Scams and Social Gaming

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday November 1, 2009 @04:03AM from the sign-up-now-for-fifteen-free-slashbucks dept.

TechCrunch is running a story about the prevalence of scams and shady monetization techniques in popular social games on Facebook and MySpace. As an alternative to buying in-game currency with real money, many games make use of lead-generation offers — letting players sign up for a trial service or take a survey in exchange for the currency. The system is rife with scams, and many game developers turn a blind eye to them, much to the detriment of the players and the legitimate advertisers — not to mention the games that rightly disallow these offers and fall behind in profits. The article asserts that Facebook and MySpace themselves are complicit in this, failing to crack down on the abuses they see because they make so much money from advertising for the most popular games.

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Re:Rightfully disallowed? by sopssa · 2009-11-01 05:54 · Score: 0, Flamebait

This just seems like crying from those who don't have other options in their games than to directly pay with money. It's good to offer another options for people.
And so what if they get more back and have more to spend on advertising in turn? It just means their game is more successful (in terms of monetization) than the alternatives.
This has nothing to do with Facebook. There are laws that the lead-generation offers have to follow like showing the terms and price of the offer. If they aren't following them, you report them to police or FCC.
(btw, Facebook does allow lead-generation offers and also has pretty strict rules about advertisement)