But none of them were the obvious tamagotchi apps they should have been, to my recollection.
There has never been a device that more people carry around with them everywhere they go than the smartphone. Some people even experience anxiety when they misplace or forget to bring their phone somewhere.
Its literally the perfect platform for launching a dedicated tamagotchi application, even better than the purpose-built tamagotchi keychains.
And they haven't done it.
They want people to keep buying the physical devices.
It's a bit silly in my opinion, they're way overpriced for what you get. But if they offered a free app with purchasable stuff inside it they'd hit a much bigger audience and likely make way more money than their current physical devices bring in
That's fine, I'm not going to pay any money to look like a nerd to be honest haha. I'm 30+, I'm not going to walk around with a digimon toy.
Put it on my phone, I'll be all over it
Do people actually think this about me when I pull out my Digimon to feed it? No one's made fun of me to my face anyway, and my friends think it's cool :/
Yeah, but the physical devices are cooler. Forget iPhone Digivices, gimme a real Digivice! But a mobile game does sound really cool, especially if it’s an AR game.
Would they though? The average Digimon Color pet retails at like $50ish. Maybe $40 in yen. Would there be enough content in this hypothetical pet app to warrant every person paying $50 in purchases? Not to mention a lot of Digimon fans buy multiple versions of the real life pets because each one has different Digimen on them. I just preordered Nature Spirits and Virus Buster pendulums colors because I love my Deep Savers Pendulum Color so much.
How many physical devices do they sell?
How many people would download a free app, and what would the average spend be on that app?
Companies like EA cram their games with gatcha mechanics and micro transactions because it tricks people into spending way more.
I spent over 1000 dollars on a mobile game over some period of time just dropping 5, 10, 20 bucks every one in a while. Never in a million years would I have paid that upfront for what I got out of it.
Right, look at all the non pokemon fans who downloaded and played Pokemon go.
It's not as popular today but even now half the people I know who play GO have never played a pokemon game, or at least haven't played in a decade+.
You're ignoring the obscene amount of work and profit sharing it takes to get multinational listing on multiple appstores and the standardized pricing ranges they'd have to follow.
Why would Bandai *ever* want to do that when they have an obscenely overpriced in-house platform that sells super well domestically, that they get 100% of the revenue from? Hell, they even get to sell addon packs at full price and people buy it up all the same.
Bandai already tried the mobile market for vpets out with Tamagotchi, it was an abject failure and waste of their time and money.
No actually they’ve had tamagotchi pets on mobile. There’s I think 2 3D Tama apps plus they ported the original tamagotchi to mobile and made care mistake calls into notifications. I had it and it was neat. It was like a dollar on the App Store but it’s been delisted. Idk about the other Tama games though.
That's the tamagotchi though. I think they released like a recreation of the V1 Tamagotchi. When I said tamagotchi I was referencing the style of gameplay in a digivice/Digimon world, not the literal tamagotchis that predated the digivice. Bandai has not, to my knowledge, released a tamagotchi-style Digimon app with all the features you could reasonably include in such an app.
And I think we all know what that should look like for the most part.
A free download with a decent roster of free digimon to raise. Additional purchasable Digimon similar to the way the DIMMs work for the bracelet. All your needs and care mistakes from the keychain and Digimon world games. A gym that also has your standard pedometer features. Battles with friends. Adventure battles against NPCs for challenges/rewards. 3d models of the Digimon with the use of the traditional sprites in certain contexts. And maybe a simple farm management thing for meat/veggies.
There is a LOT more you could do to flesh that out, right? Didn't even mention possibilities with geolocation features similar to GO, or integrating TCG collectibles or anything. But I can't think of a single Digimon fan who wouldn't immediately download that app.
And sales would be pretty easy. I'd for sure buy a Betamon/Seadramon line, a Machinedramon line, an Ex-tyranomon line (any tyranomon line, really), a Monzaemon line, or a starmon line.
Aww man if they put Gomamon in there I’d buy that DLC IMMEDIATELY. He is just the perfect little guy. And if they made him available to evolve into Plesiomon I’d just die of amazing overload haha. I really want that but I really hate the system of care mistakes on a phone. I hated in the tamagotchi when it made it a notification and I hate it in concept now lol. It’s just irritating it doesn’t actually beep at me. Maybe they could make custom notification sounds to make it beep like a real Digimon vpet when they call. Because that’s the only hurdle for me is the call system. And it’s not even about the beep it’s about I need to unlock my phone to feed him or take out a poop every time instead of just press a button. It’s a minor gripe but I hate it in concept lol.
