This week, gamers can return to the “Cozy Grove” universe with the sequel title, “Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit” available. One difference that sets the new title apart, launching on Tuesday, is that it’s a mobile-only game for the streaming service Netflix exclusively, which acquired the “Cozy Grove” developer, Spry Fox, as an in-house studio back in October 2022, unlike the new title’s predecessor, made available on Apple Arcade, Nintendo Switch, arguably the most-chosen platform of the game’s players, Xbox, PlayStation, and PC in 2021.
But according to an interview by Variety, co-founder and studio director David Edery of Spry Fox said that creating the game for Netflix didn’t harm the title as much as fans of other platforms might first think.
“Obviously, we’re not on Switch at the present time — but we still had to make the game work with controllers, it’s not like we could just forget that part,” Edery said. “So it changed the game less than you would have thought. The one thing that’s transparent obviously is I can tell you because I knew literally 100% of people were playing the game on a mobile device, we cared even more about mobile than we would have before.” Not to say that we didn’t care about it before, ’cause it was before an Apple Arcade game. But we still did more to make sure it’s a quite an enjoyment playing on any screen, whatsoever the size is, whether it’s a big iPad or a small phone.”
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For example, one of the newest added features of “Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit” is its new zoom in and out button, which is, according to Edery, “a thing that I would like to think we would have put in regardless,” but given that the game’s 100% mobile now, we’re going to put in.
“Otherwise it didn’t change stuff as much as you might think, he added. “And our ambition is still at some point to have the game available on TVs and see some things like that. So we wouldn’t want to walk away from the investments that enable us to do that.”
According to Netflix, “Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit” is a game “about the healing power of helping others”: “In it, you play a spirit scout who’s stranded on a mysteriously charming island after a bus crash.”.
When you’re not out searching for the rest of your troop or decorating your campsite, you serve as caretaker for the island, tending to the ghostly woes of its spectral inhabitants, and bringing peace and friendship to adorable bears and other animals suffering from past trauma. When your restorative work is done, stretch out by exploring, fishing, crafting, and decorating to your heart’s delight. Two things that this team behind “Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit” values about being a Netflix Games title are no microtransactions in the game itself and the wider reach they’re able to get onto the streamer, which reported 269.60 million subscribers as of March.
“What’s nice with Netflix is, if you have to try and monetize your game, you have to do something to make people give you money,” said Alicia Fortier, lead game designer of “Camp Spirit.”
“And that can be a complete opposite motivation to wanting to do good for people’s lives. And those are diametrically opposed.”. It’s pleasant not to need to worry about that being on Netflix, so we’re simply free to focus on providing players with a good experience. She also pointed out how stoked she was about being on Netflix because of the fact that “we can reach those people who wouldn’t have a Switch, because there are people who are like, why would I spend hundreds of dollars on a console?” Fortier said, “If more and more people can get access to the games, that would be my dream come true.”.
Edery, Fortier and the Spry Fox crew had set out to make a sequel to the immensely popular “Cozy Grove”—not as some splashy project to pad new owner Netflix’s slate of original video games but because there are a few major, major flaws with the original.
“To be clear, ‘Cozy Grove 1’ worked out really well.”
We were really happy with it. People played it for surprisingly long time; there are people who are still playing it, even since launch day, which kind of amazes me. But there were two fairly big problems,” Edery said. “One of them was just technically; we didn’t architect it in a way that made it easy to grow in terms of adding new land masses, adding as many characters as what we might want to in the future. And there’s a variety of reasons for that, but it wasn’t technically built to scale that way.”. Even fans of ‘Cozy Grove 1’ who played it on the Switch have commented, ‘Wow, once you’re really slathering your island with decorations and animals and stuff, you start to get some performance issues.’ And that’s despite a fairly significant amount of work we did to compensate for that. So, one of the reasons we wanted to do ‘Cozy Grove 2,’ if you will, with ‘Camp Spirit,’ is because we just really wanted to rebuild this game from scratch so that we wouldn’t have all those limitations. Now, the “Camp Spirit” designers are looking ahead to all the updates they have in the works moving forward, while leaving plenty of room for developing features in response to gamers’ reactions at launch. (Example of that from Fortier: “Let’s say the community becomes obsessed with a particular imp that shows up in the game — we should probably make that imp a more interesting part of the game.”)
“We have the next fair planned.
We’ve got some Easter eggs in the launch scope that can lead to stuff people can discover for the first updates, and we wanted to get all our seasonal stuff prepared,” said Fortier. “One of the features I’m really curious to see the community response to see how we develop it is the asynchronous multiplayer.”. It’s all very new for a ‘Camp Spirit’ and can greatly change the way people want to customize and communicate with their friends. It’s not very important to us, but not losing this sense of parallel play means not getting immediate social pressure on multiplayer. But still, I think it’s kinda super fun that you can see your friends on your island and everything. While Netflix has moved more and more to be transparent about the engagement and viewership figures for its TV series and films, gaming is charted territory for the company; therefore, it is not clear how they will measure success for prized originals like “Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit” and what that will entail for development on future games and overall strategy. But Edery has some insight into what’s expected from the game.
“The short answer is, I think Netflix is still evaluating, what are the right metrics for games?
What does define a success? Because it is still a new business for Netflix, and so I don’t think there’s any hard, for sure, this defines success, this defines failure,” Edery said. “But what I can tell you is, in the case of ‘Cozy Grove’, we all know what success looks like, and it’s that people decide to play your game for a long time, because that is what it’s designed to do. And that was the case before Netflix. If someone just wants to play the game for three days, then we did something wrong. The whole point is to be on this journey for months at least, to get familiar with these characters a day at a time at a very relaxed pace. And so I think that works well for next Netflix, and they will be very happy if we can accomplish that; and as a studio, that is the exact same thing that will make us happy.