Let The Interviews Begin!

Will displays his collection of artifacts
Hey all! Before the game closes down I want to give it a proper send off, by arranging some interviews with the ambassadors, influencers and maybe even some of the voice cast & crew behind the game where I can. Selfishly, this is to help push myself in to doing Community Management work and have things to show off in my portfolio, but I thought it would be something the community would appreciate & find interesting. I did one with Patric M Verrone before we knew the game was set for closure.
The next one of these is with the very well known u/Will_W who of course did a bunch of event and theory/gameplay videos on his channel here. Without further ado, please find his answers to my inane questions!

Let The Interviews Begin!

Q. Hello WillBits. You are well known within the FWOT Community. How do you feel about the game closing down?
Whatever grieving I might have once done for FWOT has unfortunately long run its course. I think there was a lot of wasted opportunity & a lot of poor decisions that got us here, and it's interesting to reflect back on all of that, but I've come a long way from my younger days in how I feel about endings. It's kind of nice when things end, when a chapter closes and we move on to fresh, new things. I think there's a lot we could learn from all of this, but instead of doing that hey guys look Futurama's back on the TeeVee pass that Ol' Fortran Spirit and top me off on the Bachelor Chow babbbyyyy!
Q. How did you get involved in making the videos for the game?
I had already been running a YouTube channel as kind of a variety channel for a while. Playing lots of different games and finding various successes with it. Some minor hits, mostly a lot of misses. I'd always loved Futurama and I'd also been playing a lot of... city-builder, dude collector mobile games already in my spare time. I'd gone hard on both Simpsons: Tapped out and Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff, although I never really covered either one, it seemed like there was always a lot of demand for info and not a lot of great sources for games like that with constantly refreshing and evolving events. I was never as into those franchises as I was into Futurama so it seemed like a fun thing to try my hand at. I hadn't planned on covering it as extensively as I did, but when the videos took off I was like "well, here's a dragon to chase" so I did!
Q. When did you start playing the game?
It probably helps that I was also very, very lucky. I was already working as an animator out here in Los Angeles and I have a lot of friends in the animation and games industries. When the game first had it's launch party, a friend of mine knew how crazy I was about the series and also mobile games and I asked if I wanted to attend the party.
Lemme tell you, this was a good party. The entire cast was there just hanging out, I joked about Bachelor Chow but they had actually made some there you could snack on, there were lots of little events and also an early draft of the game able to be played on little phones they had set up. So technically I played a pre-beta cut of everything! It's kind of a weird game to play at a party though, since by design you usually play for like a minute or two and then come back and check hours later.
As far as seriously playing on my personal account, I was a Day 1 player of course! Jumped on it right away, and I guess now I'll technically be a Day Zero player as well. I watched it come into this world (of tomorrow) and I'm gonna watch it go out!
Q. Be honest, when did you last play the game?
I opened it up while chatting specifically so I could cross reference things I haven't looked at in a bit and I deeply regret it because I know it's gonna be spamming 'COME BACK' at me for days now. But as far as actually playing the game, like attempting to take it seriously and unlock things? I kept playing for probably a couple months after events stopped, there was a while when I was seriously pushing characters to 99 just so I could flex.
While I got some free pizza to go wild with I didn't get that much free pizza, and the only way to really efficiently grind the absurd amount of chips and Nixonbucks required to level someone to 99 meant mostly spending pizza on fuel and just grinding the farm maps for hours, and I spent several weekends still doing that (much to the chagrin of my family).
By my count I currently have... 42 characters maxed out at 99? I have several others in the 80s, but there are still just so many characters in the game. I would've easily had them all by now if I'd kept with it but as the months went on there wasn't a lot of motivation to do so.
I think when Cornwood did a repeat I played like the first week of it but didn't even do the rest. I already had all the characters and there was nothing new for veteran players which I think was a bit of a misstep, but maybe not one they could have done anything about.
Q. What would you have liked to see TinyCo/Jam City do anything differently with the game? Do you think they made any mistakes?
They should've programmed more mobile alerts than just 'COME BACK'. But in all seriousness, they ramped up the FOMO too hard and too fast. Which makes me wonder if the game wasn't actually struggling even before it started really obviously struggling. The Hallowe'en / Robot Hell Event was way too over-tuned and it made a lot of people stop playing, and then the X-mas event hit right before that.
But that history is all well known at this point. And I have to wonder if this fate wasn't inevitable from the outset and the poor / short-sighted game decisions didn't just expedite the process. This nature of video game is, by design, built around FOMO and kind of exhausting players into spending on premium characters and conveniences, and they all seem to have had a limited shelf life where they either get cancelled or put into more minimal maintenance modes.