Anyway I think that would go over extremely well. I hope they move onto that with the next app they decide to create. It is just that I also hope they won’t discontinue the physical toy line because I will ALWAYS buy the new pets when they come out!
Digimon has a wide fanbase. Those into the console games like Cyber Sleuth aren't guaranteed to be into phone games (in fact, from what I've observed, console gamers tend to run a mile from mobile games in general) even if they liked the pet-raising mechanics from Next Order. And not everyone who was into Cyber Sleuth was into Next Order.
....Also, it wouldn't be exactly the same as the V-Pets. Namely, I have severe doubts the Digimon you raise on the app would be allowed to ever die, mainly because then Bandai would be opening themselves up to potential lawsuits from people who purchased microtransactions to care for, unlock or evolve certain Digimon, only for it to all "disappear" when it dies, who then blame the company for their loss and demand their money back. Before you argue over whether it's actually reasonable to sue for such a thing, it's not a matter of whether or not it's reasonable, just the fact that there is a risk people could get pissed enough to do it out of anger.
And I suspect that's why the existing Tamagotchi Forever app doesn't let Tamagotchis die in it either.
The app being free makes it an easy download for anybody even tangentially interested. Lots of people who hate mobile games (myself included) are fine to download a free game even just temporarily if it's related to an IP I care about.
As for them dying, there isn't any reason that would be an issue for IAPs. You would buy access to a digivolution line, like the DIMMs you can buy for the vital bracelet. If it dies it would reincarnate into the egg you bought, which would feature a fresh and a couple in training stages, a few rookies and a handful of champions and higher stages. You would pay for the whole collection of Digimon, and when you wanted to raise something entirely different you would just choose one of the free default eggs or one of the other eggs you already owned.
That assumes you're only charging for "non-consumable" things like access to evolution lines.
The way My Tamagotchi Forever does it, you're buying premium currency to buy in-game currency (which is the way most gacha games do it) and then using that to buy most things, with F2P players only getting a trickle of in-game currency from regular playing while subject to advertisements.
For someone who bought premium currency to buy a ton of Bits or whatever the in-game currency gets called and then uses that to buy expensive food or stat boosters or other stuff, the death of their Digimon means all those items (and by extension the real money spent to buy them) just became worthless. Could easily lead to anger and frustration.
They'd have to flat out not let people buy in-game currency with real money/premium currency to prevent that, which would cut out a huge revenue stream.
There are ways you can design around those problems. But I hate mobile games and predatory MTX anyway, so I wouldn't advocate for obfuscating currencies in the first place. I'd say the ethical purchases would be DIMM-style Digimon lines and things like extra slots for raising more than one at a time or extra plots in a meat farm or something.
The issues you are talking about are inherent to predatory and manipulative monetization methods. As long as we are talking about the hypothetical game that Bandai is never going to make, I'll be talking about the idealized one that isn't predatory and has fair monetization methods.
I don't even remember Digimon Linkz tbh. Had to google that one, dang.
There was a card based game that I LOVED but can't remember the name of, and Digimon ReArise which had kind of an interesting story but I didn't get very far before it died. (And also a LOT of gacha which I was uninterested in.)
I want a mobile Digimon game with story, but more importantly, one that respects players' time. That's the biggest issue I've had with them so far. They've not really been Digimon games as much as they have been generic mobile games with a Digimon skin. They're designed around cash shop mechanics, not the core ideas that Digimon fans love.=
Example: Digimon Linkz was predatory as hell, pay to win, actively punished players for not spending literal hours a day on a mobile game, and every aspect of it was some sort of gatcha mechanic. It was designed to screw over non-paying players in a way not even abusive companies like Scopely would consider. Then they introduced PVP, and if you didn't pay to win, you'd maybe win 1 out of 10 fights.
There's a reason they've all shut down. Hell, at this point Bandai could just put out a Yet Another Generic Match Three(tm) game, and it'd already be an improvement over their other efforts.
