Doki Doki Universe 12-10-2013 on PSN

Doki Doki Universe is a quirky, cute, game from HumaNature Studios for PlayStation. It’s to be released on December 10, 2013, for PS4, PS3 and PS Vita.

It was said to be a free to play game, with a small price point once you reach a certain planet, a small fee, stated over and again since revealed at E3 in June 2013.

Today the game was finally announced as coming out on December 10, 2013 in North America, via the PlayStation US Blog. The article  says that the Starter Pack is free, which gets you “16 personality quizzes, Doki-Doki Mail, QT3’s home planet, and a tutorial planet.” The FULL game will give you  “story mode, 31 personality quizzes, and the Doki-Doki Mail messaging system.”

It was a little shocking to read how that was put, and the next part even more so. $14.99.

I don’t deny HumaNature Studios their due. It’s only that all year they’ve adhered to the it’ll be a small price to upgrade, or small anything for anything kind of idea.

So, I can buy the game for $14.99, download it on PS4, as well as my PS Vita and PS3. That’s great. The family can play the PS4 and PS3 versions, not just me. Only I can have the full game on my PS Vita though.

If anyone else in the family wants to play on their PS Vita, they can download the game for their PS Vita, but that’d be the Starter Pack, the free one. To play the whole thing on PS VIta, they’d have to pay $14.99 each.

From many perspectives this is OK, but they won’t pay for it. Only I will. They can at least do the messaging on their PS Vita’s, but this is precisely counter intuitive for our family. I’d have to pay over $50 to outfit our family with this game.

We liked the idea of the game, but now they can only play it on the consoles and on their PS Vita’s they won’t really play it much.

$14.99 is a lot when you are only playing it on the PS Vita only.

For the console gaming family it’s always great when you buy anything digital, the whole family can play it. But bringing the PS Vita to the mix for cross-buy games … only one PS Vita benefits, the owner of the content.

I was hearing them talk about the game all year and figured that at some point in the game it’d be 3.99 or 4.99 or something to do more. Maybe another add-on pack down the road. Now that is a nice idea on how to monetize a game. I do think that Sony putting the price at $14.99 is going to cause a lot of people to not buy it.

So how do the trophies work then, for the Starter Pack only people? Don’t know. But I do know that PS3 and PS Vita share the Trophy List, and PS4 has it’s own Trophy List, and the game Cross-Save across the platforms, saving automatically to the cloud every 5-minutes, so you can earn Double-Trophies for this game if you have a PS4 and PS3; or PS4 and PS Vita; or PS4 and PS3 and PS Vita.