In the mobile game world, there’s a common strategy that a lot of small devs will use to try to build success very quickly. If a company is able to publish one successful mobile game, they’ll sometimes use that success to develop a whole bunch of games really quickly, then just a💦s quickly abandon them when they aren’t as successful. They’re trying to find their next hit game while their last hit is still bringing in revenue, so they release four or five games the following year hoping something else will take off. When those games don’t take off right away, they move on to the next thing as fast as they can.
Niantic is a bigger, more prestigious studio than most, but you can see similar patterns since the release of Pokemon Go. Wizards Unite was shut down less tꦛhan three years after it launched, while a handful of games like Catan: World Explorers were shut down before they even received a global launch. La🏅st year the studio laid off 85 people and canceled four upcoming games, including Transformers: Heavy Metal, before immediately announcing NBA All-World and Marvel World of Heroes. This year alone, Niantic is launching three new games, NBA All-World, Peridot, and Monster Hunter Now, as well as the integrated social app Campfire. Niantic is developing quickly and looking for its next big hit before Pokemon Go inevitably loses steam, and if something doesn’t work it isn’t afraid to cut its losses and move on.
That’s a concern players should have when approaching Peridot, Niantic's new AR-focused mobile game sim that launched this week, but of all Niantic's current and upcoming games, Peridot feels like the one that’s best positioned to take off. While some of Niantic’s licensed endeavors feel like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:reskins of Pokemon Go, Peridot stands out as a fully AR, Tamagotchi-style pet sim. It maintains Niantics core design values of encouraging exploration, exercise, and social experiences, but it's decidedly different from the studio’s other games, for reasons that are immediately obvious as soon as you start playing.
There’s an off-brand Pokemon quality to Peridot that will cause some to immediately dismiss it, understandably. But Niantic's implementation of AR technology in Peridot is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in a mobile game. The way your pet dots are placed in the real world and the level of interaction you can have with them is pretty remarkable, and while the gameplay is light, the photo ops are next level. Niantic has very shrewdly built in a photo mode and GIF creator to make sharing your dots on social media easy, making every player a de facto arm of the marketing machine. People are going to want to share pictures and videos of their adorable, one-of-a-kind virtual pets, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Peridot had its major moment this summer. Whether it’s able to become the next Pokemon Go is anyone’s guess, but one thing I can say for certain is that the current monetization scheme puts Peridot at serious risk of early abandonment.
The first few days of Peridot are blissful. I fell in love with my adorable little dot Shoosh as soon as they hatched, and I had a lot of fun raising them, teaching them tricks, and discovering all of Peridot’s impressive AR features. I e💞njoy going out of the house to explore the neighborhood with Shoosh and introduce them to flowers, trees, and my cats, and I was constantly rewarded with experience points for me and growth points for Shoosh. As I raised my dot from baby to adult, I made frequent visits to nearby habitats to scope out other dots that could one day make a suitable breeding partner for Shoꦬosh.
That day came sooner than expected. Thaꦆnks to my frequent doting, Shoosh was ready to mate on the third day. I was excited to pick a partner, before I realized how complicated and expensive the entire process is. I explained the cost of breeding in detail in my , but the basic gist is that breeding requires a nest, which costs $5. There&rౠsquo;s no breeding subscription or mating battle pass - it’s just $5, minimum, every time you want to breed. Nests are not farmable and there’s no way to earn them through progression. You either buy them in the shop, or you don’t get to participate in breeding.
Locking a feature behind a paywall is one thing, but breeding﷽ isn’t just a thing you can do in Peridot, it’s something that’s baked into the gameplay loop. Once you raise your dot to adulthood, there isn’t really anything you can do with them. You can still play with them, feed them, and raise their growth level, but they don’t evolve again after they become adults, and there’s no reward for growing them any further. The whole point of raising them is so that you can eventually breed with them, create unique offspring, and start the process over again. If you never breed, you’re never closing the gameplay loop. Requiring players to pay real money for a critical path experience feels like a huge mistake that’s going to drive a lot of people away.
Despite more recent criticisms around remote raid passes and Go Fest, Pokemon Go has always had a pretty reasonable approach to monetization - at least as far as mobile games go. Its approachability and low barrier to entry has been a huge part of its success over the years. When players don’t feel pressured to spend money because they’re having fun with the game for free, they’re going to play the game longer. This makes Pokemon Go look healthy and attracts more players, which increases the number of people who will spend money on the game. The low cost of Pokemon Go has made it easier to play with my partner. She won’t spend, but I will, and since we can still play together, I’m playing and paying more than I otherwise would have. Pokemon Go’s fair monetization is ꦇone of its best qualities, and one of the main reasons I’ve stuck with it so long.
Niantic has been turning the screws on Pokemon Go players for awhile, so maybe it's not that surprising to see Peridot have such lousy monetization right out of the gate. The breeding process has a lot of random variables, so if you pay the $5, you’re still not guaranteed to get the dot you want. If that sounds like a gachapon game, that’s because it kind of is. Maybe it was naive, but I just didn’t expect Niantic's major new IP and first big AR-driven game to be a slot machine with extra steps. For as much as I’ve enjoyed it so far, I’m probably ditching Peridot before I sink a bunch of money into it. Niantic is about to find out the hard way how much its players are willing to pay for something that doesn’t have a Pokemon in it, and it’ll be a shame if a good idea gets dragged down by an unnecessary fee.