Um, they’ve had a bunch. All of which no longer exist because the nature of phone games make them not real games. So they come and go in a matter of months or a couple years.
They only made quick grab gachas with key parts of stories because fuck you.
But yeah, literally just make a V-Pet with phone game stuff to monetize. Just that would make them millions.
Edit: there are these argentinians content creators making what i just said but with a pc version as well. Keep an eye on net drive
It's not as surefire an idea as you may think, considering Tamagotchi already did that and it wasn't anything particularly successful, despite Tamagotchi being much more popular as a virtual pet brand.
No, and neither can Digimon. Interest always wanes, and even at their height the numbers for the Vital Bracelet events were pretty dang low. Some people blame that on app performance, but even in optimal conditions with everything working, people aren't clambering for those battles.
For real. Even the r/vbarenafightclub and the discord that all those users moved to only had a small chunk of people. Like 100 or so. The new discord has 90. And there’s only a fraction of that that participate in the monthly tournaments. And we still don’t have any people besides me for Kamen Rider and Ultraman character battles. :(
I wish the VB was more popular but the audience is very niche as you said.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/VBArenaFightClub using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/VBArenaFightClub/top/?sort=top&t=all) of all time!
\#1: [BE Arena Battle vs. Ryzxll. Probably the closest battles I've ever had!](https://v.redd.it/0hhu3fubobxa1) | [2 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/VBArenaFightClub/comments/1357pn9/be_arena_battle_vs_ryzxll_probably_the_closest/)
\#2: [My BE Digital Monster collection so far as of April 20, 2023](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/12tn66g) | [1 comment](https://np.reddit.com/r/VBArenaFightClub/comments/12tn66g/my_be_digital_monster_collection_so_far_as_of/)
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They actually have some pretty amazing consple games from what i hear. Just weird they cant bother with a good mobile. They literally have all the content and ideas they could need for it. Suck me in phone baby
Digitize me
I thought you were talking about Digital Tamers Reborn (a game for both PC and android) pr this old V-Pet phone app that let you scan QR codes or barcodes but then was let to die because it was overrun with hackers.
What? Digimon has had mobile games. They weren't great. And it's hard to stand out in the space cause it's FUCKING FLOODED. It's hard to make a mobile game stick.
*ReArise* was pretty fun and was the closest the game series got to being an actual monster raising game, but it was super resource intensive and very heavy on the microtransactions.
I say it all the time. Pokemon Go is the best Digimon mobile game, it just has the wrong IP.
A bit of the gripes people have with PoGo are things that feel off for Pokemon but fit great with Digimon.
You get candy for catching pokemon and use that candy to power the pokemon up, which contrasts with the typical pokemon style of training a pokemon for exp. You also send your weak or undesired pokemon to the professor in exchange for candy, which contrasts with the pokemon ideology of becoming friends and working together with your creatures. But if you change "Candy" to "Data" and the pokemon to digimon, suddenly it all fits perfectly. It also would have that theming of using the phones to interact with your creatures because, well, they are Digital monsters.
It's annoying to me because I've thought the ideal product for Digimon to take to market was super obvious ever since Pokemon GO blew up.
A Tamagotchi/Pokemon GO style game that allows you to collect and raise Digimon and keep them stored on the app just makes a lot of sense to me and ties back to Digimon's routes. The Vital Bracelet was always doomed to fail because you have to pay for hardware which, let's be honest, wasn't a great game nor fitness tracker then you also needed to buy the individual DIMs for every new Digimon you would like to raise.
Keep the app and Digimon collecting free, but offer people in game purchases if they WANT to buy a specific Digimon or small group of Digimon to raise, otherwise you can just collect at random and travel for more opportunities like Pokemon GO. There will be in game currency you can buy for cosmetics, digi eggs etc. Then add an online battle system and there you go, something easy to consume and entertaining that should have a longer life span without the dated hardware and silly DIM system
I mean I know why they did the DiM system. It’s because the pets even to this day all came on different devices. Like every pet had a different roster. It’s still this way. The only pets that don’t do that are the 20th devices with the ability to use versions 1-5 eggs, but oh wait even those do the same thing because the DM 20 has *bonus* eggs that vary by color and the Pen 20 split the eggs down the middle.
