I’ve been so busy lately I haven’t had time even for casual fare like Candy Crush Soda Saga or Paradise Bay. A few days ago I finally checked in to Paradise Bay only to discover the following message:
If it’s too small to read, it says:
“Bon Voyage! Trademasters, it’s with a heavy heart we must inform you that on May 17, 2019 we will terminate service fo Paradise Bay. On that date the game will no longer be playable. As of March 18, all In-App purchases have been turned off and allplayers credited with ten million Gems to use as they desire. Thank you for spending your time with us, and we wish you the best on all your future adventure! – The Paradise Bay Team.”
As for why it’s going down, it says a lot that this notice went out on the 18th of March and a “big fan” like me only saw in it early April. When I wrote a post about Paradise Bay a little over 2 years ago, I commented, prophetically, that: “I’m a little worried they’ll take it down for non-profitability since it’s so easy to play for free but, eh, not my problem.” Welp, looks like I’ve gotta get me a psychic hotline because my prediction came true. And I think I know why.
But only “think.” I don’t work for King or keep up with the latest news in casual game-land. So take everything I’m going to write below with a pinch of salt. It’s just that as a player who considers myself a fan of Paradise Bay, as well as someone who dabbles in other casual games, I could tell the writing was on the wall for this game two years ago and the results are plain for all to see.
TL;DR – It wasn’t profitable enough
Paradise Bay is no Anno 2070, but it’s still a large game with a lot of moving parts and graphics. A game like that will take a lot of money and man-hours to develop, design and maintain. It just had too many moving parts compared to King’s other games like Candy Crush. Apparently it was run by a company named Z2 that King bought some years ago for $45 million. That probably explains why it’s a more complicated game that doesn’t really fit the simple puzzle games King made their fortune off.
A lot of stuff going on in one little screen
Furthermore, unlike those simpler games, Paradise Bay was also story and event-based. This means even more effort and money spent on brainstorming, programming, testing and bug-fixing events, constantly trying to keep players engaged and more. I’ve seen a figure of “$200 million generated by Z2live in the past few years” being bandied around online. That’s a vague and poorly-sourced claim, but even if it’s true, how many years is “a few years”? One? Two? Five? How much of that revenue is actual profit? What were the most recent figures? I bet it cost a ton to run a game that didn’t make much in return. Especially when you consider that King by itself makes over $200 million every quarter…
The thing was, Paradise Bay was too laid back. Too easy to not play. Too stagnant. Even a fan like me could go by for weeks without playing and come back to meet very little change. No new systems, no new challenges, no new plants to grow, no new maps, no nothing. The only thing you’d miss out on were a few pet stickers, which are hardly essential. In January and February they experimented with free and paid login bonuses but again, the best rewards were pet stickers. Pets are reasonably cute, but they don’t do anything, they’re just kinda there, so eh.
I think another reason why Paradise Bay went down is because they failed to build any meaningful communities within the game. That’s why most gacha games are so big on guilds and parties. They want players to develop a sense of camaraderie that keeps them coming back. I’m sure there are a lot of people who would like to quit a certain online game, but they can’t because they would miss all their buddies they fool around and chat with. Or they would feel guilty about letting the team down.
Paradise Bay didn’t have any of that. You can’t chat with anyone in the game. You can’t ask anyone for help or say thank you after they help you. You can’t find specific people or link up with them. There are ways to do that on Facebook outside the system, but not everyone has Facebook or wants to use it for this kind of thing. In a relaxed farming game like this, there should have been lots of ways for people to interact, trade stuff and help each other out in eventss. And the more benefits there are from playing with others, the more likely players are to rope in their friends and family into playing as well. In theory.
