Trophy Chase: Why are PS players buying a wretched Little Adventure on the Prairie?
In February, the mobile game Little Adventure on the Prairie was ported to PlayStation 4 and PS Vita. The game is frankly of poor quality, but gamers buy it to earn platinum trophies and raise their status in the gaming charts.
Little Adventure on the Prairie is a platformer with unpretentious graphics and elementary gameplay: the player moves through monotonous levels and monotonously kills enemies. The game costs only two dollars and is completed in an hour.
The developers, the small Qatari studio Infinite Madaa, ported Little Adventure in such a way that gamers could easily earn platinum trophies there. And so they found an audience for their title.
What exactly are “trophies”? These are achievements that gamers earn for completing PS games. The highest level of the trophy is platinum. The number of trophies is displayed in the player’s profile on the PlayStation Network service, and the more trophies a player has, the higher he is in the charts on sites such as PSNProfiles and TrueTrophies.
Many gamers do not care about these ratings, but some spend a lot of time and effort solely to be in the top. It was for them that Little Adventure was ported.
Usually, to earn trophies, a player needs to try. In Little Adventure, you just need to play – in the course of a short passage, the player easily earns first bronze, silver and gold trophies, and then receives the coveted platinum.
According to TrueTrophies and PSNProfiles, more than 90% of the game’s buyers have completed it and earned platinum. Moreover, Little Adventure has another trick – the PS4 and Vita versions are tied to the same profile, but the trophies in each version are counted separately. That is, the player buys one game, but passes it on both platforms and earns two platinum. Therefore, for example, the game has eight thousand owners on PSNProfile, and almost half of them also passed it on a portable console.
Game designer Salem Al-Ghanim (Salem Al-Ghanim) said that the studio decided to port the game to PS solely because of money problems. The developers needed a quick and easy earnings to continue working on another project – a turn-based role-playing game Chromia, which, according to Al-Ghanim, should be “perfect”. Al-Ghanim claims that the team earned as much as it needed, but does not name specific figures.
The studio’s decision was symptomatic. As Kotaku notes, the trophy race among PS players has escalated in the last few years, but the average time it takes to get a platinum trophy in games has noticeably decreased.
This is especially true for the PS Vita – very few titles come out on it, and almost all of them are artless ports of mobile games that no one has heard of.
Compare how the top games for the platform looked in 2012 and now. No more Uncharted, Need for Speed, Street Fighter and other notable franchises. And Little Adventure on the Prairie is in the first place.
At first, Sony seemed to be trying to protect its half-dead portable console from dealers in fast platinum. Last summer, a game called ★★★★★ 1000 Top Rated was banned, in which platinum could be obtained almost instantly, as was reported even in the game trailer.
But dozens of others come to the place of one game – it seems that soon Vita will be needed only by trophy hunters. But at least they will continue to use the console.
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A source: Kotaku
