Tokyo Ghoul: Dark War

» see tokyoghoul.gamesamba.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Tokyo Ghoul: Dark War switched its servers off at midnight Pacific time on 28 April 2021, ten days short of three years old. The notice was signed by the operation team rather than by any person, which is the normal way.

The thing most write-ups get wrong, and I had it wrong too before checking, is who made it: an American company called GameSamba, headquartered north of Seattle with offices in Hong Kong and Tokyo, working from a Studio Pierrot license with Funimation attached. It both built and published the game. The cutscenes used Funimation's English dub.

It did about 2.2 million installs on Google Play and sat at 4.27 out of five across more than forty-five thousand ratings, which is a perfectly respectable record. Metacritic never gave it a score because no critic ever reviewed it. The last update of any kind shipped on 29 June 2020, so the game spent its final ten months running untouched.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the announcement nobody believed ~

Word reached the players around 1 April. The earliest fan videos are dated that day and they say the game is closing on 30 April; the publisher's own notice, dated the 26th, gives 28 April instead, so the date appears to have moved forward by two days, though I can only show you the later document and not the earlier one. What is plainly on the record is a player writing on 6 April that he had finally pulled Juuzou and was hoping the whole thing was an April Fools prank.

The order of operations did not help. Purchases and downloads were killed on 2 April, twenty-six days before the servers went off, so by the time anyone read the farewell notice its first item was something that had already happened weeks earlier. The uninstall arrived before the eulogy.

~ three games, three graves ~

Tokyo Ghoul itself reached me fine. The manga and the anime traveled the way anime has always traveled, which is to say without consulting anybody about territory. The game went the other way: GameSamba shipped it to six countries and every one of them has English as a first language. A story crosses a border in an afternoon, while the app built from that story needs a rights-holder and a storefront in your region to agree with each other first.

There is a second oddity here. The Japanese rights-holder had its own Tokyo Ghoul phone game, :re Invoke, published by Bandai Namco and rebuilt for the West as :re Birth. Both of those closed on 26 November 2019, seventeen months before Dark War did.

So the licensee's side project outlasted the official version, and when its servers went dark in April 2021 there was no Tokyo Ghoul mobile game running anywhere on earth. That lasted until Break the Chains turned up in November 2023, which then managed nine months. Three games have now been built from this manga for phones and all three are dead.

~ the advertisement outlived the game ~

The notice promised the website would close on 7 May 2021. In December 2022 it was still serving its full marketing page, still inviting you to choose from over fifty characters and build your ultimate dream team, nineteen months after there was anything to build it in.

GameSamba's own homepage kept returning the same bytes every day until January 2026, its navigation bar still listing Naruto: Slugfest alongside a pair of Star Trek browser games, all of them dead too. The page came down when the DNS record finally lapsed.

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