In August 2024, Nintendo’s free-to-play mobile incarnation of Animal Crossing was announced to be coming to an end this November. It’s now been revealed that its replacement, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete, will appear December 3, and ditch all of the 2017 game’s microtransactions for a one-off sum. Except, the sum is huge, the game’s losing features, and there’s no exception for long-time players of the original Pocket Camp.
Nintendo’s experiments with mobile gaming have often been at odds with the ethos the company usually tries to express. At one point the now defunct Mario Kart Tour sported deeply controversial gacha mechanics. The company has also been quick to shut down games that aren’t performing as wanted, to the disappointment of long-term players, with a bunch of different mobile titles—including Dragalia Lost and Dr. Mario World—canned since the mobile ventures began in 2016.
Pocket Camp’s situation isn’t quite as final as others, like Mario Kart Tour’s no longer receiving updates since the end of 2023. Instead, people who’ve been playing the Animal Crossing game since its 2017 release will be able to transfer across their progress to the new game. But only after paying a whopping $20 entry fee. And it will only be updated for another year. And it’s losing features. And oh boy this doesn’t look great.
There’s something of a concession toward just how enormous a price this is for a mobile game people may have already spent vast sums on previously—for the first two months, Nintendo will be charging half that much, ending on January 31, 2025. Still, another $10 is a kick in the eye for those who’ve invested over the last seven years.
Pocket Camp Complete doesn’t mark a step forward for the game, but rather will see it continuing with a slightly reduced set of features, and the promise of one more year of updates. If you’ve got an established village, it’ll all transfer over, along with all your Friendship Levels, but not your leaf tickets, which are being removed entirely. But in a really surprising move, Nintendo makes clear on its update page that “There is no discount specifically for Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp users.”
Why not?! What a deeply peculiar move, to not reward those who’ve been subscribing for $3 to $8 a month since 2019, when subs began! The game costs the same for me, who has never played, as for the person who’s put in $480 in subscription fees.
Various online features are getting ditched, such as sharing gifts and the Market Box, and interacting with other islands is becoming a whole weird ordeal. Most of the bonuses that came with subscriptions are going too.
It also looks like Nintendo intends to stop updating the game as frequently come October 2025, after which point there are no plans to add new cookies or new events, suggesting the $20 entry fee is buying you access to the last proper year for the game. Who knows? This may be timed to overlap with the release of a new Animal Crossing game for the Switch 2, given the normal release schedule of the series suggests one should be due.
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