The problem with Disney Dreamlight Valley: I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed

I never took myself for a cozy gamer before the pandemic. But, quarantine and depression really signaled a change in how I looked at the entire genre. It started with nearly 1000 hours into Animal Crossing: New Horizons but continued well into the future.

When I saw Disney Dreamlight Valley, I knew this would be a perfect game for both myself and my wife to continue our cozy quest once ACNH finally fizzled for us. It had Disney characters, a cute aesthetic, and an interesting story. The downside was that we couldn’t play together due to it having no multiplayer implemented, but that didn’t stop us.

For those that don’t know, Disney Dreamlight Valley is a standard cozy game that includes challenges, missions, fishing, mining, crafting, farming, and everything else you expect out of this genre. Except, it has a story to go with it, albeit predictable. Oh, and, aside from your character that you can design and create, it’s nearly entirely populated with both Disney and Pixar characters.

Normally, something big like this is just out of our price range. But, we both wanted to play and budgeted together, each grabbing the $70 Ultimate Edition of the Founders Packs. 

It offered a ton of goodies, currency, and more. We knew this was the best way to go about it since I’d play Disney Dreamlight Valley on PC and she’d play on our Nintendo Switch. 

That was well over a year ago now. We played. A lot. Looking at my Steam account, I’ve logged well over 300 hours into this charming Disney-fied cozy game.

Paying big bucks doesn’t mean you’re getting a perfect game

Even charging that much for a game, Disney Dreamlight Valley came with its own problems, like entirely kicking players out of the game on certain platforms without notice. There were times that it was just unplayable due to being kicked out so much.

My wife’s Switch version of Disney Dreamlight Valley was notorious for this, as she couldn’t even play some days without constantly losing progress. Sometimes missions would bug out and not be able to be completed until a future update. But, the game was Early Access and problems are expected.

One qualm I had (and still have to this day) is the absolute focus on Disney Dreamlight Valley being a game for girls, even though the character creator allows you to be a boy and it includes some men’s clothing. As pretty as I look in a dress, I just wish they had thought about the fact that men may play this game a little more.

Early on, the developers, Gameloft, made some insinuations that Disney Dreamlight Valley would only be in Early Access for a handful of months and then the content would ramp up pretty hardcore. Based on how many Moonstones (the in-game currency) we got in the Ultimate Edition, we assumed it would pan out well with their Star Path season pass prices.

But, alas, time kept moving. Updates kept coming, with new seasons and not enough actual meat in the semi-regular content. Our Moonstones ran out, we stopped caring about the challenges to get us event items, and we moved on.

The problem came down that we both binged the main story pretty thoroughly. Before long, we ran out of things to do and started making it up as we went. After I got my Disneyland theme park rides, I entirely reinvented my Meadow as a theme park. So did she. Then, I sat the controller down with nothing else to do.

Scrooge’s shop was dried up. The rotation of Premium Shop items cost money for something we may not even use. The stories and missions were entirely complete. The only reason to log into the game was to do the Star Path, if we even bothered to pay for it.

Disney Dreamlight Valley dries up like a well before you know it

But, when I was done with all of that? I felt empty. Anytime they’d add to the story or present new content, we ate it up in a matter of days when they intended for it to last months. 

To this day, even with multiple updates since I last played, walking into Scrooge McDuck’s shop is full of empty sections that no longer get filled. I still have plenty of items that I never got my hands on in either Disney Dreamlight Valley nor Animal Crossing, but I’m way more likely find new items in ACNH.

While previous Star Path seasons and story content had easy, relaxing missions, the hard grind in the recent seasons became more wrenching and annoying. They started offering missions where you’d water a single plant once a day for several real-world days, or starting a daily conversation with a specific villager multiple times, thus requiring multiple days to finish.

Being forced to do content in Disney Dreamlight Valley that involves real work hours of sitting and waiting felt like a feature they added to prepare for the free-to-play launch and it was really jarring, but it was clear they were trying to keep players from zipping through everything quickly.

Logging into my Disney Dreamlight Valley account now, I realize that I never even bothered to do the DreamSnaps quests and missions. I just stopped caring when I had nothing else useful to do in the game anymore.

I think it’s most upsetting that the most recent Disney Dreamlight Valley Star Path focused on Halloween and pirates (with goodies from The Nightmare Before Christmas, Hocus Pocus, Haunted Mansion, and Pirates of the Carribean), a Star Path made for myself and my wife, and we just couldn’t care enough about the game to log in and do the challenges. I wasted a ton of precious Moonstones purchasing that season pass and just never did anything with it. And now it’s gone.

