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Why Do You Want To Kill My Pet? Zynga Shuts Down PetVille, 10 Others
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."
bye bye
This is what happens when you let people who don't really know video games run a video game company.
Will you finally stop sending Zygna money for doing nothing?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Investment implies some form of return.. Sinking time into pointless games in't an investment, it's a waste.
--Ebenezer Scrooge
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
I wonder how much money people who played those games have just "lost." In the real world, I give you a dollar and you give me a widget. In these virtual worlds, I give you points that I purchased with a real dollar and you give me a virtual widget. And when you shut the virtual world down I'm left with nothing. I see they're giving bonus packages for their other games but with the company sinking fast that offer seems pretty hollow.
You're welcome!
It's something that MMO players have had to deal with for some time, and now it's something Facebook gamers now have to deal with: Money you throw at online games, be it in the form of microtransactions or subscriptions, is of little long-term value. You might get enjoyment out of it now, but that doesn't mean the game will be around tomorrow.
Let this be a lesson to people that haven't learned it yet.
Seriously, where is the "game" in Farmville? I certainly didn't see any.
If people learn not to play Zynga games from this, it will be for the best. Maybe someone not yet victimized by this can learn from others' stupid mistakes.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
If they'd have recognized the many, many red flags all around the media and internet screaming that Zynga is evil, greedy, devious, copycatting bastards run by the king of all assholes and should be avoided at all costs, maybe the players wouldn't be in this situation in the first place.
You'd better view it as an entertainment expense no different than cable TV or going to see a Movie or a play or a baseball game. That's what I do. I play Star Trek Online. About once a month I buy $20 worth of game cards. When I went out on a week night to watch a game with friends at a sports bar I'd spend at least that much, probably more on food and drink. Hell It's $15 to see a movie anymore for 2 hours of entertainment. I play STO 20 - 30 hours a month.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Investment? Jesus fuck, it's $15 a month, the average person with a life spends way more than that monthly for much less hours of enjoyment than a MMO can a provide you in a month. What you "lose" is the hours themselves, the same hours you would've lost watching TV, wheeling a bike, going for a walk, etc.
These are not games and people who play them are not gamers. Keep convincing yourselves that they are, you cow clicking morons.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It's got nothing to do with micro-transactions, it's about lock-in. They bought a good that can only be used in conjunction with a service from a single vendor. If that vendor decides to stop offering the service, the problem arises because the entire utility of the good is tied to that service. How exactly they paid for the good is irrelevant. It's the fact that they can't continue to use the good independently of the vendor they bought it from.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Cancelling a game is "inflicting emotional pain"?
You need to get your kids out more.
So, let's get this straight:
A company, Zynga, runs a business that is based on sucking people in and getting them to engage in small transactions for the purchase of various virtual things, along with incentives to spam their friends.
As a 'cost reduction measure', Zynga abruptly terminates the virtual things of some of their well-sucked-in customers, simultaneously breaking their habitual connection to whatever game they were playing and providing the nontechies with an object lesson in just how ephemeral 'ownership' is in Zynga's horrid little playground.
In what universe, exactly, did this plan make any sense? 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?
Put in a comment about how you're better than people why play these sorts of games. Start the year off right by showing everyone just how awesome you are!
I suppose that all the games use the same base code, so releasing is for some games will not be possible. I also assume that the games are not paying for the server load of customer service. So I am not sure what an be done. It is like when a show is cancelled,. It is sometimes sad, but really there are other things we can do.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Admittedly, there's nothing inherently wrong (from a business perspective) about a company choosing to shutter some of its lower-performing properties in the interest of reducing costs. The problem is that Pincus has a history of building up a large and popular product, getting a decent-sized population of users, then destroying it through poor management or general asshattery (see Tribe.net). Why anyone thinks he's a good CEO is beyond me.
BOOP!
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
So... what would be an improvement? I think this is better than having a unemployed family member live under a highway overpass, or parents get downsized lose medical coverage and die, kicked out of house in foreclosure, watching grannie eat alpo because she has no income anymore, or about 80 bazillion other ways to teach kids about the realities of capitalism... Killing off some kids virtual pet is fairly compassionate in comparison to any other teachable moment...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
although I have my issues with Zynga as a company, it's not much different than any other game or service that runs on microtransactions. The real lesson here is that emotional and financial investment in a web-based game controlled by a third party is always subject to cancellation. People need to recognize that their micropayments are for temporary gratification, and not permanently.
