The Tomorrow Children coming to PS4 this year, scrapping F2P

The Tomorrow Children is set to relaunch later this year on PS4, this revived version of the bizarre game scrapping its free-to-play mechanics.

Q-Games CEO, Dylan Cuthbert, has talked about the original game’s reception, its closure, and how the team fought to reclaim the IP from Sony.

For those never played, The Tomorrow Children was a strange collaborative online games where players scouted for resources, built settlements, and fended off invasions. Everything about it, from the weird web of mechanics to its haunting visuals, screamed offbeat. Here’s our original review from launch.

It’s no surprise that the game wasn’t a major hit on PS4 back in 2016 though many were surprised to hear Sony was pulling the plug on The Tomorrow Children just six months later.

In an interview with GI.biz, Cuthbert explains why it didn’t take off:

It was a free-to-play game, so it needed time to grow, and for us to work out how to monetise it properly. But that’s the main reason it ended up being shut down, because we didn’t really manage to monetise it. We weren’t experienced in free-to-play, so that probably didn’t help, but neither were Sony. We were still finding our way to earn from the players. Not in a manipulative way, we wanted to find a nice way to earn just enough to keep the game going.

Having played several hours of The Tomorrow Children myself, I never felt the urge to spend a penny despite enjoying my time. Clearly, othersfelt the same way. An influx of new players wasn’t always great news for Q-Games as this only led to heightened server costs with no guarantee these newcomers would make in-game purchases.

With the game now revived, it will shed its former free-to-play business model. “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.”

This new version of the game will also include new features and content that didn’t make it into the original release. Not only that, if The Tomorrow Children finds the audience Q-Games believes it deserves, there’s the chance it could arrive on additional platforms and maybe even spawn other titles to create a series.

We’re sure to hear more about the game and what changes have been made, including price point and the removal of microtransactions. You can sign up to The Tomorrow Children newsletter for updates.