Game Tycoon
If you missed it yesterday, we’re
rebranding as CanadianYeti Reviews! I much prefer this new name as it gives me
my own unique brand instead of relying on the name of an animal or my own name.
The URL for the website will stay the same for now (http://hyenareviews.blogspot.ca/) but will change as soon as I find a
way to have two URLs to redirect to the same page. Now onto the third-last
editorial of 2016, as we discuss tycoon games! Remember those?
If not, it wouldn't be a surprise to me. Tycoon games have become more or less
a relic of the past. Once upon a time they dominated the PC market in the late
90’s and early 2000’s, but now they seem to have all but vanished, aside from a
few recent spiritual successors, indie games and feeble attempts to revive old
franchises. So what on earth happened to them?
Well, before we answer that question,
let me tell you my history with the genre. One of the first games I ever played
was a little gem called Zoo Tycoon. See, as a kid I adored animals, making weekly visits to the local zoo, reading
about them constantly, watching every nature documentary I could and more. A
game about building a zoo filled with awesome animals was right up my alley.
Even after delving my way into the fantastic RollerCoaster Tycoon series, Zoo
Tycoon and its sequel Zoo Tycoon 2 are still some of my most nostalgic of
games.
The RollerCoaster and Zoo Tycoons are
the only ones people really remember out of the sheer mass of tycoon games,
mostly because they were some of the most polished and refined games in the
onslaught. But there were so many more that nobody played, like Mall Tycoon,
Ski Resort Tycoon, Lemonade Tycoon, School Tycoon, Hospital Tycoon, Plant
Tycoon, Prison Tycoon, and even Donald Trump’s Real Estate Tycoon. And that’s as
close to a topical joke you’ll ever get on this site.
While many of these games couldn’t be
considered good by any means, the steady flow of them seemed to guarantee that
the business simulation genre was a mainstay in the PC market and wasn’t going anywhere.
Until one day, the releases just started to slow, and then stopped completely.
There’s still a few popular releases nowadays, such as Game Dev Tycoon and the
recently released RollerCoaster Tycoon spiritual successor Planet Coaster, but
the flow of games seemed to have stopped. Why did this happen, do you ask?
The answer might just be sitting in
your pocket right now. You see, when mobile gaming first took off, it took the
casual gamer market by storm. Simple games like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope and
Fruit Ninja were all the rage for a few years, because of their cheap cost and
addictive gameplay. While the mobile market is nowhere near as lucrative as it
was back in the day, there’s still major success stories from it, such as Candy
Crush and Pokémon Go.
One of the mainstays in the mobile
market are what I like to call “Farmville Games”, named after the infamous
Facebook time waster that started this trend. There are dozens of Farmville
knockoffs on the app store, such as The Simpsons: Tapped Out and Smurfs
Village. If you’ve somehow managed to avoid playing one of these at some point
or another, firstly I must congratulate you, and secondly, I’ll explain how
they work. You construct a few buildings, and over a pre-determined set of time
they accumulate cash for you. You check in on the game every few hours to
collect your money, which you then use to create more buildings or grow more
crops or whatever so you can get more money to continue the cycle until the sun
devours the Earth once and for all. It’s the type of game you check in on once
every few hours and grows painfully boring after a week or so.
As tedious as these games are, they
are the culprits responsible for the Case of the Vanishing Tycoon Games. Why?
Well, one thing I haven’t mentioned yet is the other calling card of the Farmville Game: another term I’ve coined
in recent years, that being the “double currency”. See, most Farmville-style
games have two types of cash: your standard gold coins, as well as “gems” or
some other fancy alternative. Gold coins are usually used to return some
pitiful amount of cash, while gems can be used to buy fancy decorations or
something that will make you several times the normal amount of cash. There’s a
catch, though. The gems can usually only be purchased with real money, and
suddenly you realize why these games are usually free. Because the normally
obtainable currency usually isn’t worth that much, the game gives you the
option to use your hard-earned real world dollars to buy some Monopoly money for
your little phone village.
And this is exactly why tycoon games
have taken a dive in recent years. Why have an up-front $20 price tag for a
game you can enjoy forever with no extra costs when you can give them the game for free, but force
your microtransactions down their throat the entire time, as well as force them
to check in periodically so they never grow bored? It’s become par for the
course for the game industry to try and snag as much money out of your wallet
as possible, and the way these games control the casual crowd might just be the
scumbaggiest way of doing it.
It’s honestly a shame that the tycoon
series is all but destroyed, because there were some great games in there. But
really, in the name of progress it was kind of doomed, as game developers
discovered new ways to innovate the tycoon series to make them more money. In
the end, the real tycoons are those guys.
Song of the Week
The holidays are a time to be
unabashedly nostalgic for the past. While I can’t remember exactly what year
this was, I definitely remember getting Zoo Tycoon 2 for Christmas, and the
Main Menu theme is one that’s stuck with me for all these years. See you next
week for my Christmas special!
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