Why Do You Want To Kill My Pet? Zynga Shuts Down PetVille, 10 Others 377
Dr Herbert West writes "Executing the cost-reduction plan CEO Mark Pincus announced in November, Zynga has shut down, pulled from the app stores, or stopped accepting new players to more than 10 games such as PetVille, Mafia Wars 2, FishVille, Vampire Wars, Treasure Isle, Indiana Jones Adventure World, Mafia Wars Shakedown, Forestville, Montopia, Mojitomo, and Word Scramble Challenge. Comments from gamers on the shutdown notices included things like 'my daughter is heartbroken' and 'Please don't remove petville. I been playing for 4 yrs. and I'M going to miss my pet Jaime.why do you want cause depression for me and others. Why do you want to kill my pet?' For players that have invested a lot of microtransactions and/or time, this comes as a heavy blow."
Re:The Risk of playing Microtransaction-based game (Score:5, Interesting)
Let this be a lesson to people that haven't learned it yet.
In other news, you're a heartless bastard... And so is Zynga. True as it may be, teaching our children and teenagers (the main market for Zynga games), and to a lesser extent young adults, the harsh reality of capitalism by inflicting emotional pain is not socially acceptable. They don't know any better and have had precious little opportunity at this point to learn that. The "lesson to people" attitude is mean-spirited and absolves Zynga of its higher level of social responsibility because its primary audience are people who simply don't know any better. It's no different than scammers preying on the elderly to extract money from them; It's going after people who are vulnerable and defenseless.
Saying this is just a "lesson" is a moral justification for predatory social behavior.
Re:Virtual Money (Score:5, Interesting)
These constructs in games are very similar to financial products, which are also logical constructs and virtual products:
1) "A financial product is about as conceptual as you can get,” says Wilson Ervin, a senior adviser at Credit Suisse. “You just need paper and ink.”-- The Economist magazine [economist.com]
2) "In an even more blunt description, Tourre calls the CDOs he produced "intellectual masturbation" and likens himself to Dr. Frankenstein.
"When I think that I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: 'well, what if we created a 'thing', which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?")" -- CNN / Money [cnn.com]
Be wary of those who tout the financialization of society, as it results in a "house" which generates these logical constructs, which it then sells to people. They have value because people value them, like Petville pets or Farmville tractors. All of these things are neither goods, nor services, but logical constructs. They're inherently volatile. The financial world is built on logical constructs - currency is a logical construct, as are stocks and bonds. Currency is durable construct because it makes life easier for people versus barter. Stocks are volatile - "Shares of ownership in a company." Bonds are volatile - "Promises to pay."
Anyway, just wanted to point out the similarities.
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Interesting)
And why should we care about this fluff, anyway?
You clearly don't have children. You will learn what a Bieber is, and why iTunes gift cards and not the President, is the current incarnation of the anti-christ. You will discover the joys of cleaning out a malware infested computer in your teenager's bedroom on a biweekly basis, to the point that you, in a fit of anger, spend a weekend building a vm image with a pxe server and restoration image so your solution to their pepetual inability to listen to you and then try to actively override any security features designed to keep them from screwing it up is "press f12 and wait an hour, and no bitching about your 'lost music', dumbass." And you will also learn why a random sampling of teenager's glowy rectangles show that Facebook is almost always on it... and thus, Zynga is as well.
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Interesting)
At least this should serve as a warning to those who trust such a shitstain company as Zynga, the biggest bastards in the gaming industry (to their own employees at least...Ubisoft and Nintendo may be worse to customers).
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Interesting)
They've stepped up their bastardery too. I got a spam today where a "friend" (someone I'd never heard of) invited me to play "Ruby Blast", which is on of their games.
The links are legit, they go to their game, so it's not a phisher. It's just them being rude. I've been blocking all their apps, as people start spamming me with FB invites.
Re:A brilliant strategy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Did Zynga hire some jackoff from an 'enterprise solutions' firm, who thinks that customers will just have to migrate to the shiny new product because support is no longer available for the old one?
My guess? Yes. May this turn out to be a lesson for everyone involved:
Also, why the fuck do unordered lists on /. not get bullets?
Re:Did you all learn you lesson? (Score:5, Interesting)
While they provided the game for free, it did take some manpower to make..
Not really. Zygna is all about copying other people's games in order to minimize the need to do any actual work.
From the CEO himself: "You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."
Re:The Risk of playing Microtransaction-based game (Score:4, Interesting)
Its education, in that it provides a small example for a kid to roll around in his head without as much pain as any bigger real world example I can think of. I ask again, whats your superior suggestion to teach "the harsh reality of capitalism" with superior defined as causes less pain to the kid?
Your standard /. car analogy was not very good, although I respect the effort to uphold /. tradition (seriously). I'm guessing your point is you don't like bankruptcy laws, no-fault insurance, or the existence of uninsured motorist coverage because of payout disparity depending on wealth?
The "toughen up a bit" is not to make me feel better (none of that stuff ever happened to me, although I suppose if it did I'd be tougher now) the point is to make the kid less brittle when something bad happens to them. The old argument of "make sure you have a pet, so the first death in the family the kid experiences is merely his goldfish, not grannie"
Re:The Risk of playing Microtransaction-based game (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:4, Interesting)
Ever heard of how they strong-armed third-parties back in the NES days?
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:4, Interesting)
See the 3DS EULA and remote bricking.
My anger; thier vulnerability (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Risk of playing Microtransaction-based game (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe the point is that adding $15 to an MMO is pocket change if an average person making $15 per hour plays the game more than a few hours a week. The "cost of time" to play the game (versus doing something else) is way more than $15 per month for many players.
Oh, it can be an "investment" all right (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, it can be an "investment" all right. Take my parents, for a start. No, seriously, take them ;)
They used to take trips into France and whatnot every weekend, buy the most expensive cameras to photograph stuff, etc. It cost a bunch, lemme tell you. They used to be in the red as far as their credit card limit went every month end.
Then I got them addicted to WoW. Fast forward some years of being on WoW every waking hour when the servers aren't off for maintenance. No really, they do most of the shopping on Wednesday mornings. And now they actually have money for a change :p
Sounds to me like getting to keep one's money would technically qualify as a return :p
Plus, with Blizzard skipping maintenance on some Wednesdays, I think they even lost a few kilos. Think of the health benefits, man. Surely that counts as a return :p
Or take my getting them addicted. Sure, I had to sink some time into answering stuff like "HELP! I'M DROWNING!" followed by (I swear I'm not making it up) "WHAT CAMERA TO TURN UPWARDS? NO, I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA! I LOOKED IN ALL BAGS AND I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA!!!!" But after that? They've been out of my hair for years now. Plus now mom has more interesting stuff to talk about when she calls. Not that she calls as much, either. Those newbies aren't gonna just kill themselves in the warzones, you know?
I don't know about you, but I'd say that's worth something. That's my return on investment right there :p
2012 Worst CEO (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably why Pincus was voted the 4th worst CEO in the USA in 2012 http://www.valuewalk.com/2012/12/the-worst-ceos-of-2012/ [valuewalk.com]