Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp has a ?39 underwater theme
Sea of thieves.
You can now pay £39 to give your Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp an underwater theme - exclusively available using Leaf Tickets - the app's premium in-game currency.
Pocket Camp introduced campsite themes in a recent update and most require you spend Leaf Tickets to purchase them. Themes need to be bought in separate chunks which separately reskin your camp's foreground, midground, background, fencing and sky.
This new underwater theme requires 150 Leaf Tickets for the foreground, 250 for the middleground, 150 for the background, 200 for a coral fence and 300 for an underwater sky.
In total, that's 1050 Leaf Tickets - an amount which no player could realistically amass without spending real-world cash.
The cheapest way to buy enough Tickets would be the game's largest Leaf Ticket bundle which contains 1200 for £38.99. (You could buy several of the smaller packs to hit 1050 Tickets exactly, but this would cost more.)
I play Pocket Camp for half an hour every day on my commute to work, and check in again during the evening. I've managed to collect everything in the game so far without paying, but the recent addition of campsite themes has reduced my stash of freebie Leaf Tickets to nothing.
There's nothing wrong with a free-to-play game offering new ways to make money - and as a cosmetic option it does not offer anything which affects normal gameplay. But still - £39? I'd probably spend a fiver on it...
Fans have also questioned the timing of some recent theme releases. In particular, Pocket Camp rolled out a premium spring flower theme (which many people bought) before giving away a near-identical one as part of the recent Leif garden event.
The game's third premium only character, Celeste, was also then announced - at a time when players had likely just emptied their Leaf Ticket balance. Celeste notably costs 350 Leaf Tickets - 100 more than KK Slider and Tom Nook did when they were on sale.
Pocket Camp has see-sawed back and forth between fan-friendly changes and what have felt like more financially-motivated decisions while adding in significant new gameplay features. The next, an all-new fishing tournament, is due to go live later this month.