Upland - Property Trading Game

I first picked up Upland at the peak of my cryptocurrency hype. It advertised itself as a blockchain-based property trading game, which seemed right up my alley at the time. However, this was far from the game I was expecting, and the manipulative money-squeezing practices made it pretty easy to drop after just a little while. Without the gross commercial tactics, this could even have been a really fun game, but as it stands, I can't see it ever reaching that point. Plus, the "blockchain" technology that they were advertising was essentially just their backend database for keeping track of who owned what, which I found to be pretty disappointing.

The main goal in Upland is to fictitiously trade real-world properties in order to earn a passive income that lets you trade even more. That sounds like a lot of fun to me, but the implementation killed it right out of the gate. When you start the game, you're gifted enough in-game currency to buy a small starter property and get a taste of how the system works. After that, you can receive a limited number of loyalty gifts for returning every day, but when that finishes, the only two reliable sources of in-game income are the sluggish returns on your properties and the "optional" in-app purchases. The income on your starter property is so abysmally small that, if you want to buy anything else in the next decade, you'll need to fork out some real cash. Don't think that you can just leave the game for a while and come back either, as Upland locks certain functionality in the game until you hit a certain net worth. That functionality includes things like buying and selling properties on the player market and, notably, leaving your properties alone for more than seven days. I found that if I didn't invest at least five real-world dollars, I pretty much had no access to anything the game had to offer, and just a week of inactivity would mean I lost all of my progress anyways.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not opposed to paying for games, or even for making the occasional microtransaction, but I felt like Upland wasn't respecting me, my time, or my wallet. I was lured in by the offer of a free property-trading game combining Monopoly with the real world, and adding in exciting blockchain technology. However, while Upland technically did deliver on all of those promises, it didn't feel like it actually succeeded in giving me even one of them. The game's concept still interests me, but this is clearly not where it's going to be fully realized. Hopefully, someday we'll have a worthy real-life property trader, but for now, I would just pass.

The game is available for Android here (as of 12/6/21): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.upland.app&hl=en_US&gl=US
The game is available for iOS here (as of 12/6/21): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/upland-property-trading-game/id1457175587
The game is available online here (as of 12/6/21): https://play.upland.me/

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