About nine months ago, the developer for Girls’ Frontline 2, a gacha strategy game, said it’d be keeping the Chinese and global games a year apart. As the Chinese-based version of the game launched in 2023 and was followed in 2024 in the West, it made sense.
A lot of gacha games and other imported online games do this, so that both sets of players can experience everything. However, now developer Sunborn is scrapping that idea and plans to catch the global version of the game up with the Chinese one, which has ticked off a few players.
In an interview with 4Gamer, a Japanese outlet, producer of Girls’ Frontline and CEO of Sunborn, Yuzhong, said that he wants to get the two versions in parity with each other. Translated by X (formerly Twitter) user Ceia, Yuzhong said:
“Our goal is to ‘catch up and completely match the service content of the global version with the mainland version.” It won’t be immediately, but we intend to completely synchronize the progress eventually.”
When questioned about anything bad happening to content when it’s shrunk down, the CEO assured the interviewer that they’d work on ensuring people don’t miss out.
The idea of syncing up the two versions is great, but as pointed out on the Gacha Gaming Reddit forum, it’s probably going to result in fewer rewards from events. Those invested in gacha games will want all the time they can get with certain events, trying to clutch as many free items from the game before it expires.
The catch-up plan worries players due to FOMO
Girls’ Frontline 2 usually runs its events and special gacha banners (think the advertising on top of those capsule toy machines) for about six weeks. Players have already noticed that one of the latest was only done for three, resulting in a net loss. Some players, having seen this and the lack of compensation for the missed three weeks, don’t seem to have confidence that this will be a smooth transition.
User Rockman13X said:
“They cut a major event from 6 weeks to 3. We lost 3 weeks of raw income from dailies, weekly endgame modes, and stuff. And we got nothing in the return for those [three] lost week[s].
“It seems like they just gave up on [the] idea [of] keeping relative distance between main server and global because they treat main server as beta testers and global as [a] stupid cash cow at this point.”
However, it’s not a plan that’s being designed to create a fear-of-missing-out scenario. The development of two versions of the game must be a headache, and Yuzhong pretty much states as much:
“Also, from our perspective, it’s more efficient from a development perspective to provide the same content to users worldwide with a single build system rather than operating multiple servers with different progress.
“While the associated localization work will be a new burden, synchronizing progress will increase the game’s fun and focus development, so we see it as a challenge we absolutely must take on.”
Previous Girls’ Frontline 2 drama is utterly bizarre and almost tanked the game
Girls’ Frontline 2 hasn’t been bereft of drama, what gacha game is? Around the launch of the game in China, the game was essentially boycotted by players after a bizarre jump to the conclusion that they were being cucked. You know, the act of being denied, usually involving watching from a chair.
A returning character, Daiyan, a reported fan favorite thanks to being Chinese, spoke with another character, Raymond. Digging into the files, players found that a majority of the lines rarely involved the player character and were essentially only these two interacting.
The resulting backlash caused Girls’ Frontline 2 to drop from China’s top 200 earners on app stores, and the team rewrote the story twice.
I’m sure going forward, the global fans of the game will be entirely normal about the potential rushed nature of the incoming changes, even if it means the developers aren’t seemingly overworked.
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