Soon after completing the tutorial, I happened upon a “Great Spirit’s Chest,” a 72-hour long bonus that promises to give me three times the amount of in-game gold or gems for the same amount of actual money. This makes playing more interesting and helps us motivate players in various ways.” According to him, every one of the company’s games is free-to-play, “and we don’t have plans to change that.” Sirotin explains: “ The Tribez has two types of in-game currency: one that can be earned by playing the game, and another that is granted for outstanding results or can be bought via in-app purchase. This dual-currency system is typical in this sort of game.

This is the new model, “free-to-play” or “freemium,” that is so popular on mobile devices and has been working its way onto PCs and traditional console platforms as well. Gems are far scarcer, but anytime a player is running low, they can always open their wallet and buy some. “Gems” are one of the two forms of in-game currency, alongside generic “gold,” and many items can only be bought with one or the other (although some can be bought with either). But there’s a cost to my isolation: I lose a pretty large number of gems by doing so, because optional or not, the game really wants players to share. Once I unchecked the sharing boxes at the bottom of the quest completion pop-up, they stayed unchecked. I did not connect my accounts, and fortunately the game respected that decision. “It is always up to the user whether to use them or not.” Such social networks as Facebook and Twitter fit these purposes,” Sirotin says. “We want to empower those users who desire to be more social and more in touch with other players in the game community. According to the The Tribez’s Chief Producer, Leonid Sirotin, “These so-called ‘viral’ elements are present, in one form or another, in every modern game.” And while that’s a slight exaggeration, different types of social integration have been increasingly prevalent in recent years, and as we discussed some time ago, the next generation of home consoles will take that even further (as with the “Share” button on the PlayStation 4’s controller). But these updates are no longer just a part of games found on Facebook they have made their way outside this ecosystem. Over the years, Facebook feeds have been filled by messages from games such as Mafia Wars and Farmville. This is the rise of in-game socialization. Soon, two new quests are added to the queue, each with a 24-hour timer, and both asking me to connect my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Letting friends and followers know about quest completions will give in-game rewards, which is a pretty serious incentive to spam feeds with updates. After the tutorial ends and another quest is completed, something new appears on the screen: two share boxes, one for Twitter and the other for Facebook. Since then, it has been downloaded over 9 million times: 4.1 million times on iOS (more than half of those being the tablet version), 3 million times from the Google Play store, 1.6 million times on Facebook, and 320,000 times on other platforms (such as the aforementioned Amazon Appstore and the SK Planet’s T-Store in South Korea).Īnd publisher Game Insight wants everyone to play. In March 2013, it made its way over the Amazon Appstore and then onto Facebook in September. In October, it made its way over to Android. Initially released for the iPad in April 2012 (only nine months after development began), The Tribez was ported to the iPhone the following month.

It’s a game that’s worth telling people about. The gameplay is simple (tap things to interact with them), and it only takes a few minutes to really grasp the basics, but a lot can be done with simple mechanics, and The Tribez has a surprising amount of depth.

Within ten seconds, I’ve already completed a quest, earning 20 gold and 5 experience points. Are you on location? Excellent, then the crossing was successful! You should go ahead and make nice with the locals. “Come in, come in, this is the professor. If the submersible wasn’t enough of a tip that this isn’t just some simple prehistoric God game, another speech bubble pops up, beside it a man with crazy hair and a lab coat.

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