There’s so much more to the story

Needless to say, we both got our $70 worth from Disney Dreamlight Valley . But, this was a game designed by a mobile game developer for PC and consoles with a mobile mentality. In theory, they should have understood the need for constant content for the more obsessive and hardcore of us cozy gamers.

In fact, if we were to use real money to buy every single bit of content offered in the shop over the past year, it still wouldn’t satisfy our craving for time and gameplay. Where Animal Crossing came with all of this content built right into the game to allow for my thousand hours, Dreamlight Valley was more of a trickle-in. A real “hurry-up-and-wait situation”.

But, they failed in a lot of ways. Where Animal Crossing faded from our daily lives on its own, peacefully, with a salute on its way down and still plenty of time that we could have spent in it, Disney Dreamlight Valley feels like an entire stop-gap at this point. Like we ran an entire gamut and have nothing to show for it. Frankly, I feel used.

And finally, after well over a year, Gameloft announced that Disney Dreamlight Valley is coming out of Early Access. The plan, as they’ve told us for a year, was that it would become free-to-play when it did, as well as offer a ton of new content to keep the party going, possible multiplayer, and so on.

It was to be a valid, reassuring option for those of us that both came from Animal Crossing and paid a lot of money for Disney Dreamlight Valley . But, suddenly, they explained a change to their plans over a year later. The game, which has built itself to be a free-to-play mentality, with microtransactions abound, will no longer be free-to-play.

A flailing game is a failed game

With the news over the past couple weeks about Disney Dreamlight Valley reneging on their original deal, I wanted to circle back to that and talk about the failings of both Disney Dreamlight Valley and other thoughts about “Games as a Service” gone wrong.

As I’m writing this, Gameloft made multiple announcements across multiple days to detail things like their usual upcoming roadmap, plus how content will be offered going forward.

Across my life, I’ve been under a pretty heavy thought process that if you pay for a game, the content should be included and microtransactions should be minimal or negligible, at worst. 

If the game is free-to-play, however? I absolutely understand the need for a model that requires a way to make money. Some games take it off the deep end in how many pop-ups or in-your-face windows try to get you to spend real money, but the game is free. It’s understandable and, oftentimes, easy to ignore.

Gameloft, a publisher known often for free-to-play mobile games, on the other hand, has designed Disney Dreamlight Valley’s entire value and ecosystem around this free-to-play model that relies on people purchasing a Star Path season pass for all of the seasonal goodies, or the Premium Shop having specialty items and clothing for real money.

While I wasn’t a huge fan of the little WALL-E bundle they offered for such a high price, it was at least understandable of why it existed. Gameloft is a business out to make money, as a business does.

The problem with wanting it both ways

Let’s talk about the consequences of “double dipping” as a developer and that Gameloft decided to double-dip on Disney Dreamlight Valley.

The inherent problem with Disney Dreamlight Valley isn’t that it doesn’t have a lot of content. In all truthfulness, it does. But, it’s a cozy game built with the same long-term intention as Animal Crossing: New Horizons and it fails pretty miserably at a certain point.

With stand-alone paid games, like My Time at Sandrock (which we loved!), all of the content meant for the game generally is included. There can be expansions or additional content added over time. But, you don’t need them to play the majority of the game.

In the case of ACNH, Amiibo Cards also come to mind, as well as the Happy Home Designer expansion. They generally find ways to add more content that don’t impede on the core experience and can be ignored outright, if you need to.

Free-to-play games, on the other hand, and especially newer games under that genre, tend to have a starting small bulk of content and then rely on a model called “ Games as a Service” or “GaaS”. This model means that they plan to offer more and more content, given as both free updates that require grinding, as well as paid enhancements, cosmetics, or full story riffs. 

Generally, you can pay money to unlock the free content quicker, and so on. You go into the game knowing the intentions and adjust your perception accordingly.

As mentioned before, when we got our copies of Disney Dreamlight Valley back in September 2022, the promise was that the game would become a free-to-play model eventually, the Founders Pack owners would be taken care of, and that paying for a Founders Pack of some sort would help push the developers to a quick release. 

Changing their minds after a year

Disney Dreamlight Valley, while intending to invoke the same long-term feeling that ACNH offered, eventually dried out. The hardcore fans of the game did everything they could and ran out of things to do. The fanbase was just too quick for them to pump out content.

