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Target To Sell Facebook "Credits" As Gift Cards
Julie188 writes "Target will begin selling Facebook's virtual currency as gift cards on September 5, becoming the first brick-and-mortar retailer to do so. Facebook Credit gift cards will be available in $15, $25 and $50 denominations at the retailer's 1,750 stores. That's right, you can now spend real dollars to get fake ones so you can buy imaginary items for games like FarmVille, Bejeweled and 150 other FB games or apps. If that interests you, please contact me. I have some swamp land in Florida I'd like to show you."
I have been saving up for new cows.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
this is not about rights, it's about games. I remember seeing a lot of discussions about buying stuff for MMOGs and other tonguetwisters with real money.
facebook users should only be subject to the same amount of ridicule as other gamers.
new sig
Target already sell Farmville and Mafia Wars credit in individual cards and have for almost a year. The only difference here is that it is a general Facebook card so you can use it across all of the games (and Facebook get a much bigger cut). I don't play these games but I find it funny how hypocritical most gamers are about them, it is fine if you buy DLC for that retail game you spent 50 hours playing, but if someone buys virtual credit to buy DLC in Farmville they're just insane!
It is obviously just a lame bias against games that are Flash based (instead of C++) and have minimalistic graphics (like every game had fifteen years ago?).
I heard that people are selling these things called "movie tickets" that grant the bearer the right to sit in the dark with a bunch of strangers.
If that interests you, please contact me. I have some swamp land in Florida I'd like to show you.
I, personally, feel that this is the very acme of human civilization. It's all downhill from here. We have achieved out existential duty, fulfilled the will of the universe in bringing about Facebook Credit Gift Cards. This is the Great Will of the Cosmos.
That's right, you can now spend real dollars to get fake ones so you can buy imaginary items for games like FarmVille, Bejeweled and 150 other FB games or apps. If that interests you, please contact me. I have some swamp land in Florida I'd like to show you."
If it's virtual swamp land then I'll buy it. I'll pay extra if it contains realistic sounding mosquitoes and alligators. Otherwise I would never want to live in Florida for real. Fantasy worlds are more fun. That's why I go to church every week, and pray for our greatest religious icon in the history of humanity: J. R. "Bob" Dobbs.
Opening admission: I'm coerced into playing Farmville and Fronterville by my Mother and a couple of friends who want me to send them gifts and occasionally do crap on their farms. Also, I willingly play the D&D Adventures FB game, and I've tried the 'just barely a game' type stuff like Mafia Wars.
To my knowledge, all the Facebook games are free. Lets assume that Farmville was an 'indie' game. If the game provides you with some level of enjoyment, how is dropping $15 once off for some extra game content any different from paying $15 for some indie game that you might play for a week or two on and off before finishing it or being done with it. I suppose once you start to spend a substantial amount of money it's a different issue, but then that's not specific to Facebook games. It does make me wonder if anyone I know has spent money on these games, I must admit.
Is the fact that the goods are 'virtual' such an issue? This will start an argument, but how tangible are any of the mp3s that you purchase from say, iTunes, or books via Kindle? Yes, it's an mp3 or a glorified text file, that provides entertainment, or whatever you want to define it as, but it's still entertainment in virtual form. Really, how different is it to purchasing goods for some subjectively entertaining virtual farm; at the end of the day is it still not simply entertainment in an intangible form? How is this not just a digital way of buying extra dolls for a dollhouse or some other real world to virtual comparison that might have not implied that I own dolls?
Each to their own, seriously.
Also, you can walk in and touch swampland in Florida. That's way more effort than dragging some fences and cows into a virtual lot on my PC. It's a totally different market ;)
One, how the hell is this "your rights online"?
Two, my Target already had these up on Monday. It's not like they were street-dated.
Most (almost all) FB games are not actually games. They are a series of clicks with no challenge, no particular set of strategy, no real difference between levels. There exist no actual gameplay elements. I say this as someone who has played everything from MMOGs to NetHack clones to Text-Based Adventures (Zork and the like) to Flash style games (N - Way of the Ninja) to artsy games (Braid) to Triple-A shooters (Halo 3) and more (a tribute to a life well spent).
If Facebook games offered some gameplay (which some do, ie Bejewelled, Desktop Defender) and not just a blatant and sickening attempt to grab eyeballs and personal information, it would be harder for me to hate them and their creators.
Seagoon: Shut up Eccles!
Eccles: Shut up Eccles!
