One Year Later, Hello Kitty: Island Adventure Is Still Trying to Balance Ethics and Profits

The game is now coming to Switch and other platforms, but its debut on Apple Arcade continues to have fascinating ramifications for game balance.

My oldest became frustrated with Island Adventure when it debuted, due to a reading learning curve, but we’re gonna give it another shot soon. Credit: Sunblink

It’s been almost a year since the launch of Hello Kitty: Island Adventure, a charming Animal Crossing-like set in the surprisingly robust and still popular world of Hello Kitty, with more than a dash of influence from, of all things, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game was a big hit on Apple Arcade, and like many Apple Arcade games, it’s heading to other platforms in 2025, starting with Switch and PC. 

I wrote about Island Adventure last year, in which Chelsea Howe, chief product officer at the game’s developer, Sunblink, described the game to me as “all about respecting people's time,” and trying to avoid designing a game that punishes people for having a life outside of it. My time with the game backed that up. Part of the reason Howe and Sunblink could pull this off was because Apple Arcade doesn’t allow the presence microtransactions or ads, flipping some of the toxic incentives you normally see in mobile games where developers are chasing maximum player engagement and money.

“It is 100% a push pull, and I love it,” said Howe during a conversation with Crossplay at this month’s Summer Game Fest event, where the studio was showing the game on Switch. “It’s so fascinating to see where anecdotal data deviates from actual what-do-people-do-in-the-game? I find the place that manifests the most is often in ‘Wow, this mechanic is really grind-y and I don’t like doing it and I’m going to quit the game.’”

Howe is a data person, but told me she tries to be an anecdote person. Or, at the very least, she does not dismiss anecdotes; they’re a form of data, too, however singular.

Currently, Island Adventure doesn’t cost more than a monthly subscription to Apple’s gaming service, but it’s still a live service game updated regularly, informed by a community. Naturally, you’d want people to play your game, but at what cost?

“I always fall on the side of [wanting] to form long lasting relationships,” said Howe, who said the team’s outlined plans for expanding Island Adventure not only in days, weeks, or months—but years. “Even if people are playing more, if they’re upset about that, or if they’re playing more because they feel obligated and not because it’s joyful, that’s going to hurt us long term.”

An unexpected benefit of partnering with Apple: Howe doesn’t have access to some of the most detailed player data that you’d usually get with an ongoing mobile game.

“They have such awesome data privacy that you don't get the same granularity that you’d expect on a normal mobile free-to-play title,” said Howe. “Which is kind of a blessing in disguise! It means you’re not chasing ‘Oh, gosh, our whatever metric went down by 10%, we’ve got to panic and change all of our plans.” 

Even today, financial arrangements for Apple Arcade are fuzzy, though reports have suggested a mixture of upfront payments and follow-up payments based on how many people play the game and for now long, a very important metric for a game like this.

All of this came up in a very real way recently, after adding weather events. The idea was simple: from time to time, it might rain, or a volcano might give off steam. The events were random, but would, in theory, mix up the experience for regular players.

There were other layers, too.

Special creatures in Island Adventure could only be collected when it rained. The developers added quests to guide players towards these events, but it backfired. In Animal Crossing-style games, people love to collect everything, and because weather wasn’t predictable, players started obsessing over trying to catch the rain (and critters).

You don’t have to go very far to find players grumbling. 

“The app makes my phone get really hot and drains my battery pretty fast,” said one player. “i played for 3 hours yesterday and got one rainfall 🥲,” said another player.

“What we saw in the data was that people were playing many more sessions per day and longer sessions per day,” she said. “But what we heard anecdotally was ‘Oh my god, it never rains. I'm just sitting on my phone waiting for rain. Rain isn't happening. Is rain bugged? OK, it finally rained, and it didn't rain in the location where the creature spawns. I hate this. I'm miserable. This is the worst thing in the world.’ Just extraordinary community backlash.”

One way to view such an outcome, said Howe, is that it “improved metrics.” 

“If you’re looking as a data analyst or a pure product person,” she said, “they’d be ‘Hey, engagement is up, this is a good thing.’ Then, you look at the community and you’re like ‘People are having just an awful time with this, it’s not worth it to continue to incentivize this.’”

A patch will soon remove the quests, and weather will become “more consistent.”

“We wound up making a lot of changes regardless of what the data showed around engagement,” said Howe. “The community feedback and the anecdotal experiences people were having was not the type of experience we want to have or incentivize.”

Hello Kitty: Island Adventure arrives on Switch and PC in 2025 as a “timed exclusive” for some undisclosed amount of time, before later arriving on PlayStation 4 and 5.

And hey, it’s (still) a good game.

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Also:

• Has anyone stuck with Island Adventure one year in? I’m curious how sticky it’s been with anyone reading Crossplay, whether it’s you or someone in your family.

• Funny enough, I rented Animal Crossing for Switch from the library for my daughter, but then it got hot out and all she wanted to do was be at the pool.

• Maybe we’ll give Animal Crossing another go on a flight we have next month, when there will be some dedicated time to figure out how the tame works.