I believe Gameloft saw this and decided to pivot entirely. This is leading to some really awkward conversations and announcements from Gameloft about Disney Dreamlight Valley.

On October 27th, 2023, well over a full year after Disney Dreamlight Valley launched, they announced that the game would no longer be free-to-play when it officially launches on December 5th, 2023.

But, what does that mean for the fanbase? Unfortunately, not much. Those that bought the game’s Founders Packs a year ago get to keep the game they paid actual money for, some Moonstones, a few cosmetics, and a pat on the head, no matter what Pack you owned.

Seriously, 2,500 Moonstones does not get you very far. Most items in the Premium Shop or the Star Path costs at least 3,000 Moonstones, for instance. 

Disney Dreamlight Valley gave us almost a way to do something, like handing us a coupon for our trouble where we still have to spend money to actually use it.

When you do the math, it hurts

It doesn’t matter if we spent $70 on the Disney Dreamlight Valley Ultimate Edition. We will now have to pay an additional $30 if we want the Expansion pass, and even more if we want to access the next Star Path. According to their posts, my $70 Ultimate Founders Pack is no different than the bottom-tier base-level “Standard” Founders Pack.

I feel betrayed to think that I’ve dropped $140 dollars on a game for myself and my wife (plus some, because those additional microtransaction Moonstones weren’t cheap), and they couldn’t even give the common courtesy of treating us like it when they used us at their stepping stones. 

If I want to enjoy the new content being offered for the same price range, I have to drop another $30 for each of us. Absolutely not. We both agree that spending $100 (each) on a single game is absolutely outrageous, when they’re going to continue to nickel and dime us in the future.

So, where does that leave us? Well, less than a week after the initial announcement, it was apparent that the decision to move to a fully-paid, non-free-to-play model in the middle of no where after a year of promises made some really bad waves. 

Just five days after the announcement, Disney Dreamlight Valley made another announcement to try to show a roadmap. On the surface, it could be fine. But, it felt like they were the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz holding up his curtain so no one could see him.

However, the problem remains that the promise of new biomes that we’ve been strung along for a year are now locked behind an additional $30 paywall for longtime fans.

Disney Dreamlight Valley wants to make sure you know it’s giving you content, finally, maybe…

The stale game is where people that spend no additional money will remain, with occasional scraps and bones thrown their way. Sure, you get some new characters like Jack Skellington (The Nightmare Before Christmas) or Mike and Sully (Monsters Inc). But, the majority of the new villagers will come from the expansion pass.

The addition of multiplayer as a free update is a nice detail, but feels a year too late at this point. The mode will allow you to see other people’s valleys and check their also-empty Scrooge’s shop. But, it feels like an afterthought, as they say that it’s just a beginning of how that mode will evolve, not a fleshed-out feature as of yet.

But, if you want the content that was originally promised as the slow drip, such as biomes, tons of characters, and more clothing and furniture, you have to spend more money.

This double-dipping means that the same monetization options that were introduced when the game was designed to be free-to-play are also present. 

For instance, there is a paid season pass, which is a really bad thing for a game you’re forced to also pay for. I think of games like Fortnite or Halo Infinite. You have free tiers and paid tiers, but both of those games are free to download. 

Then you have something like Diablo 4, a standard purchase kind of game, where “seasons” exist, but they’re free for all players.

Some interesting details hidden in their Apple Arcade version

What’s hilarious is that they hide the fact that the Seasonal “Star Paths” and the Premium Shop are still identical for everyone except for the now-announced Apple Arcade version of the game. It removes those from Apple Arcade entirely due to Apple’s rules of making people pay for more microtransactions in their paid Arcade. They know what they’re doing.

The Arcade Edition also removes any cross-save ability to platforms outside of Apple products, which locks you entirely out of chunks of the normal version of the game. 

There are too many cozy games out there waiting to be played to worry about this one

I just have no words to explain how betrayed I feel after hundreds of hours of play, having given up on Disney Dreamlight Valley months ago due to an absolute lack of quality content, only to find out that the content we’ve been waiting for has been dropped behind an even- higher-than-I’ve-already-paid-for paywall.

As it stands, I believe that their new “Gold” special edition should have translated from the Ultimate Founders Pack. Maybe I’ll just restart my copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and play that for another thousand hours instead. They don’t charge me for that.