Paradise Bay also faced the issue that most of these “putter around and collect cute stuff” games face: storage. You’re always running into storage limits, which stops you from producing or collecting as much stuff as you would like. Even worse, the space on your island is tiny, with very limited room for expansion. So even if you collect 100 cute but useless pets, you won’t be able to display most of them. The same goes for all the tiles and furniture and other ‘rewards’ you get from events. This is part of the reason why I stopped playing the very similar Rakuen Seikatsu Hitsujimura, quite apart from the fact that they broke my heart as a free player. Deliberately, I might add. Which matter we might discuss another day, or maybe not, it’s not that interesting.
The world map has looked like this for over a year, nothing new to explore.
Hmm, where was I. Yes, I was saying how Paradise Bay doesn’t have many events, the events aren’t very rewarding, the rewards you get aren’t useful and you don’t even have enough space to display them. For my part as a player none of these were big deals. I mentioned before that I liked the laid back nature of the game. Play when you want, for as often as you want. But from the gaming company’s perspective, a game that people don’t feel compelled to play is a game people don’t feel compelled to spend money on. Which ends up being a game that costs more than it’s worth to run.
I need 400,000 EXP to level up and your ‘challenge’ gives me only 1500. Am I a joke to you?
It’s worse than that, even. As part of their shutting down campaign, Paradise Bay has given all players 10 million gems to spend. Wow! Ten million! In a game where you could only get maybe 3 or 4 a day for free, wow! What am I going to do with them?… And then I realized, there’s nothing to do with paid currency in this game. You can expand your storage a bit, meh. Or speed up production a bit, eh. It means nothing to a patient gamer. The game also has a gacha system where you can draw for pets, but I already told you, pets are useless. That’s why Hitsujimura gradually moved away from pets as cuteness to pets as mega weapons of war where if you don’t have the right one you can forget completing the event, oh, and the reward for the event is good stuff which will make the next events even easier, i bet you wish you had those pets now, huh, huh? Tch. That game.
Poor Wesley will never be able to ask Sita out.
In short. Paradise Bay was a lot of fun to play because it was so laid back – no pressure to play, no pressure to spend. There wasn’t much to do in the game, but that just made it a nice change from the constant grind in almost everything else I normally play. Unfortunately, for Activision Blizzard/King, that’s not what they want from an allegedly free game. It was clear that what made Paradise Bay so attractive for me was also what would lead to its demise. When I saw the notice, I thought “Wow, it lasted longer than I thought,” not “Oh no, what a shock!” It’s a tough life out there in casual gameland.
To draw the curtain on Paradise Bay, I’ll take screenshots of all my characters to remember them by:
Bye Wes! Sorry you never got to marry Sita!
We never got to find out if you liked Wes…
Your pets are too expensive. If you don’t want to give them up for adoption, just say so.
Watch that coffee consumption Pike. Too many lattes will make you fat.
Keani. The eternal voice of reason.
Finn was so cute and funny.
I wanted to hear more adventure stories from Clara!
Farewell and thanks for all the memories!
Do you know of any games similar to this? So sad they shut the servers down.
Not yet. I am desperately searching for something with a similar feel as well, because I liked everything about Paradise Bay :'( Everything I find is either too grindy, too garishly colored or too pay-to-win. If you find anything promising, please let me know, and I’ll do likewise 🙂
I would recommend the “Farm Tribe: V” f2p game with very similar farm mechanic and seaside setting as it was in Paradise bay, they also have a global chat and co-ops.
I looked online but didn’t find “Farm Tribe V.” Only “Farm Tribe: Dragon Island” and “Farm Tribe 2.” I don’t mind trying both, though. Thanks for the suggestion!
Me too
In my opinion, Township is the best out there right now.
I will definitely download that and give it a try.
My Little Paradise
I still have not found any
Please bring it back I really love this game
Try Homesteads by Enixan. I started it right after paradise Bay was shut down. It’s the closest thing to it that I can find.
Gracias por escribir esta reseña, a mi me encantaba jugarlo,ñ y ahora estoy rogando porque lo intenten de nuevo, o en el peor de los casos, encontrar uno parecido:(.
Yo también lo echo mucho de menos. Juego muy relajante. (traducción automática)
Hay Day is similar
Thank you for the suggestion.
