughs)
Yeah, so eventually they’ll cross but for now they’re separated.
Not that I can mention right now!
There’s a lot of stuff in the works, and a lot of it is coming soon. Hopefully we’ll have announcements ready for you guys. (laughs)
Transcript edited for readability; Photo Credits: GamePress, GameSamba.