The Tomorrow Children will be a blast from the pre-perestroika dreamscape past when it returns. However, its old free-to-play approach is one thing the developers are eager to leave back in 2017.
Q-Games founder Dylan Cuthbert spoke with GamesIndustry.biz for the inside story on the fall and upcoming rise of the idiosyncratic town building game. The Tomorrow Children was taken offline just over a year after it first came out, and Cuthbert said a lot of its troubles could be laid at the feet of its free-to-play business model - which wasn't nearly as common then as it is now, especially for PlayStation-published games.
"I really think the [problem] was basically just the free-to-play thing," Cuthbert said. "I think people, especially at that time, didn't like microtransactions in general. At the time as well, I saw many comments saying, 'If this game was just a one-time purchase, I'd buy it.' Loads of people said that."
When Q-Games brings The Tomorrow Children back to PS4, it will come with a more traditional one-time purchase instead.
"It means the game can be balanced a lot better, because we don't have to try and squeeze a bit of money out of the player at every opportunity," Cuthbert says. "We can just actually build the game properly, based on normal - more normal, I suppose - progression methods."
The Tomorrow Children may come to other platforms after its homecoming on PS4 (also PS5, thanks to backwards compatibility), but that all depends on the reaction to this first version. Q-Games still isn't ready to provide a specific release date for when that may happen, but Cutbhert did say he hoped to get it online by the end of 2022.
We went in-depth with the end of The Tomorrow Children back in 2017 as its first incarnation came to a close.