Farewell and thanks for all the memories Paradise Bay… what a game. I lived in that beautiful island peacefully.
Thank you Paradise Bay creators…
Yes, a big thank you to them. I wish there was some way they could have kept the game online/offline, but still, I’m really grateful for the good and relaxing times.
Omg!!! Gutted…. I made a promise to myself not to play until I’d finished my PhD …. so I’ve just finished my PhD … And am gutted to discover it’s all gone!!! and i didn’t even get to spend my gems!!!
Yeowch, how painful! At least I got to say goodbye. To be fair, they did provide quite a bit of notice before the servers went down.
Thank you for the good read. I’ll miss PB but actually just finding out about it after a long hiatus so… Yup.
Yup. It cost too much to run, as a game that many people only checked occasionally.
Not happy about the game has gone I loved that game I want it back
Not much hope of that, I’m afraid. The company seems to be doubling down on its puzzle games lately.
Same, I loved PB so much, even my two children had it, we’re all pretty unhappy it’s gone
😞 Well, this broke my heart. I loved this game.
As did I. I was looking forward to building another Christmas tree this December.
Oof. My Island died with my old tablet (a Kindle Fire) and I forgot about this game for months only to Google it and find out that because of the company being shut down my island is no more. To make the blow worse, this is happening because a lot of people are losing their job at King, and my heart goes out to all of them.
I feel somewhat vindicated to go back from mobile games to traditional PC games where all my save files are stored on my own hard drive, but that doesn’t lessen the blow of losing something original – MY island with MY decorations arranged how I wanted them. I put a lot of effort into that and it hurts. Just because I was on a vacation from my island doesn’t mean I wanted to leave it forever.
What really stinks is that they couldn’t even let players download a local copy of their islands, or release the source code so some dedicated geeks could let it run “in the wild”. To just turn it all off with a snap of the fingers is so unnecessary and callous.
Farewell and fair winds, fellow Trademasters. I will miss you all.
I feel the same way. I’ve received some suggestions and done some research into games similar to Paradise Bay, but the thought of putting in all that effort only to have the game randomly shut down is discouraging, to put it mildly. For the same reason, I’ve been reluctant to start any new mobile/gacha games except easily-replaceable puzzle games.
Releasing the source code would be wonderful for the fans, but there’s nothing in it for King.com and their owners. The best we can hope for is for them to either launch a similar, better-planned game, or sell the IP and its assets to another company who will hopeful treat it better.
Hey just read your blog was a great read btw. I am supa devastated at paradise bay shutting down 🙁 so much so that I am learning some game dev at the moment and trying to build some games myself!!! The first few will be basic “match it” games like candy crush but I’m hoping to eventually applease all pb fans by being like “hey guys look at this copy I made” 😂😄 it might be a dream for a while tho programming side of gaming is hardddd!!! >:(
Have you tried Gardenscapes? Its nothing like pb but I love it, its more interesting than candy crush and you can upgrade your garden and have cute story lines to keep up with! ^.^
I hadn’t even heard of Gardenscapes but I’m now interested solely because there’s a 3DS version. I’d hate to get invested in another online game like Paradise Bay only to have my hard work yanked out under me again.
Keep it up with the programming! It’s a useful skill to have no matter what you do with it.
There is Homescapes as well
Just looked Homescapes up on the playstore. It looks pretty nice, but it’s basically a Candy Crush clone with a home-building skin over it. Reviews say it’s really hard as well. If you like puzzle games, go for it. If you’re not into match-3 games or you’re looking for a pure simulation game, it’s not for you.
Hola, también decía que el oro se podía usar en cualquier juego de King, con un número de ID, yo no lo logre, ustedes si?
Hola, investigué un poco y no es posible usar oro del juego en otros juegos. Tienen un sitio que explica por qué no: https://www.help.king.com/hc/en-us/articles/208397655-Can-I-transfer-Gold-Bars-currency-between-games-#%20
(Utilicé Google Translate para escribir esto, por lo que podría no ser un español preciso.)
