Since when do game makers feel the need to gouge the players that play their games?

Over the past few months, there have been some new games that look fun and interesting to play. And while most are still under development and not even available to play, they all seem to have one thing in common. Pricey entry points!

The newest addition to hit the blockchain is My Neighbor Alice. This game is not live yet. It has just been introduced with some pretty fun images. There is even a video that shows a glimpse of the game on their website.

Straight from myneighboralice.com:

My Neighbor Alice is a multiplayer builder game, where anyone can buy and own virtual islands, collect and build exciting items and meet new friends.

Inspired by successful games such as Animal Crossing, the game combines the best of the two worlds - a fun narrative for regular players who want to enjoy the gameplay experience as well as an ecosystem for players who want to collect and trade NFT’s, even if they have no idea what an NFT is.

They say the game was inspired by Animal Crossing, but their promotional video looks almost identical to Animal Crossing’s game play. As a fan of Animal Crossing, I was still interested in giving My Neighbor Alice a try. That was until I saw how much money it will take to get started playing the game.

In their original Medium post introducing the first land sale, it stated that the minimum amount needed to stake to be eligible for lottery tickets to purchase land was 50 ALICE or 1000 CHR. At that time, ALICE was trading at $12.50 and CHR was about $0.30, making the initial investment somewhere between $300 and $650 just for the chance to win a lottery ticket to purchase land.

So, you get one lottery ticket every day you stake 50 ALICE or 1000 CHR which you need to stake for 14 days, from April 27th until May 11th. That seems OK, because you get to unstake your tokens and get them back. However, if you are lucky enough to win one of the 927 lottery tickets here is what you have to pay for a plot of land.

(Information was pulled from the same Medium post)

Plots and prices — Discount for early neighbors!

Amount of plots for sale: 927 (less than 5% of the plots on Nature´s Rest)
Original Cost per plot: 50 ALICE
Early neighbor discount: 60%
Cost per plot after discount: 20 ALICE
Stake start: April 27th at 12:00PM UTC
Stake ends: May 11th at 12:00PM UTC
Lottery draw: May 12th

After a 60% discount, you are looking at paying around $288 (ALICE at $14.41 as of time of writing). So, before you can try the game, or it even comes out or you know anything about the game play, you have to pay almost $300 to begin. Lest we forget, there is most likely going to be other NFT purchases you may have to make to acquire other items for your land.

I cannot image a game that entices me to play so much that I would be willing pay $300 before I even got a chance to try it. Even if you understand how My Neighbor Alice is going to create monetary incentives for its community of players, I cannot justify paying that much for a game.

In my next post, I’ll go over the insane amount of money being spent on land for Mirandus on Gala Games and how much it will cost to run a Gala Node.