Futurama in particular seems like it was always going to be a tricky IP for this style of game. It's always been a more niche show than the other mainline animated sitcoms, and the fans in that niche also tend to be--well I don't know if I want to say "smarter" but certainly nerdier in a very specific way. And I think that audience might be less susceptible to going along with pay to play schemes and way more likely to do things like spend all day fighting robots with Defenders, slowly chipping down the robots 1 damage point at a time in order to avoid spending money on a couple bombs. That kind of fanaticism makes us a little harder to monetize. We will grind ourselves into the dust to avoid the FOMO rather than opening our wallets lol.
I kinda wish I could've been a fly on the wall of the design team room during the Robot Hell event because I bet it was wild.
Q. Any characters you feel should have been added before the end?
Cubert is the biggest, most conspicuous absence. My understanding is he was in production and already at least partially animated when the wheels started to come off. Dwight was finished so he made it in I suppose, but in my opinion the two kids should've been added as main story characters. Let them hang out with Tinny Tim and make him not an X-mas exclusive, that way you can also do costume variants of them and what have you.
Q. Will you be watching the show when it comes back to our screens in Summer?
Yeah sure okay. I mean, haha, yes I definitely will watch it, but this ties into my opening statement a bit--Futurama is a real Ship of Theseus at this point. And to be fair, anything that lasts this long has to in one form or the other. The Simpsons in season 34 is almost unrecognizable from the Simpsons in season 1, but when a show has been running continuously it gets harder to place the exact moment that things meaningfully changed.
Every time Futurama comes back, it's a different show. Like yeah it's the same voice actors, and the same creators, and many of the same writers and artists--but never all. And even the ones still there have changed. There will be new writers, and new artists, and try as they might they will make a different show.
Now that doesn't mean it will be bad, of course. It may be good. It might even be better! I can't wait to watch and find out.
And yet part of me can feel how much I've changed on this issue. There used to be few things I wanted more than revivals of my favorite properties. But like a Monkey's Paw curling, more and more I've gotten what I thought I asked for, and finding that the nostalgia is not enough. That sometimes we rob ourselves of new and exciting experiences when we don't allow ourselves endings. We don't let ourselves grieve and, yes, appreciate the old, but realize we must also move on to bigger and brighter things.
Futurama has been blessed with multiple endings. Many chances to say goodbye and they've all been beautiful. I suspect we will get at least one more, and I'll watch it again with tears in my eyes. But this time I almost kind of hope it's the last one and we let things come to a close.
Q. Now that the game is done, what is next in the life of WillBits? I know you have been working on The Great North.
Yep! I have not really been posting content online hardly at all! If you're a WillBits historian (do we have those?) you probably know I started playing Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery when Jam City started also shifting its attention towards that and away from FWOT, which was also a double-edged sword in my life. It was a very popular game at launch and my viewership shot up with it.
But ultimately that audience was huge but very fickle. They would show up in droves for Hogwarts Mystery but wouldn't even look at any other games or content, which is fine--I don't blame anyone for that, everybody's going to watch what the enjoy, but it was absolutely disastrous for the YouTube algorithms.
I had made a gamble, you see. I'm an animator at heart, and I loved editing and making skits for gaming content, but deep down I really want to make original things. Fresh, new things! So I spent months developing a "season" of original content--and I'll be the first to admit they are pretty flawed, both in writing and animation execution. But my hope was that the audience I had picked up via covering games would at least watch the new shorts, and that would be enough engagement to launch the channel out into the greater algorith--but ultimately the opposite occurred. People there for mobile game coverage don't are about animated shorts (and vice versa) so they all performed just terribly. I still have several partially completed episodes that I've never put out because, well, one I've become very critical of them, and also it simply isn't a very financially responsible way to spend my time currently.
So I went back into the studios! And at just the right time, it seems. The animation industry is getting hit HARD right now (HBO and Netflix really pulled out the long knives, and there are huge layoffs happening at Disney as we type this). Currently FOX and Bento Box are being very, very kind and I'm having a great time working on The Great North and, to be honest, keeping my head down and weathering the storm (if you'd like to help feel free to check it out on Sundays on FOX, or streaming on Hulu and Disney+ in some areas, it is a very wholesome sitcom!)
Optimally I'll be working on TGN until it is cancelled, and with any luck that won't be soon (it's already been picked up for a 4th season). But if FOX executives start getting skittish in the same way some of our peers have been you, uh... may seem me come roaring back in an attempt to keep the lights on, but for now I am deeply appreciative of having a reliable paycheck to keep food on the table.
Thanks to WillBits for chatting with me. As mentioned (and linked above), you can see Will's work on Hulu or Disney+ and he's still around here from time to time. If anyone can get me a line with u/TinyNixon for some Q & A, let me know!