There are several things that I think contributed to this game closing on August 13, and I feel like it is a combination of these things that lead to this eventual end. I don’t think it was any one thing, but rather a lot of things adding up to the outcome being what it is.
- Lack of Sticky Events
When they held the Christmas themed even in December 2019, there were two things that happened. Several ghosts had Christmas themed costumes on, and it was super fun to catch those. The problem was that you didn’t get to KEEP that look after the event. They all reverted to the normal version of the ghost. (This is likely because they limited you to one of each ghost on your team, as evidenced by the Playmobil Librarian being able to be placed on the same team as The Librarian.) They also introduced a new ghost called Yuki, which was near impossible to find, even though she was meant to be the highlight of the event. - Changing the costs of things early on
When the game was just starting out, some things cost half as much as they did for the rest of the life of the game. A month or so into the release, they doubled the cost, and took a monthly event and made it weekly. Both of these events frustrated some of the players who were pumping money into it. - A single winner for each multiplayer event
There should have been some way of sorting players into multiple groups so that more people had a chance at the good prizes. Perhaps even sorting players based on level, and limiting groups to 500, so that 1 player out of every 500 would win? Doesn’t have to be that ratio, though. As far as I know, there were 3 or 4 players that dominated from the start of the game until the end (for the most part). And that’s world-wide. - Negative players early on
There were a few players in the game’s global chat early in the game’s lifespan that would say “this game is dead,” and they would say it frequently and often, while they continued to play the game themselves. They were frustrated because the developers weren’t upgrading the game as “quickly” as Niantic was upgrading Pokemon Go. The problem with this attitude was that the game was new, and Pokemon Go had a few years on this one. At the start of Pokemon Go, there were tons of crashes, and lots of problems, and they didn’t even have all 151 original Pokemon in the game. Within the first six months of Ghostbusters World, there were 152 ghosts available. That’s impressive. These players were also saying that the launch of Wizards Unite was all they were waiting for and then everyone would jump over to that game. Well, Wizards Unite launched, and did that happen? No. - Terrible rewards for leveling up
As you level up, your rewards should also level up to match… this didn’t happen. - Terrible Odds at getting great ghosts
When you have spent weeks getting the shards needed to combine Gozer or Vigo, or Nine-Tailed Fox, among others, and you do that and get a low ranked version of that ghost, it was disheartening. From player research, some players would combine enough shards to make over 100 of the ghost, and still not get the S ranked version. - Lack of Communication
Early on, there was decent communication with the support team. Eventually the pair of support team members dwindled down to one, who would respond to things every so often. - Lack of Updates
The last actual game update was around the end of May in 2019. Because of this, people knew something was up. This lead to the number of compatible cell phones beginning to dwindle. - Lack of Advertising
Early on, this game had a load of advertising, and it dropped to next to nothing. If they had added features like friend codes, and trading, people would have naturally been advertising the game on social media, to add more friends in the game. The lack of these features really hurt the natural, organic social marketing that happens all the time with Pokemon Go. - A Global Pandemic
How do I play Ghostbusters World? It’s probably the #1 most asked question in the chat in the game. Most people didn’t understand that this is a walking game. A game like Pokemon Go. That said, Pokemon Go has made many changes to make the game work from the comfort of home. They haven’t done everything they should yet, but they’re working on it. That said, without developers actively developing this game, it did not get the modifications needed to properly play the game from anywhere. With a pandemic going on, games like this must adapt to the paradigm shift, and that’s a fact. - When Multiplayer Bosses Broke, They NEVER Fixed It
This was one of the worst things to happen. Of the 152 ghosts in the game, there are 3 you can only get through multiplayer battles… and while those three kept appearing once a week (every third week), you could never create a room to fight them after a certain point. And they never thought it was important enough to fix. Because of this, a lot of us weren’t ever able to collect Stay Puft. - Competitive landscape in AR games
The landscape of games like this now includes Pokemon Go, Jurassic World Alive, The Walking Dead, Men in Black: Global Invasion, Ingress, and Wizards Unite (bleh). Not to mention Minecraft Earth, the upcoming Catan AR game from Niantic, and others still coming soon. There are so many for players to choose from today, it’s no surprise that some would get lost in the shuffle. Imagine what would happen if a Star Wars game like this was released… - Impossible to track down mini-bosses
Once you found the location of a mini-boss, you could likely return to that location and find them again. But there were some that I never saw. And this is a real shame. - Some ghosts were just too rare
Never did find a Black Slime Behemoth… and several others. And I’ll say this: If an Ecto-Sphere is supposed to be a rank 3-5 sphere… it should give you a rank 5 ghost from time to time.
Can you think of additional reasons that combined together with these would have lead to Ghostbusters World being shut down?
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