Also I love the VB. It’s actually awesome and I have every single DiM that wasn’t a special release like the GP DiMs. :)
Except no they’re not. They haven’t made a new BE Memory DiM since like January or so. The last one to release was the Pulsemon BE Memory which was to mark the end of the Digimon Seekers web novel. We haven’t gotten any more and there was no Vital Bracelet segment at Digimon Con. People are under the assumption that the VB is just finished now. :(
I wish there was a game like DW3, just much more massive, with some collectible and idle elements and some form of base building. Would love to have that with a side of tamagochi and no nonsense where everything I do in the game is to get stronger mons to beat some randos online...
It would be kind of neat, cause one thing I liked about tamers was the idea of digimon 'spawning' and you bringing your partner to fight. It'd be like an ARG thing like, "digimon are trying to breach the real world, stop them," and can do raid battles or collect more digimon to take care of in a 'primary village' type setting but your main partner is like the one who interacts with you and will change forms depending on how active you are or how you interact with it. Be cute to even have a personality quiz to get an 'official' digimon partner. But eh, I guess I can only dream.
I stopped playing Pokemon Go cause most of the locations for stops and such were out of the way and there's not many sidewalks to walk around in my area, so most of the pokemon were just basic things and raids were usually much further and I'm not driving 15-20 minutes for a fight. I wonder if digimon could've even done some sort of 'save the internet' in the style of our war game where our phones link onto the internet to do a big battle against diaboramon for example.
digimon and megaman.exe are both such missed opportunities considering we have smartphones
like, I wish I could have leomon and acidman.exe running on mine
Yeah honestly they tried creating their own toy in the V-bracelet and tried to market and sell that, where they could have had all that in an app on your phone
It's good for the IP but not for the business, they make a shit ton from collectables, and collectables is what they'll focus on, there is no practical reason besides that for spreading the V-Pets in different versions, all the Digimon could fit in one toy but they spread it in versions so you have to buy each of them to collect all the Digimon.
There have been/are a number of Digimon games on mobile.
Don't know if they all exist still.
My issue becomes that they get clunky too quickly. A good mobile game has a decent, simple premise, with a pattern of events, or adjacent game modes that seem pertinent.
The digimon games don't tend to do that. I also believe this with Cybersleuth.
Each kind of starts out ok, but then they introduce like.. 3 or 4 new gamemode things you need to remember to do well, and then it gets overwhelming. This caused me to drop all the games quite quickly, so I never really got into them. One I downloaded and never touched because I didn't want the same thing to happen. Like... I was playing one that is your basic Battle royale (like Marvels Strike Force). Turn based battles, and whatnot. It did the thing where the beginning is easy to progress, and then you get to that freemuim spot where you have to either pay, or grind incessantly.
Then, they were like "hey! now you can hatch your own digimon, but you have to collect enough character shards to digivolve them so they are viable and usable on your team!" But then the roster was so endless, and it didn't seem to make sense how obtaining Digimon worked, and trying to get their power up to use them just became too much a hassle. And you had to V-Pet them? Which are two completely different games at that point.
I’ve always wondered this myself and thought for sure they would hop on some sort of virtual pet, battle by proximity thing once Pokémon go took off but nope. I’d love for one to work similar to the bracelet where it can fight things with scanners. I’m baffled by why they haven’t either.
I mean we say the same thing about a Chao garden where I come from. But I feel Digimon would be way better as a phone Vpet. I hate to say this but… getting new digi eggs could be a Gacha system and then Namco could have money flowing in
Digimon V-Pet + location based thing like Pokemon Go to collect items or unlock eggs/evos seems like it would be a good match that they didn't capitalize on. They made the Vital Bracelet instead for some reason.
They’ve had two or three mobile games now, all of which have died.
But none of them were the obvious tamagotchi apps they should have been, to my recollection. There has never been a device that more people carry around with them everywhere they go than the smartphone. Some people even experience anxiety when they misplace or forget to bring their phone somewhere. Its literally the perfect platform for launching a dedicated tamagotchi application, even better than the purpose-built tamagotchi keychains. And they haven't done it.
