Disney Dreamlight Valley should be a model for Disney (and other) live-service games

I’ll be honest, I have no idea how well Disney Dreamlight Valley is doing under its current business model, where it has an upfront (but not a “full” $60-$70) price, an optional expansion you can buy (with more coming), a ton of cosmetic offerings you can pay money for, but also pretty consistent free updates as well.

Today was also the first time I played the game in several months, and it has had several significant updates since I last played, and it didn’t feel overwhelming even with some changes in how everything works and a ton of new content to check out.

That’s the huge difference between Disney Dreamlight Valley and virtually every other live-service Disney game I’ve played since I started this blog. Some are free-to play. But others (i.e. Disney Speedstorm) have an upfront entry price and the same overwhelming amount of new content along with huge pressure to buy, BUY, BUY! things to make any meaningful progress.

At least certainly for games you are putting out on consoles and not mobile platforms, I feel like the Disney Dreamlight Valley model is far superior. There’s always free content to engage with, paid content if I want it, and if I’ve been away for a bit, I don’t immediately get blasted and overwhelmed with all the new stuff. Disney Dreamlight Valley is just chill, and frankly makes me way more likely to stay in that ecosystem and spend those moonstones (also only having a couple of currencies helps instead of several or more).

If you want to play with core Disney and Pixar characters these days (i.e. not Marvel or Star Wars), you are mostly limited to their mobile or live-service offerings, and that doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon with a couple notable exceptions like Disney Illusion Island or the upcoming Epic Mickey Rebrushed. If we have to continue to do that, if Disney Dreamlight Valley is doing well and continues to do well with its current business model, it should be the standard, not the exception.

That’s it for today, but as we are nearing the end of the month I should have at least one entry coming up next week. Things are slowing down a tad for current Disney games probably until Star Wars Outlaws hits at the end of August so I might be diving back into more retro content for awhile til things ramp back up which I’m looking forward to because that was originally the focus of this blog, there has just been a very regular flow of current Disney game stuff for really the last couple of years and only recently does it seem to be slowing down some. See ya real soon!