Could (Niantic? Ludare? Ludia? Someone else?) take over Ghostbusters World?

Many of us have probably seen this happen with mobile games in the past. Sometimes the original developer of a game can’t keep running it, or doesn’t want to, for whatever reason. So they have a few options.

1. They can just keep the game running, providing bug fixes on occasion, but never really focusing on it again.
2. They can shut the game down, which happens more often than not, because there are so many games on the market, with more added every day.
3. They can transfer the game’s assets to another game company who will then pick up the game and run with it.

Transferring a Game has Precedent

That third option is the one we’ll take a look at, here. I used to play a game called “Smurfs Village” a lot more heavily than I do now (which is to say, I open the game about 1 time per year to see what’s new, only to find the interface has changed tremendously, but the game is still running fine). The funny thing is, I found that it has changed hands twice.

It started out being developed at Beeline sometime around 2010. It was buggy, and crashed a lot, but they set the stage for the game. The game was purchased by Bongfish and Flashman Studios in 2016, who started with an initial phase of stabilization, resulting in a 99% crash-free rate, and then they connected directly with players. And finally, in September 2019, they announced that PopReach Incorporated would be taking over the game development. No idea why it changed hands a second time, but it did. The interesting thing is reading through the comments on this forum thread about the changing of developers from fans. They loved the communication they had with Bongfish Games.

Who Could Pick up Ghostbusters World?

Anyway, here we are… the license may be running out for this game at 4:33 Creative Lab and Nextage. So there are multiple options.

Niantic

Niantic is the developer of Pokemon Go, Ingress, Wizards Unite, and have a bunch of other games in development, including one based on the tabletop game Settlers of Catan. This developer would probably be my number one choice. Sure, some of their games have bugs, but they quickly work those out of their games. When Pokemon Go launched, there were a lot of issues with crashes, but that’s largely because the number of people who wanted to play the game surpassed their wildest expectations. And not by a small margin either. They did not expect it to grow as fast as it did, and had to scramble to catch up, and every time they thought they had expanded enough, they needed more.

So yes, Niantic would be a great place for this game. I’m sure that one thing they might do is spend time, with their team, fixing bugs in the game, and making changes to the monetization of the game, so that it operates similarly to the rest of their games. After that, I’m guessing that they’d add in their player account system, so that they can transfer our account information to a new version of the game. And finally, they would likely start building the game on their own platform, so they can migrate all of us over with a single update once they had a stable version in place.

Honestly, Niantic has big licenses, and Ghostbusters is one of the biggest, so it seems like a great place for them. And Niantic has a single team per game. They share resources and ideas, and can also share development resources whenever necessary, but mostly the developers will work on a single game.

Ludia

This is the company behind Jurassic World Alive. I’ve known about them since playing multiple games from them, including Jurassic Park Builder, Jurassic World: The Game, and Dragons: Rise of Berk. It looks like they also have a Ninja Turtles game.

While I didn’t really like the capture method of the Jurassic World Alive game, and I’ve watched as they seem to have built in tons of ways that we can spend our money into their games, they do a good job with the quality of the games. And Jurassic World Alive does have a rather large player base, from what I’ve seen.

I think it could work out over here.

Ludare

When Ghostbusters World was down for a couple of weeks in 2019, I played this company’s Men in Black: Global Invasion. I still open the game from time to time. If I played it as much as I play Ghostbusters World, I would probably be doing very well in it, but I am at a place in the game where I would have to grind for a while to get my aliens strong enough to fight at the gyms they have all over in the game.

That said, they run events regularly, and seem to have a similar system to Ghostbusters World that seems like it would be a natural fit as well. Plus, it’s another game coming from a Sony Pictures property. I had also reached out to Ludare via their website and asked them if they would ever consider taking over the Ghostbusters World game, and to my surprise, they replied!

Thanks for getting in touch. We appreciate the kind words and are glad you enjoyed playing MIB: Global Invasion. Ghostbusters is a classic franchise and a lot of us here at Ludare grew up watching the films and cartoons. We’d be happy to have a conversation around Ghostbusters World if an opportunity to work together presents itself.

Now, this response is a great one, you know it’s written by someone there, and not just a bot or a canned response. And the wording is very positive. It’s not a guarantee or anything, clearly. Especially since I emailed them last September.

Mojang

Since I’m not really in to Minecraft, I’ve never played Minecraft Earth, which I guess is in early access at this point anyway. They really want that game to work, though, and it is a Microsoft property that is very large, so I could see it doing well. That said, they pretty much seem to develop only Minecraft related mobile games. So I would probably not consider them an option.

Anyone else?

Is there any other developer that you would like to see take over Ghostbusters World? Anyone want to start a petition or some kind of letter writing campaign to save this game with another developer?

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