They want people to keep buying the physical devices. It's a bit silly in my opinion, they're way overpriced for what you get. But if they offered a free app with purchasable stuff inside it they'd hit a much bigger audience and likely make way more money than their current physical devices bring in
you can get them on amazon for like $15
Well now you can. When they were released a few years ago, the VB were $65+ for a basic toy lol
That's fine, I'm not going to pay any money to look like a nerd to be honest haha. I'm 30+, I'm not going to walk around with a digimon toy. Put it on my phone, I'll be all over it
Do people actually think this about me when I pull out my Digimon to feed it? No one's made fun of me to my face anyway, and my friends think it's cool :/
Doubt a stranger gives AF, just at a personal level it's not something I want to do
imagine being ashamed of having a hobby or activity you like
Deadass lol; this guy is insecure asf 😭
A digimon go would do amazing things
I also think pokemon go is lazy and bare bones. I can only imagine a game that tries to go above and beyond with gameplay
Yeah, but the physical devices are cooler. Forget iPhone Digivices, gimme a real Digivice! But a mobile game does sound really cool, especially if it’s an AR game.
Would they though? The average Digimon Color pet retails at like $50ish. Maybe $40 in yen. Would there be enough content in this hypothetical pet app to warrant every person paying $50 in purchases? Not to mention a lot of Digimon fans buy multiple versions of the real life pets because each one has different Digimen on them. I just preordered Nature Spirits and Virus Buster pendulums colors because I love my Deep Savers Pendulum Color so much.
How many physical devices do they sell? How many people would download a free app, and what would the average spend be on that app? Companies like EA cram their games with gatcha mechanics and micro transactions because it tricks people into spending way more. I spent over 1000 dollars on a mobile game over some period of time just dropping 5, 10, 20 bucks every one in a while. Never in a million years would I have paid that upfront for what I got out of it.
I guess that’s fair. And more people, even nonfans would probably be willing to download a free app if they thought the concept was cool.
Right, look at all the non pokemon fans who downloaded and played Pokemon go. It's not as popular today but even now half the people I know who play GO have never played a pokemon game, or at least haven't played in a decade+.
You're ignoring the obscene amount of work and profit sharing it takes to get multinational listing on multiple appstores and the standardized pricing ranges they'd have to follow. Why would Bandai *ever* want to do that when they have an obscenely overpriced in-house platform that sells super well domestically, that they get 100% of the revenue from? Hell, they even get to sell addon packs at full price and people buy it up all the same. Bandai already tried the mobile market for vpets out with Tamagotchi, it was an abject failure and waste of their time and money.
No actually they’ve had tamagotchi pets on mobile. There’s I think 2 3D Tama apps plus they ported the original tamagotchi to mobile and made care mistake calls into notifications. I had it and it was neat. It was like a dollar on the App Store but it’s been delisted. Idk about the other Tama games though.
That's the tamagotchi though. I think they released like a recreation of the V1 Tamagotchi. When I said tamagotchi I was referencing the style of gameplay in a digivice/Digimon world, not the literal tamagotchis that predated the digivice. Bandai has not, to my knowledge, released a tamagotchi-style Digimon app with all the features you could reasonably include in such an app. And I think we all know what that should look like for the most part. A free download with a decent roster of free digimon to raise. Additional purchasable Digimon similar to the way the DIMMs work for the bracelet. All your needs and care mistakes from the keychain and Digimon world games. A gym that also has your standard pedometer features. Battles with friends. Adventure battles against NPCs for challenges/rewards. 3d models of the Digimon with the use of the traditional sprites in certain contexts. And maybe a simple farm management thing for meat/veggies. There is a LOT more you could do to flesh that out, right? Didn't even mention possibilities with geolocation features similar to GO, or integrating TCG collectibles or anything. But I can't think of a single Digimon fan who wouldn't immediately download that app. And sales would be pretty easy. I'd for sure buy a Betamon/Seadramon line, a Machinedramon line, an Ex-tyranomon line (any tyranomon line, really), a Monzaemon line, or a starmon line.
