GameSamba Interview at Anime Expo 2018

GameSamba Interview at Anime Expo 2018

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.


GameSamba works on both browser-based and mobile games. What have been the biggest challenges for each format when it comes to developing the game?

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.

You said earlier that Fairy Tail is going to have both a mobile and browser aspect to it?

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.

So this differentiation -- like, the MMO is because it’s going towards mobile? Is that the trend that you’re following?

Yep!

Attack on Titan: Assault

GameSamba Partnerships

We noticed that you have a lot of different partnerships such as with Funimation…
We have a partnership with Kodansha -- Fairy Tail: Mobile and Attack on Titan:Assault are licensed with them. We do have a very strong relationship with Funimation though. They are our sister company, so that helps us out a lot with deciding which titles to go for, and we have a lot of cross-promotions we do with each other.
What are the current promotions going on right now?

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…

So promotional campaigns, stuff like that?

Yeah!

18: Dream World

18: Dream World

Does Gamesamba develop the games? Do you localize the games?
We do both. We have 18: Dream World, and they also made an anime out of it called 18if. It was developed in Japan and we localized it into English and published it in North America. Most of our current games, we’re developing through our other offices. We have an office in Japan, an office in Hong Kong… we try to keep it as in-house as possible.
18 is a very popular game with some of the community -- what goes into making a game so successful when branding is usually so critical in a project's chances of success?

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 --

So you could build the brand from both sides.

Yup, exactly. We try to help each other out as much as we can.

Would you care to expand a bit about 18?

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!

What’s the best part about the story?

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

Tokyo Ghoul: Dark War

Would you like to expand about other games, like Tokyo Ghoul: Dark War?
Tokyo Ghoul: Dark War is an action RPG. It goes through seasons 1 and 2 and you’re fighting along the storyline -- it has the clips of the anime in there. It’s super fun! We just did a major update last night for our real time PvP. There’s the generic PVP and it kind looks like it’s a MOBA but you’re fighting against a bot, always. But now it’s real-time PVP where you can pick and ban characters and enter into -- it’s kind of more like an open space so it’s not like a MOBA map -- and you fight each other in real-time, so that’s pretty exciting.
It must’ve been really challenging to implement PvP, given there’s a lot of different games where you go for rankings instead. So what challenges that you ran into when making the PvP?

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.

Yeah, you’ve got to get into that action!

(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.

Your games seem to have a pretty wide diversity of genres. Are there any genres that Gamesamba is looking forward to working on?
We have some more anime titles coming out -- I can’t announce them yet but they are pretty big and well known titles! (laughs) So look out for the announcements for those. We also have Star Trek: Alien Domain, and we’re making some improvements on that title.
Star Trek: Alien Domain

Star Trek: Alien Domain

So how’s the path with Star Trek: Alien Domain been so far?
We’ve been live for 3 years now, and we have a very strong, dedicated community. They’re very opinionated! (laughs) And they actually love the game so much that they help us with their feedback constantly. We actually have a Star Trek council and we go in meetings with them -- like voice meetings with them on Discord -- and chat with them and grab their feedback to push it through to the developers and see what we can get done. That’s worked out pretty well for us and it’s worked out well for them because they’re still around! It’s very interesting and very different from the anime world. (laughs)
Definitely, that sounds very different! Speaking of communities, are you mostly localized for an American community or is it mostly global?

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…

It’s kind of hard.

Yeah. (laughs)

Fairy Tail: Hero's Journey

Fairy Tail: Hero's Journey

You're working mostly in America for distribution? Are there any games that are particularly popular in other countries?
Our Fairy Tail: Hero's Journey web game is worldwide, so we have crazy amounts of people from all over the country in our support and in our forums and we try the best that we can to get to all of them, but luckily for us a lot of them do understand English and speak English so that helps us out a lot. The hardest thing to deal with in a worldwide game is when there’re events, like PVP events or world bosses...
Oh, so like timing?

Yeah, the timing is so hard to get right on that. So it takes a while to optimize it to the perfect timing.

So this is a global server, with everybody’s on the same server?

For Fairy Tail: Hero's Journey, so far right now.

What about your other games, are they differentiated by servers?

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.

That’s very exciting! Are there differences between the IOS and Android servers?

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.

That’s fair, that way everyone has fun!

(laughs)

Yeah, so eventually they’ll cross but for now they’re separated.

So far you’ve worked with CBS studios. Are there any other studios that you plan on working with?

Not that I can mention right now!

Sounds like there’s stuff in the works?

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)

I think that’s all we have for today. Thank you so much for answering our questions!

Transcript edited for readability; Photo Credits: GamePress, GameSamba.

Our very own Hakurai pictured alongside Kamishiro Rize, a heroine of Tokyo Ghoul.