A second chance for The Tomorrow Children
James Batchelor
Editor-in-Chief
Monday 7th February 2022
Towards the tail end of 2021, Q-Games accomplished something very rare in this industry: it had reclaimed its intellectual property, specifically for PS4 exclusive The Tomorrow Children.
In the announcement tweet, the Japan-based company described it as "a historical move by Sony Interactive Entertainment" and it's hard to argue with that. The game was originally published as a second-party title, funded by PlayStation, and it's typical for the platform holder to retain the IP rights in such a partnership.
The Tomorrow Children originally launched in October 2016. It was a title that defied simple genre classification: a free-to-play resource management and town building game, but with some social aspects and even some action, where you defend your town from attack using rocket launches, turrets and tanks.
Just over six months after it launched, Sony announced the title would be shut down.
Dylan Cuthbert, Q-Games
It was a sad day for the Q-Games team, founder Dylan Cuthbert tells GamesIndustry.biz, if only because they were all still playing it.
"There are many times where a team makes a game and then doesn't want to play it again, but with The Tomorrow Children, we were actually playing it ourselves at home, and our wives and children were all playing it as well, and the decision for it to be shut down... It was very quick," he says.
"It was a free-to-play game, so it needed time to grow, and for us to work out how to monetise it properly. But that's the main reason it ended up being shut down, because we didn't really manage to monetise it. We weren't experienced in free-to-play, so that probably didn't help, but neither were Sony. We were still finding our way to earn
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