Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

» see ac-pocketcamp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i have never played a minute of Animal Crossing on any device. Nintendo was never a normal thing to own in turkey. For most of the years that mattered there was no official presence here, consoles came in through importers with the price that implies, and the culture around them stayed abroad while mine was a pc in a room with a modem and later a room full of pcs in an internet cafe. Pocket Camp is the only entry in the series that could have reached me, since it was free and it ran on a phone i already had, and it still did not.

Nintendo announced it in a Direct on 25 october 2017 and released it in australia the same day, then worldwide on 21 november. It was the company's fourth phone app, built by Nintendo EPD with Nintendo Cube, and it shrank the series down to a single campsite. You gathered wood and cotton for the animal neighbors camped nearby, and an alpaca named Cyrus turned the materials into furniture, which attracted the specific neighbors whose taste you had been furnishing for.

Underneath sat Leaf Tickets. You earned them slowly or you bought them, and they skipped the timers that everything else in the game ran on. Later came fortune cookies, which were loot boxes with ten possible items and a five-star tier nobody was pulling, and later still a monthly subscription. Reviews landed at 72 on Metacritic, warm about the world and tired of the clock.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it asked for ~

Financially it worked for a long time. $50 million in revenue by september 2018 and more than $150 million by april 2020. By november 2021 lifetime player spending had passed $250 million, which put it behind only Fire Emblem Heroes among Nintendo's phone games. April 2020 was the best month it ever had at an estimated $7.9 million, for the obvious reason: New Horizons had just landed on the Switch and the world was indoors.

~ the funny part ~

On 21 august 2024 Nintendo announced the end, and it was not a normal shutdown notice. The online service would stop on 28 november 2024. Four days after that, on 2 december, the same game would return as Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete, a paid app with no microtransactions and no requirement to be online, and your save data would carry across to it. Leaf Tickets would not. The price was $19.99, discounted to $9.99 for the first two months.

People paid. Complete took roughly $2.6 million in its first week and passed $3 million by 9 december, and on 8 december it recorded $505,000 in a single day, more than the free version had made on any day since december 2017. That money was not buying new content. It was buying the right to keep a campsite that had been decorated for seven years.

~ what got buried with it ~

What actually died on 28 november 2024 was the multiplayer. Complete is single-player by design, so visiting other people's campsites and the player market are gone for good, and what is left is a decorating game with the sociality removed. For a series whose whole subject is neighbors, that is a specific kind of loss.

It is still the least cruel ending on this site. Nintendo shut down a live service and, rather than taking the game with it, sold everybody a copy that cannot be shut down a second time. Twenty dollars for the thing you already had is an insult in one light and a rescue in another, and there are several hundred graves here where nobody was offered either.

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