Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, the mobile spin-off of Nintendo’s town management series, appears to be following in the footsteps of Mario Kart Tour and adding subscriptions and exclusive content to those who pay a monthly fee.
Resetera user ZeoVGM posted the game’s announcement on the forum, which says the paid membership service will be called Pocket Camp Club and will officially go live on Thursday, November 21. One plan will allow you to appoint a camp caretaker to help you maintain your camp, while the other will net you fortune cookies and warehouses for storage. The in-game announcement doesn’t mention anything about pricing, however. Presumably information on that will be made available in a video Nintendo will be releasing on Wednesday. If Mario Kart Tour is any indicator, the subscription might be somewhere around $5 per month for one plan and maybe a little bit more or less for the other.
Here is the full announcement as it appears in Pocket Camp:
More Nintendo on mobile:
- Mario Kart Tour Ranking System Guide – Tips for Earning Ranks and Tiers
- Is Fire Emblem Heroes Secretly the Best Game in the Series?
- Online Battles Coming to Pokemon Go in Early 2020
I’ve not played Pocket Camp myself, so I’m not sure just how valuable these services might be to someone who plays it actively, but it is interesting to see Nintendo implementing this into a game that’s reaching its second anniversary. Presumably the game has enough life in it to merit a subscription plan, but this does make you wonder what other games in Nintendo’s mobile catalog might be getting something along these lines, too. Mario Kart Tour got one early into its lifetime, as the kart racer just launched back in September, but could other games like Fire Emblem: Heroes or Pokemon Go also see some kind of premium subscription in the future? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
If you are a Pocket Camp player and are worried about what this might mean for the game, it’s worth noting these seem to just be quality of life improvements, whereas Mario Kart Tour’s “Gold Pass” subscription put a paywall up between the 200cc mode. So I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective?
More Animal Crossing for your reading pleasure:
- Smash Ultimate Isabelle Guide – Moves, Outfits, Strengths, Weaknesses
- Why on Earth Isn’t There a Pokémon Animal Crossing Game?
- Why Do Animal Crossing’s Villagers Leave Such An Impact?
If mobile Animal Crossing is just not your jam, the Switch is finally getting its own mainline game next year in the form of Animal Crossing: New Horizons set to launch in the ever-crowded first quarter of 2020, which has already scared off a few games like Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. It’s currently slated for March 20, which is still a ways off so Nintendo’s not diving headfirst into promoting the game just yet, but there have been a couple publicity stunts, like having beloved Animal Crossing busker boy K.K. Slider perform the theme song at a Splatoon-themed concert last month.
