If your favorite beer changed its formula to match the highest grossing brand in its category, would you still buy it? Many people answer yes to this question and my follow up question would be why? To me the simulations games market is there for people to find their favorite flavor of simulation. Rollercoaster Tycoon was a fine pour of simulation meets arcade styled visuals with a fine depth of flavor under the hood. The length of enjoyment you could get from a Roller Coaster Tycoon game made by Chris Sawyer was and is almost endless. So why would the bastards at Atari choose to go mobile freemium on this title, because idiots keep buying their favorite products under a different formula.
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| Even the "fans" are shitting on this game's Facebook |
With the freemium game market it’s almost as if a player who downloads a free game equates to a sell to these dev. /pubs. If a game that is free to download has a million users can that be deemed a commercially successful product? The metric hardly works out with every one of that million becoming a paid subscriber or capital injecting member of the community. How I view the freemium metrics is the top 1% pays for the game the other 99% just live there in the cracks of a broken model. Even at the low end price mark we just see consumers buy the game play once and forget about. Which in that case is a plus for games supported online. Customer acquisition at the freemium level is literally passed on to the top 1% of contributors.
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| This is what Roller Coaster Tycoon 4 should have looked like |
The travesty of this beloved series is that they really chose the damn mobile platform as the vehicle. I don’t ever recall playing a game on my mobile or tablet for hours on end. Mainly because battery life is shit on these devices, and then on mobile I am usually interrupted by calls/texts. Sadly the older Roller Coaster Tycoon games were not online data mines. If they were Atari would see that the average user on RCT spends hours in a single sitting not the 15-30mins more in line with mobile gaming. No metrics for player time with Roller coaster Tycoon lead them to this bad decision. Even if they pull metrics from this mobile endeavor for a Roller Coaster Tycoon 5/s. The data will be incorrect because mobile gaming habits do not equate to PC gamer’s habits.
Wrong for players, wrong for data, and just plain wrong for the Franchise. I’d strongly urge against even test driving the new Roller coaster Tycoon 4 mobile game. This exact type of cashing in on a franchise name and fan base is what gamers need to stand together on. There has been no mention of there be a PC equivalent to match this mobile game, and trust me from what I have seen you’d wouldn't want this trash. From the screen caps you can already tell so many negatives about this game to list them would be another wall of text to disappoint. Fire up your old Tycoon’s by Chris Sawyer and realize you played the game at the maximum height the tracks could go.
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