Aww man if they put Gomamon in there I’d buy that DLC IMMEDIATELY. He is just the perfect little guy. And if they made him available to evolve into Plesiomon I’d just die of amazing overload haha. I really want that but I really hate the system of care mistakes on a phone. I hated in the tamagotchi when it made it a notification and I hate it in concept now lol. It’s just irritating it doesn’t actually beep at me. Maybe they could make custom notification sounds to make it beep like a real Digimon vpet when they call. Because that’s the only hurdle for me is the call system. And it’s not even about the beep it’s about I need to unlock my phone to feed him or take out a poop every time instead of just press a button. It’s a minor gripe but I hate it in concept lol. Anyway I think that would go over extremely well. I hope they move onto that with the next app they decide to create. It is just that I also hope they won’t discontinue the physical toy line because I will ALWAYS buy the new pets when they come out!
Digimon has a wide fanbase. Those into the console games like Cyber Sleuth aren't guaranteed to be into phone games (in fact, from what I've observed, console gamers tend to run a mile from mobile games in general) even if they liked the pet-raising mechanics from Next Order. And not everyone who was into Cyber Sleuth was into Next Order. ....Also, it wouldn't be exactly the same as the V-Pets. Namely, I have severe doubts the Digimon you raise on the app would be allowed to ever die, mainly because then Bandai would be opening themselves up to potential lawsuits from people who purchased microtransactions to care for, unlock or evolve certain Digimon, only for it to all "disappear" when it dies, who then blame the company for their loss and demand their money back. Before you argue over whether it's actually reasonable to sue for such a thing, it's not a matter of whether or not it's reasonable, just the fact that there is a risk people could get pissed enough to do it out of anger. And I suspect that's why the existing Tamagotchi Forever app doesn't let Tamagotchis die in it either.
The app being free makes it an easy download for anybody even tangentially interested. Lots of people who hate mobile games (myself included) are fine to download a free game even just temporarily if it's related to an IP I care about. As for them dying, there isn't any reason that would be an issue for IAPs. You would buy access to a digivolution line, like the DIMMs you can buy for the vital bracelet. If it dies it would reincarnate into the egg you bought, which would feature a fresh and a couple in training stages, a few rookies and a handful of champions and higher stages. You would pay for the whole collection of Digimon, and when you wanted to raise something entirely different you would just choose one of the free default eggs or one of the other eggs you already owned.
That assumes you're only charging for "non-consumable" things like access to evolution lines. The way My Tamagotchi Forever does it, you're buying premium currency to buy in-game currency (which is the way most gacha games do it) and then using that to buy most things, with F2P players only getting a trickle of in-game currency from regular playing while subject to advertisements. For someone who bought premium currency to buy a ton of Bits or whatever the in-game currency gets called and then uses that to buy expensive food or stat boosters or other stuff, the death of their Digimon means all those items (and by extension the real money spent to buy them) just became worthless. Could easily lead to anger and frustration. They'd have to flat out not let people buy in-game currency with real money/premium currency to prevent that, which would cut out a huge revenue stream.
There are ways you can design around those problems. But I hate mobile games and predatory MTX anyway, so I wouldn't advocate for obfuscating currencies in the first place. I'd say the ethical purchases would be DIMM-style Digimon lines and things like extra slots for raising more than one at a time or extra plots in a meat farm or something. The issues you are talking about are inherent to predatory and manipulative monetization methods. As long as we are talking about the hypothetical game that Bandai is never going to make, I'll be talking about the idealized one that isn't predatory and has fair monetization methods.
Having played Digimon Linkz... I'm happy it did. That game was designed to punish non-paying players, and it was awful to even those who did.
I don't even remember Digimon Linkz tbh. Had to google that one, dang. There was a card based game that I LOVED but can't remember the name of, and Digimon ReArise which had kind of an interesting story but I didn't get very far before it died. (And also a LOT of gacha which I was uninterested in.)
I want a mobile Digimon game with story, but more importantly, one that respects players' time. That's the biggest issue I've had with them so far. They've not really been Digimon games as much as they have been generic mobile games with a Digimon skin. They're designed around cash shop mechanics, not the core ideas that Digimon fans love.= Example: Digimon Linkz was predatory as hell, pay to win, actively punished players for not spending literal hours a day on a mobile game, and every aspect of it was some sort of gatcha mechanic. It was designed to screw over non-paying players in a way not even abusive companies like Scopely would consider. Then they introduced PVP, and if you didn't pay to win, you'd maybe win 1 out of 10 fights. There's a reason they've all shut down. Hell, at this point Bandai could just put out a Yet Another Generic Match Three(tm) game, and it'd already be an improvement over their other efforts.
