Animal crossing sells by the bucket load and there are more people that hold a mobile in their hand than a Nintendo console. The potential to sell a premium game and make money is huge. I feel this is another game that has gone down the wrong route. If you put timers in a game, most people will sit out the timers, what you have then is a person not playing the game as they are waiting. Once something new and shiny comes along they will start playing it and this game will become a memory and will get uninstalled, what did it matter they spent more time not playing it than playing it anyway. Sure you will have people who will still play and some of those may pay to play, but they wont generate the money that a premium version would have. You could still sell currency but only currency you already earn in the game, for those who really cant wait, it wont matter, you made most the money from the premium game. You can make money on the game by selling add on areas as more are created, like they do in Warcraft and some other games. Even Gameloft bit the bullet with Modern Warfare 5 and that sold really really well. Animal crossing had wait timers in the game, but you couldn't pay to pass them, that was the beauty of it, it felt like things grew, you earned money like real life and saved to buy stuff, I played the heck out of that game, all versions of it.. The difference is Nintendo knows how to make a game, and make even waiting enjoyable as its part of the experience, the problem with a lot of the pay to play games is, I think they are afraid that they have to make money in as many ways as they can else they will make nothing. I think most lack faith, some companies don't lack faith, look at Oceanhorn, Monster Hunter and Monument Valley they sold by making a good premium game and word of mouth took over. This has the potential to be the Animal Crossing for iOS, I think Castaway Paradise blew it big time, in my eyes its whichever of these two games reverses the pay to play or relaxes it dramatically first will wipe up. Animal Crossing is £30 or more this game could sell for £5-10 premium and make its money, people will pay it, they already pay much more than that for Animal Crossing.
Reading these impressions is making me sad about this game. Some developers are just clueless with a poopy mindset.
I'm curious to see the tone of the articles when the game launches in the US...this seems to be the main source of public feedback and it's pretty negative. EDIT: ...and there's the TA article which buries comments about F2P at the end and is generally way more positive. Oh well. (http://toucharcade.com/2014/10/27/hands-on-with-seabeard/)
It looks exactly like Castaway, and I gave up on that because there was little to do bar 'chores' for villagers and the fact there was obvious restrictions early on, like the VIP cut off in your tent. I said about that one I would have paid up front, $5 or whatever, to have all accessible through actual play. My 7yr old daughter enjoyed it all for a day, then got bored ... which ensured I wasn't paying etra to commit to a sub for it, when she was already bored with it. So that's 2 completely different demographics with independent views on it. I would have let her play away if she wanted too, no influence from me. I looked on it as a kids game really from the off. Those saying it has a zelda vibe? not even close. Zelda games have a lot of character, depth, and longevity.
Ok. So the only way I could get this game to play was to log out of GC. So far I'm really loving the game. My only concern is losing my progress because 1.) It's on my Canadian account. 2.) I'm not logged into GameCenter. Hopefully there will be an update soon. I'd hate to lose what I've gained so far.
I really, really like this game. The art style is great, the interface design is great, and it's really clever how they've managed to turn what essentially amounts to a free to play timer game into something that feels like a world that's actually alive. That being said, how much you enjoy the game will definitely hinge heavily on whether or not you understand that under the hood Seabeard is a free to play timer game. These kind of games are never meant to just be played all day long in one huge marathon session. If that's the kind of game you're looking for, the App Store has tons of those, this isn't one of them. You'll hit stopping points like any game with an energy system. If you don't like free to play timer games, you're not going to like this one. There's not a whole lot of sense in forcing the issue. It seems pretty clear that's how Seabeard was designed, which makes feedback of "Just make it a paid game! Remove the timers!" a little like looking at Candy Crush and being like "Just remove the matching!" Timers are the gameplay here, and the magic of Seabeard is how well they're disguised. I love how I feel like I'm actually doing something versus when I load up Hay Day I basically just swipe my finger around on the screen to harvest and replant and I'm done for a couple hours. It's really smart game design, but it's not like I expected anything different from the team behind this game.
Eli, i would respectfully disagree. It would be like looking at Candy Crush and saying, "remove the lives". Something that the TA GotW, Puzzle to the center of the earth, has the option to do, which in my opinion was a brilliant decision, and option to have. Timers are not, and cannot be the *gameplay*, the gameplay is the exploration, building, battle, ie, *playing the game*. Timers are waiting, and waiting leads to not immersing yourself, or to the feeling that the game is not at your disposal to play when and where you wish. PS: i recently gave up on the trials frontier for the same reason. Excellent game, but with energy timers, and no option to play as long as you want - but to each his own. Cheers
http://appshopper.com/bestsellers/gros/?device=iphone Let's play count the number of online only games with timers in the top ten grossing list.
