Dreamlight Valley is Not Gonna Be Free to Play After All

GhastlyMirror

30 de October de 2023

Sad news for those who hesitated in paying for the game in Early access, and were probably gonna wait out till it became available for free.

Gameloft has recently announced that it will be dropping the free-to-play model , and its expected to leave early access this December.

And if that isn’t upsetting enough, there´s also the fact that the paid DLC might be 30$ and there is an increase in the base game to 40$.

Now, Its not unusual for say game to change their payment model, like I know one MMO decided to go from subscription to buy-to-play. And normally I would have an issue with this but….

Dreamlight was originally designed on a free to play model, there is no news of now if they are going to remove microtransactions. But in my personal opinion if its going to be a paid game they should at least remove them and make it accessible through regular gameplay, or at least some DLC content but with a lower price tag.

And the increase in price for the base game alone, is certainly a choice, all it does is creating FOMO. Decided to wait till its fully released? Well, too Bad, you have to pay extra.

There´s also the fact those who paid for the founders pack still are expected to pay the full price for dlc, so yeah you probably got played for a sucker. Specially if you’re a switch player, from what I´ve heard the game is a buggy mess and some were expecting the game to be free so they could transfer their save file to the PC.

Now I´ve read some of the comments in the community, and I get what they´re saying, there was indeed the fear that ingame currency like moonstones was gonna be harder to acquire in regular gameplay, and every character is behind a microtransactions.

But that’s just the thing, even the fact that you have to pay for the game, there is no way to know which characters are gonna be free, or paid. And there’s a season pass on top of it.

And there has been some comparison with going the same path of the Sims 4, which Im not exactly happy about it.

I´m not in the habit of buying games with microtransactions and its for a reason, the one exception was Elder Scrolls online but that’s a MMORPG. Most of the time I just find it a predatory practice.

I also dont trust Gameloft, they have done some suspicious decisions in the past. And it does feel like they been leading some players on.

Honestly, if fans want save their game from becoming a mess they can do two things, they can either refuse to buy any microtransactions if they already paid for it, or just not buy the game until they fix this. I dont think we should be rewarding this behavior.

For now, I would advise skipping this entry in the life sim genre, there are plenty of other titles out there dont have these predatory monetization practices, like stardew valley, heck even obblets is a better substitute. Don´t let the cutesy Disney characters fool you.

I probably might post a recommendation list of several lifesim games if anyone is interested.

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