Why The Tomorrow Children failed - broken free-to-play design destroyed

"The Tomorrow Children", developed by indie darling Q-Games, launched on 6th September 2016. Sporting a superb lighting and shading engine, it looked phenomenal. Today it was announced that the servers would be terminated at the end of this year, barely a year later. After over two years' of development, probably at least three given a strong announcement at Gamescom in 2014, all that work has come to nought. So what went wrong?

The game's pretty like nothing else out there! Such a waste.

I downloaded the game today to check it out myself and it was immediately apparent. Firstly, it's not at all clear what one is supposed to do. The minimalist, controlled intro, which equips you with a pickaxe ready to diligently mine for the Motherland, suddenly gives way to an open town with zero guidance. You can wander around town and interact with trees and deposits of resources, and even run on the tread-mill to generate some power, but otherwise you're are at loss to find Circle events you can interact with. Where am I supposed to use this pickaxe of mine?

This situation is painfully compounded for the noob proletariat by the random towns and events - in my case, the first town, my very first experience, was infected by some bee creatures. As I stumbled onto on tread-mill in my clumsy, unguided explorations, a bee-sting in the back killed me! While I was trying to learn the ropes, I was being attacked and had no way to defend myself. Where's the attack button? How do I shoot? I found I could kill them crudely with my pickaxe, but then the pickaxe was exhausted. Where could I get a new one? Nowhere I could find.

These bugs were in my starting town with no way to defend myself and no other players who could defend me.

Not willing to throw in the towel too quickly, I took the subway to a new town, a long-lived town, where I hoped I'd have a more secure place to come to grips with how things roll. There was no bustle, only a few more buildings; certainly nothing like the metropolis I was expecting from months of players building it up. There were at least kiosks for buying tools so I could finally get a new pickaxe, but almost everything was excluded me as a non-paying player as far as I can see. And when a monster does attack, you can't defend yourself without paying cash for a weapon license...

If your town hasn't got these shops, you can't get gear. But most gear is locked anyway without paying, something you are constantly being prompted to do.

Thus, in addition to the confounding experience that'll lose so many new players, the game's requirement to have paying players to fill roles for the growth and defence of the town means a lack of paying players breaks the experience for all new players. You literally can't play without paying players besides you to fight against the creatures and build important buildings. And given every new player's experience is impenetrable failure, no-one's going to stick around to pay!

You can craft some items, but once again almost everything, including things you need, are locked behind a pay-wall. And you can't craft while someone else is - the game actually has you queuing!

At its core, there's potential here. I'm confounded as to why the initial experience is so brutal and poorly structured. It's as if Q-Games did zero testing whatsoever, or completely ignored the feedback. But fundamentally, trying to work free-to-play around a present paying userbase is never going to work. The initial play experience has to be fun and rewarding and self-contained to get players to want to invest. Leaving them dependent on paying players who just aren't there means ruining their experience and turning them away in a bitter cycle, ultimately wasting all that time creating the game in the first place.

I really hope Q-Games can find a way to repurpose the engine, because it is a thing of beauty with gorgeous dynamic lighting and materials. Just don't make such obvious mistakes next time! Maybe steer clear of free-to-play and stick to the core, paying gamer.