While Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp might not have had the same insane success as the Nintendo Switch version, it has been played a lot, reportedly installed more than 60 million times by 2021, and is still moderately popular today.
However, as Nintendo moves away from mobile games, it’s decided to sunset the live service aspects of Pocket Camp and instead morph it into a paid title so it can live on the App Store without the need for regular dev support.
The game is set to go offline on November 28 at 11am, but an updated version should be available sometime in October. The wording in Nintendo’s press release is brief, so there isn’t much info to go off of. To me, it sounds like the company will release a new version of the game on the App Store/Google Play Store, and then users will need to buy and download that version before porting their existing Pocket Camp saves to it using their Nintendo accounts.
Since the new version is paid, there won’t be any microtransactions, which might make it better than the free option that’s been available for years. However, things like ‘Leaf tickets,’ visiting players’ camps, ‘Market boxes, ‘ and gifting won’t work in the new version because it won’t have any online components.
I used to play Pocket Camp years ago, but I fell out of love with the game because the gameplay wasn’t as close to the core Animal Crossing franchise as I liked. If things are handled correctly, I think making the game paid and eschewing micro-transactions might help console Animal Crossing fans fall more for the mobile title, but only time will tell if that works. If you want to play Animal Crossing on mobile, you can find a fan-translated version of the original Japanese N64 version of the game online and play it on the Delta emulator.
Moving my feelings for Animal Crossing to the side, I really commend Nintendo for keeping this title alive instead of just stripping it from the mobile game stores. I played many mobile games as a kid, including an Awesome Assassins Creed game and COD: Zombies that have been removed from the iPhone, and now the only way to see them is in YouTube videos.
Source: Animal Crossing
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