Really, Im being serious, it's all been drained and clones of strip malls and suburbia has been put in place. It's almost as if Florida is a real life sim-city, except the land in sim-city will be worth more soon.
Their quality is really, really poor. I suspect the only reason they are so popular is people playing them at work. Thus in my mind they, and the people who play them, deserve to take a bit of shit. If you spend a bunch of time at work playing games, when you ought to be doing something productive for most of it (I realize nobody is productive 100% of the time but people fuck around on Facebook too much) well you should catch from crap for that.
I respect games that are good quality, and I respect that people play them because they are quality entertainment. When you are choosing how to entertain yourself, quality counts. Most of us who work regular jobs only have so much time per day we can goof off. Thus you want to try and choose quality entertainment for those times.
If these were good games that just happened to be on FB, then ok. However they are crap games that only survive because people play them at work.
I stopped at my local 7-Eleven two nights ago and noticed that some items have small prize stickers on them. Lo and behold, the prize stickers are for items in Facebook games. I don't know what range of games the stickers apply to, but I did receive a prize for Farmville and another prize for Mafia Wars.
I think I'll save these for my nieces and nephews as gifts for Christmas.
Gaia Online has sold "Gaia Cash" cards at Target for nearly three years now - which are used exclusively to buy low-res pixel items for your low-res avatar, for up tp $10 (1000 Gaia Cash) an item. The Facebook games seem like a good deal in comparison. http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/featured-announcements/gaia-cash-cards-at-target-stores/t.33551403/
Isn't this the same as buying tokens to play arcade games? The currency isn't "fake", it still has value.
What do you care where people spend their money on? I find an iphone, going to a casino, a keyboard with a pause/break key and toiletpaper a waste of money too.
How is this any different from all of the games (PS3, X-Box, and PC) that let you use real dollars to purchase avatars, skins, and other in-game add-ons?
I'm also fairly sure that some simulation games let you put real money in for game money, though their names don't come to mind.
So the only news here is that Target is becoming a middle-man. Oh, and we get to ridicule FarmVille.
-David
You don't seem to understand the concept of a gift card. They have always been fake dollars.
My company has had some real problems with absenteeism due to Farmville and other social networking applications. When we blocked them at our firewall, we saw a mysterious rise in people electing to "work at home," and others taking long lunches and even going so far as to bring in their personal laptops with a cellular modem (not realizing that the point of blocking them was not necessarily network security).
We even had to let some people go a while back when we sent them to a client site and the (angry) client reported back that they had been playing Farmville during a series of important meetings.
It's frustrating to think it, but I have to wonder if we'd be in a better recovery if so much productivity were not lost to these distractions.
Florida swampland is real property. I grow cypress trees and blueberries on mine! (As well as pine, turkey, deer, wild pigs...)
A closer comparison would be "I have a star to sell you," but even that, at some level, involves a real, physical thing.
"I have some beach-front property in Atlantis you might be interested in."
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
You could already spend real dollars in exchange for those things. You just needed a credit card.
This is no different than spending money on movies or booze or enjoyment in general. What do you get when you pay $15 to go see a movie? Typically sticky shoes and the memory of a lousy movie. What do you get when you buy a $15 bottle of booze? Frequent trips to the bathroom?
It's all about what you find enjoyable. Spend money on entertainment any way you wish, IMO. It all costs real money, and is worth what you feel it to be worth.
"Thoughts are more powerful than any weapon, and I don't even let my people own guns." --Joseph Stalin
Company creates a platform while another company creates a game. People find that game/platform valuable. People willingly pay for certain things within that game/platform. Companies have more money to employ more developers and create more games/platforms....News at 11
it's not backed by anything.
Until Target stops dumping huge sums of money into the coffers of rabidly anti-gay politicians like Tom Emmer ($150,000), I won't be shopping there, assuming that I'd have a need for virtual merchandise, which I do not.
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Of course he saw boredom as the end point of the fulfilment of all a man's needs. They didn't have Farmville in Schopenhauer's day!
I seem to remember hearing of this one guy who bought up a bunch of swamp land in Florida and made a butt load of money... Count me in!!
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
And yes, seeing the ability to buy Farmville and Mafia Wars things in the real world was dreadfully disturbing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is old, they were in my target last weekend...
I'm surprised SusanExpress didn't get in on this action first.
It's just adequately irrigated, endowed with sufficient moisture, doesn't require over-watering of your roses...
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
I have 30 godfather points and I need new jeans. :-P
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.