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Animal Crossing Pocket Camp - How much can you expect to spend?

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp - How much can you expect to spend?

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp is soon to launch on mobile, and one of the most contentious things about it to Nintendo die-hards will be its free-to-play nature.

In fairness, though, Animal Crossing has always felt like a proto-free-to-play game. Yes, it's always been a premium series, offering full-fat games that you purchase outright.

But the rhythm of play often seems like a blueprint for modern mobile gaming. Think of the way you're encouraged to keep checking back in on your community, the appeal to envy when you visit another player's village, and the focus on acquiring cosmetic stuff.

So now that it's made the leap to mobile (in Australia at least), how does Animal Crossing Pocket Camp handle free-to-play monetisation?

Our sister site PocketGamer.biz recently broke things down nicely, and we've been playing the game a whole load ourselves. Here are a few observations based on what we've learned.

Judged by its fruits

Alarm bells may well start to ring from the moment near the beginning where you first shake a tree for fruit. After scooping up your loot, you'll notice a timer telling you that there won't be any more apples (or cherries, or peaches) for three hours.

Three hours! Except then you remember that the mainline Animal Crossing games make you wait a whole day for more fruit, and realise that you'd best pipe down.

Especially when you spend your next few hours in ACPC happily tootling through the game's gentle tasks and trading systems with nary a purchase prompt in sight.

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp's monetisation system seems to be as benign as one of its furry citizens.

Leaf it out

When Animal Crossing Pocket Camp gets down to the mucky matter of money is in its Leaf Ticket system.

They're initially useful for things like boosting the equipment you use to catch certain creatures, as well as bypassing those aforementioned wait timers and granting entry to the valuable Shovelstrike Quarry.

This premium currency can be earned through the Stretch Goals system, but it can also be bought for cold hard cash.

Leaf Tickets come in priced bundles ranging from AU$1.49 (99p/99c) for 20 to AU$62.99 (£39.99/$39.99) for 1,200.

No badgers allowed

For the opening hours, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp is mercifully free of badgering (animal pun intended) when it comes to money, but it does ramp up the pressure.

Our own Dave Aubrey has put the most hours in out of anyone on the team, and he while he claims not to have hit a payment wall after 10 hours or so, he's starting to notice the squeeze.

One way you feel this is in the way the game's initial pace slows dramatically. Advancing your friendship level from 6 to 7 is way slower than 4 to 5, for example.

Something that has even more of an impact is furniture crafting. "Early pieces only take a few minutes to craft each and only require a few pieces of crafting materials, but later on it goes from requiring three minute wait times and six pieces of material to eight hour wait times and 60 pieces of material," Dave tells me.

Don't have enough materials, or don't want to wait that long? Why, you can hurry the process up with Leaf Tickets.

Material world

Your chief source of materials, of course, is from your animal friends. However, each animal will only give you three quests every three hours, after which you need to use a Request Card to get more. Don't have any request cards? You guessed it - you can get more with Leaf Tickets.

We'll need to play way more of the game to see if and how this pressure to purchase Leaf Tickets ramps up, or if Nintendo keeps it as a tantalising sweetener.

It certainly seems to get tougher to make progress without making some form of purchase when you're a good few hours in, but I should reiterate that our most experienced Animal Crossing Pocket Camp player still doesn't feel like he's hit the payment wall some ten hours in.

We should also point out that this isn't a final version of the game - it doesn't launch in all territories for another few weeks.

Right now, then, it seems Nintendo has approached the whole free-to-play thing in Animal Crossing Pocket Camp with a typical lightness of touch.

Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.