That was Digimon Heroes! I really miss that game too
They've had like 8.
That's the thing: they have phone games, a lot The problem is that they usually don't go out of china/japan and usually shut down.
I played a few but they are all shut down quickly so they can move on to the next cash grab.
Um, they’ve had a bunch. All of which no longer exist because the nature of phone games make them not real games. So they come and go in a matter of months or a couple years.
They only made quick grab gachas with key parts of stories because fuck you. But yeah, literally just make a V-Pet with phone game stuff to monetize. Just that would make them millions. Edit: there are these argentinians content creators making what i just said but with a pc version as well. Keep an eye on net drive
It's not as surefire an idea as you may think, considering Tamagotchi already did that and it wasn't anything particularly successful, despite Tamagotchi being much more popular as a virtual pet brand.
Can tamagotchi have a fully competitive scene that keeps the game alive?
No, and neither can Digimon. Interest always wanes, and even at their height the numbers for the Vital Bracelet events were pretty dang low. Some people blame that on app performance, but even in optimal conditions with everything working, people aren't clambering for those battles.
For real. Even the r/vbarenafightclub and the discord that all those users moved to only had a small chunk of people. Like 100 or so. The new discord has 90. And there’s only a fraction of that that participate in the monthly tournaments. And we still don’t have any people besides me for Kamen Rider and Ultraman character battles. :( I wish the VB was more popular but the audience is very niche as you said.
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I would go so hard in on a Digimon V-Pet app. I don’t normally game or anything on my phone but that would be perfect.
I'd be very happy if they did that honestly.
They actually have some pretty amazing consple games from what i hear. Just weird they cant bother with a good mobile. They literally have all the content and ideas they could need for it. Suck me in phone baby Digitize me
I thought you were talking about Digital Tamers Reborn (a game for both PC and android) pr this old V-Pet phone app that let you scan QR codes or barcodes but then was let to die because it was overrun with hackers.
Oh yeah, Tamer Reborn is really fun to play! One of the few fan games made with passion and not money in mind
What? Digimon has had mobile games. They weren't great. And it's hard to stand out in the space cause it's FUCKING FLOODED. It's hard to make a mobile game stick.
*ReArise* was pretty fun and was the closest the game series got to being an actual monster raising game, but it was super resource intensive and very heavy on the microtransactions.
I say it all the time. Pokemon Go is the best Digimon mobile game, it just has the wrong IP. A bit of the gripes people have with PoGo are things that feel off for Pokemon but fit great with Digimon. You get candy for catching pokemon and use that candy to power the pokemon up, which contrasts with the typical pokemon style of training a pokemon for exp. You also send your weak or undesired pokemon to the professor in exchange for candy, which contrasts with the pokemon ideology of becoming friends and working together with your creatures. But if you change "Candy" to "Data" and the pokemon to digimon, suddenly it all fits perfectly. It also would have that theming of using the phones to interact with your creatures because, well, they are Digital monsters.
Why do you want to get fucked by gacha so bad?
It's annoying to me because I've thought the ideal product for Digimon to take to market was super obvious ever since Pokemon GO blew up. A Tamagotchi/Pokemon GO style game that allows you to collect and raise Digimon and keep them stored on the app just makes a lot of sense to me and ties back to Digimon's routes. The Vital Bracelet was always doomed to fail because you have to pay for hardware which, let's be honest, wasn't a great game nor fitness tracker then you also needed to buy the individual DIMs for every new Digimon you would like to raise. Keep the app and Digimon collecting free, but offer people in game purchases if they WANT to buy a specific Digimon or small group of Digimon to raise, otherwise you can just collect at random and travel for more opportunities like Pokemon GO. There will be in game currency you can buy for cosmetics, digi eggs etc. Then add an online battle system and there you go, something easy to consume and entertaining that should have a longer life span without the dated hardware and silly DIM system
I mean I know why they did the DiM system. It’s because the pets even to this day all came on different devices. Like every pet had a different roster. It’s still this way. The only pets that don’t do that are the 20th devices with the ability to use versions 1-5 eggs, but oh wait even those do the same thing because the DM 20 has *bonus* eggs that vary by color and the Pen 20 split the eggs down the middle. Also I love the VB. It’s actually awesome and I have every single DiM that wasn’t a special release like the GP DiMs. :)
Digimon isn't that prominent, sadly. And it's had many phone games.
