The ‘hollow husk’ of mobile Animal Crossing is gaming’s sad future

You know how people have been saying, for years and years now, that the triple-A video game industry’s weird hyperfocus on mostly white, mostly male demographics would eventually bite it in the ass? As evidence of this I give you: the “free-to- play” mobile videogame.

Exhibit A: this piece by Sam Machkovech over on Ars Technica describing how the new Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp feels like a weird, hollowed-out husk of previous franchise entries; that it is not so much an Animal Crossing game as it is essentially “a scam”. Having myself grown up around PC and console games, I tend to share this perspective. But then, this has also been my reaction to every high-grossing F2P mobile game I’ve ever encountered. (The fact that I make these games for a living is, well, a testament to what life under capitalism is like.)