BOOP!
If I where the game designer, I'd at least provide an ending for the players. Have all the pets die of a illness common to that pet, have all the mafia characters get caught in an unwinnable gunfight.
Why are they obligated to continue a service if they are no longer wanting to continue the service? Did they say it would last forever? Saying they have an obligation to continue selling something they no longer want to sell is altruistic bs.
My spidey senses say that there will soon be an "OpenPets" github project, coupled with the obligatory web2.0 homepage. Essentially the nextgen version of virtual pets.
(Only half kidding btw)
Cancelling a game is "inflicting emotional pain"? You need to get your kids out more.
Yes, it's inflicting emotional pain. Not harm, pain. In the same way that stubbing your toe hurts and getting your dick chopped off by a robot purpose-built to hunt down asshat slashdot posters hurts. Pain is pain. I said nothing about the amount. Now go drink some water, eat a candy bar, or whatever the hell you do so you can be less of an asshole.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Note that these are the people who keep telling us that we're paranoid and asocial for not wanting to buy into the cloud, software as a service and virtual goods. It's not like we haven't tried to warn them. Some people only learn when they are directly affected. I have compassion for an individual who is emotionally or financially invested in one of these games, but on a more general level, I can only muster schadenfreude.
Saying this is just a "lesson" is a moral justification for predatory social behavior.
No, it's a lesson.
People will have to learn that a game that doesn't support play without relying on company controlled servers have a limited lifespan and the worth of such a game is significantly less than the worth of a game with functionality that doesn't rely external servers.
People who feel nostalgic about games like monkey island or doom can still play those games. People who see World of Warcraft as a part of their childhood will probably not be able to do the same in twenty years.
Don't give away your money for something that you aren't given control over.
My spidey senses say that there will soon be an "OpenPets" github project, coupled with the obligatory web2.0 homepage. Essentially the nextgen version of virtual pets.
My common sense is tingling, and it says lawsuitilarity will ensue if this is attempted.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It's not Zynga's job to teach your children. It's YOUR JOB. You failed.
Instead of teaching your children you're blaming Zynga for not teaching them. YOU FAILED.
Worse yet, instead of recognizing that you're a piss-poor excuse for a parent, and taking responsibility, you're trying to blame a third party. At being a good parent... YOU FAILED.
Go kill yourself now. Your children won't suffer. After all, Zynga is going to bring them up just fine. You won't suffer either. Because you'll probably not kill yourself and instead spend the next few years trying to pretend like your children's upbringing is not YOUR fault but Zynga (or some other unrelated 3rd party)'s fault.
You're a moron, but you summed it up best with:
> Saying this is just a "lesson" is a moral justification for predatory social behavior.
You're an idiot who shouldn't have kids, raise kids, or discuss educating kids. The only predatory behavior here is me telling you to go kill yourself you miserable excuse for an excuse-maker.
Those who can't take responsibility must die. You're on first.
M
You're right. We should probably get the government to regulate this kind of thing. Game companies inflicting emotional pain on kids is unacceptable.
Perhaps a new payroll tax?
If you go into a depression due to a game about virtual pets going away i think there are far serous things going on. What is next, a serial killer is born and its zynga's fault and is sued by victims families?
200 years ago, more or less, there was a heavily-censored online service called Prodigy, which had one adults-only section called "Frank Discussions" where you could talk about (gasp) sex 'n stuff like that.
And one day Prodigy closed Frank Discussions, prompting mucho whining from subscribers about how they closed "our" discussion board.
Yo, peoples: It belonged to Prodigy, not to you. Slashdot belongs to faceless corporate masters and used to belong to Rob Malda. If you don't like it, you can always do the Rusty Foster thing and start Kuro5hin or some such. Otherwise, it's not yours. And those little Facebook games aren't yours. They never have been. If the evil corps want to shut them down, too bad. They're proprietary and/or copyrighted stuff the owners can do with as they wish no matter how evil you think they're being.