Hi! great article 🙂 I’ve found a game where you can do some farming to prepare stuff to sell to clients and also build and design your own paradise resort. It’s called my little paradise worth to try it!
I just looked My Little Paradise up on Google Play and it looks really cute. Thanks for the recommendation.
These days I’ve been scratching my itch with a browser game called Rakuen Seikatsu Hitsujimura (https://rakuen-hitsuji.jp/) but unfortunately it’s Japanese-only. It has an app version so if it ever comes out in English (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.successcorp.HitsujiApp) I’ll be sure to announce it.
Yep tried it pretty confusing but very similar, however extremely time consuming
Just now only I googled I came to know that Paradisebay was shut down..😥My heart broke I loved this game very much.. Still paradise bay App is in my phone.. I’m not going to uninstall.. I like this game I want to visit my island and want to say my pets… Please do something for it. Thanks.
I wish there was something we as fans could do, or even an offline version, but since it’s been over a year since King shut down Paradise Bay, it’s time to accept that it’s not coming back.
Sad to lost this game, once i play this game i feel i’m living at the sea. Hope it’ll be playable in someday soon.
The hope is slim, but you never know.
Still miss Paraday Bay game. I’m looking for another game similar, but….so hard, because nothing can replay PB. Hope I can playing this game again….
It would be nice if they released an updated version, but it doesn’t seem like they have any interest in that.
A good alternative is My Little Paradise, however graphics not so good although game similar but extremely time consuming & confusing
Loved your article, I miss Paradise Bay but not that much as it was way too time consuming, always waiting for productions to finish… A good alternative as already suggested is My Little Paradise, however graphics not as good but game extremely similar though even more time consuming & confusing with no explanations on how to avance…
Just saw it on the Play Store. Really colorful-looking game, maybe a little too colorful? I’ll give it an hour and see how it feels. Thanks for the recommendation!
Hi guys!
Dragonscapes gives somewhat the vibe of the Parafise bay, although it’s not the same. I don’t think we will find a game that is really similar to our beloved game.
Hope you’ll enjoy at least the Dragonscapes! 🙂
I took a look at Dragonscapes Adventure. It does look a bit like Paradise Bay with the tropical island vibe. A lot of reviewers complain about the energy system, but it might still be worth a try for anyone missing PB. I’ll bookmark it for the future.
I found another one and it’s very similar to paradise bay! It’s called Royal farm. The developers have 1 more similar, I think it’s called Farmington, but it’s still very new and I don’t like the graphics as much. Be sure to check it out.
Also, I need some friends in the game 🙂 Here is my Royal Farm friendship code: QS334C. Let’s write this fairy tale together! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ugo.play.free.farm.valley&1626069918
Paradise Bay was the best game
I still miss it.
Yes I think that everybody wants a month should get on here and make it a point to tell the higher ups that made this game and it chose to take it off of here that we love this game and want it back every month I get on something and make a comment about bringing it back
I would like to know who the higher up is because I want this game back this is ridiculous how they’re going to take a really good game away from us especially as older people we like games like this and I have looked at every game that is similar to this game I love Paradise Bay and every month I am going to make sure that people know that I love this game they’re going to stay here and say that it wasn’t doing as good well Candy crush is the most stupidest game in the world Paradise Bay is a good game and I want it back and I see a lot of people that miss that game so whoever the higher up is please bring it back
At this point, I think the game is done and dusted. It’s been years without a peep. I was holding out hope for maybe a sequel or a reboot, but let’s face it, it’s not gonna happen.
Agreed! I’m glad people are still talking about it YEARS after they took it away from us. I’ve been playing FarmVille 2 Tropical Escape because it’s the closest thing I could find to Paradise Bay, but it’s still just not the same.
Ugh I still miss it!
Me too. Other games are too busy, too frantic, too money-grubbing. Paradise Bay was really one of a kind.