Eli, with all due respect, huh??? Even your reviewer, Eric Ford, praises the game's complexity and all of the fun things you can do within the game. He's certainly not praising the joys of timer gameplay.
My point is it's free to play timer mechanics powering the whole thing, utilized in incredibly clever ways that you don't even realize.
Hear, hear! Although I do understand some of the comments and I want a few things to develop faster, I see it as a turn based thing. I play a little while, think about my next moves, try to earn some money, try to make or deliver an item, see what else I can shake, pick up, catch, feed or find and decide which island will be the last visit of 'this round'. Just when I was going to suggest an option to trade with other players, I found out that there seems to be such a system in the game after I fixed the bridge on my home island! Can't wait to see what that's all about. Correction: I CAN wait. Just looking forward to. Oh, also enjoyed watching a bird play in the rain, while waiting for a few seconds to go by.
On the contrary. After playing for a while it's time to get back to real life and some games with timers can help with that.
Debating mobile game philosophies is awesome, but can anyone comment on the multiplayer? Is multiplayer a given with a game like this? That could be a game-changer (in a good way) for me.
...and the day the company folds from not making any money, you lose everything, your progress, your money from IAP's, everything. This is a single player game and should not be online. Gameloft gave in with Spiderman being online only, and now I feel I own the game and will play it wherever and whenever I feel like as its a single player game. There is a trend that is coming for need to be online free to play single player games, once money is involved, its not free to play, you own part of it. I respect developers, but I also think the player needs respect to. Its put me off the game completely I was so hoping for an iOS Animal Crossing game to play on the go, but all my iOS devices are WIFI only and therefore I can really only play this reliably at home so may as well play the real thing on my 3DS console... I think they should consider a premium IAP to make this a full blown game with the timers and inventory re-balanced accordingly, better to get £5 out of me for that IAP than nothing at all, which is what they probably will get with it as it stand. Best of both worlds for them that way.
Yes, the people who enjoy these kinds of games play them in bursts. I highly recommend shoulder surfing people on the subway or something like that if this concept is foreign to you. Watching my girlfriend play iPhone games was a pretty great learning experience. She's got a rotation of around four free to play games she plays throughout the day. It takes her about 15 minutes to go through the tasks on her Hay Day farm, another 15 to go through what she has to do in Plunder Pirates, maybe 10 or so to burn through her Candy Crush lives, and now the 15 minutes that Seabeard provides. That's ~1 hour of gameplay that costs her nothing. She rarely has time in one session to get through all the games she plays, and by the time she's got time to play iPhone games again all of her timers are up and the cycle starts over. I've grilled her pretty hard on this and she tells me she almost never reaches a point where she doesn't have anything to do in all of the games she plays. When she does, she'll download something else for free. If she likes it, it becomes part of her rotation. That reason is why she plays Plunder Pirates now. Mobile games have been huge for female casual gamers, to the point that this is a main demographic now that developers target. Maybe not females specifically, but definitely casual gamers. If you don't fall inside of that demographic that's fine! There's tons of games out there that you can play instead. This whole complete confusion of who plays these kind of games though is really weird. Lots of people do. Just because Seabeard isn't the kind of game you want to play doesn't mean you need to force it or get into long winded debates about what it means to play a game. Different strokes for different folks, focus your energy on something you enjoy instead of something you don't.
Maybe I'm crazy or something, but I always wondered why developers don't just publish two separate versions of their games; a free one with timers and ads for the casual players who doesn't want to spend a lot of time/money, and a premium priced version for people who just want to play the complete game without iap everywhere. Wouldn't that be the best of both worlds?
The vast overwhelming majority of people will download the free one. It's kind of like when you have games or apps with advertisements in them. Everyone gets so worked up about there not being an ad-free option or IAP to disable ads. From everything I've seen, and everything I've heard from developers, high-90% of the time no one goes for that, making it rarely even worth the cost of implementing in the first place. Totally rebalancing Seabeard and releasing two different sku's to appease a niche group of gamers when the bread and butter of the App Store is the mainstream casual audience just doesn't make a whole lot of sense with what a vicious market it is out there. You want to cast as wide of a net as possible.
I assume the always online is to prevent people cheating or hacking the game for free gold and to sell iap.
