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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.
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 ;)
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!
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 think I'll save these for my nieces and nephews as gifts for Christmas.
You shouldn't admit to child-abuse in public.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Isn't this the same as buying tokens to play arcade games? The currency isn't "fake", it still has value.
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
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.