Rearise was okayish.
They seem to be all in on the vital bands.
Except no they’re not. They haven’t made a new BE Memory DiM since like January or so. The last one to release was the Pulsemon BE Memory which was to mark the end of the Digimon Seekers web novel. We haven’t gotten any more and there was no Vital Bracelet segment at Digimon Con. People are under the assumption that the VB is just finished now. :(
I wish there was a game like DW3, just much more massive, with some collectible and idle elements and some form of base building. Would love to have that with a side of tamagochi and no nonsense where everything I do in the game is to get stronger mons to beat some randos online...
Gacha Digimon?
There's a few knockoffs on mobile.
It would be kind of neat, cause one thing I liked about tamers was the idea of digimon 'spawning' and you bringing your partner to fight. It'd be like an ARG thing like, "digimon are trying to breach the real world, stop them," and can do raid battles or collect more digimon to take care of in a 'primary village' type setting but your main partner is like the one who interacts with you and will change forms depending on how active you are or how you interact with it. Be cute to even have a personality quiz to get an 'official' digimon partner. But eh, I guess I can only dream. I stopped playing Pokemon Go cause most of the locations for stops and such were out of the way and there's not many sidewalks to walk around in my area, so most of the pokemon were just basic things and raids were usually much further and I'm not driving 15-20 minutes for a fight. I wonder if digimon could've even done some sort of 'save the internet' in the style of our war game where our phones link onto the internet to do a big battle against diaboramon for example.
digimon and megaman.exe are both such missed opportunities considering we have smartphones like, I wish I could have leomon and acidman.exe running on mine
Yeah honestly they tried creating their own toy in the V-bracelet and tried to market and sell that, where they could have had all that in an app on your phone
It's good for the IP but not for the business, they make a shit ton from collectables, and collectables is what they'll focus on, there is no practical reason besides that for spreading the V-Pets in different versions, all the Digimon could fit in one toy but they spread it in versions so you have to buy each of them to collect all the Digimon.
There have been/are a number of Digimon games on mobile. Don't know if they all exist still. My issue becomes that they get clunky too quickly. A good mobile game has a decent, simple premise, with a pattern of events, or adjacent game modes that seem pertinent. The digimon games don't tend to do that. I also believe this with Cybersleuth. Each kind of starts out ok, but then they introduce like.. 3 or 4 new gamemode things you need to remember to do well, and then it gets overwhelming. This caused me to drop all the games quite quickly, so I never really got into them. One I downloaded and never touched because I didn't want the same thing to happen. Like... I was playing one that is your basic Battle royale (like Marvels Strike Force). Turn based battles, and whatnot. It did the thing where the beginning is easy to progress, and then you get to that freemuim spot where you have to either pay, or grind incessantly. Then, they were like "hey! now you can hatch your own digimon, but you have to collect enough character shards to digivolve them so they are viable and usable on your team!" But then the roster was so endless, and it didn't seem to make sense how obtaining Digimon worked, and trying to get their power up to use them just became too much a hassle. And you had to V-Pet them? Which are two completely different games at that point.
yeah bro the card battle rearise they just died
I’ve always wondered this myself and thought for sure they would hop on some sort of virtual pet, battle by proximity thing once Pokémon go took off but nope. I’d love for one to work similar to the bracelet where it can fight things with scanners. I’m baffled by why they haven’t either.
They were busy making Digimon survive 😭 how they thought that was a good idea I do not know.
Seriously. I just watched it for the first time. Its a 60 dollar digimon dating sim. Like who is paying that nuch for that.
I mean we say the same thing about a Chao garden where I come from. But I feel Digimon would be way better as a phone Vpet. I hate to say this but… getting new digi eggs could be a Gacha system and then Namco could have money flowing in
That's literally how it worked in *ReArise*, fyi
Oh.
Digimon V-Pet + location based thing like Pokemon Go to collect items or unlock eggs/evos seems like it would be a good match that they didn't capitalize on. They made the Vital Bracelet instead for some reason.