Do you understand why free and/or open source software is a good idea now? :)
Well, no.
You enable your children.
Blah blah blah PXE blah blah saved image blah blah.
If they can't keep the computer malware free TAKE IT AWAY FROM THEM.
"You clearly don't have children."
Perhaps the poster doesn't.
But you have no idea how to properly deal with yours.
M
There is a good reason to shut down these games:
People are killing other people over them!
See:
http://blog.games.com/2011/08/31/farmville-player-steals-farm-cash-stabs/
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
It's just gone to that great backup tape in the clouds. One day, if you're very very good, you'll go there too and you can play with your pet again.
Killing off some kids virtual pet is fairly compassionate in comparison to any other teachable moment...
This isn't education. This is a company that has made hundreds of millions of dollars by preying on children and teenagers selling them products and services that have little value and are grossly over-priced. Using greater evils in the world to justify a lesser evil is morally questionable. Let's say I crash into you in my car. You drive a very nice car, obviously a person of means. In my defense, I say I shouldn't have to pay as much in repairs, because it didn't hurt you as much as if I'd run into a poor person's car. You can get a rental, buy a new car, etc., so the proportional harm is less than the guy who's crappy buick I just wrecked and he has no money for repairs, or a rental, etc., and now may very well lose his job. This is the moral equivalent to the argument you're making, but with the roles reversed.
You're making an argument here based on your own emotional needs; Namely that you dealt with worse as a child and therefore these kids should "toughen up a bit". Take yourself out of the equation and evaluate objectively.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
with those kind of games, -making- the game is inflicting emotional pain...
This is a valuable lesson. Kids should have these formative experiences when they're young to build those defenses when parents can comfort their vulnerability. Reality is harsh, with disappointments, unplanned surprises, and gotcha's. What's the alternative? We can't protect our kids forever and they need to deal with reality as it is, not as parents wish it was. This is a learning experience that business relationships (a software program, a service, a microtransaction game, Divx, Amazon's Kindle, their *JOB*) are transitory, and will only continue as long as they are in both party's benefit.
I could see stopping enhancements, but actually taking the games down seems pointless. They can't cost that much to run. The operating costs are related to the number of users, who are presumably still viewing ads and buying in-game items. So there shouldn't be an operating loss.
What seems to be happening is that casual entertainment is moving to mobile, and Zynga was late with that. Zynga's business model relies on being in the right column of Facebook pages, and that column doesn't appear on phones. Zynga stock has dropped from 15 to 2.35 in less than a year. It's so bad that employees refused stock options. The consensus in the investment community seems to be that the CEO should resign.
It's the fact that they can't continue to use the good independently of the vendor they bought it from.
Web-based games like the kind Zynga produces use a lightweight client (Flash) because many of the platforms it develops for are resource-constrained. iPads, hand-me-down laptops from the parents, smartphones, etc. As a result, a lot of the processing has been moved to the server to enable that functionality. It's a rational design trade-off. Of course, when the server costs more to maintain than the income generated by keeping it on, it's time to shut it down. And yes, it is possible to port the application to run standalone, and even add certain community-features at a very low pricepoint -- but it costs money.
That's the downside of Web 2.0. It's a cost tradeoff -- you can spread your costs to millions of people to enable things like Google Mail, giving people gigabytes of free-to-access e-mail storage and a number of added features beyond that, in exchange for advertising revenue. It's economy of scale -- there are business models for which the margins are so tiny, that it takes millions of customers to make it viable. So if the breakeven ever falls under a certain point, it's no longer economical.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
An excellent question, to which I haven't seen an answer yet. Did their TOS promise anything forever? I doubt it. BUT... did their TOS say they may, at any point in the future, discontinue the service and offer no refund or release for future content? Maybe. Maybe not.
Not that many read the fine print, but the point is that most people, especially kids, are very short-sighted, and expect things they like to last forever. If you're going to kill off something that kids have come to expect, it'd at least be a good idea to be nice about it instead of just yanking the plug.
Open source the server so someone else can take over the project. More than likely someone will. Otherwise, all that investment people have put into their virtual bits turns to crap overnight, and that's totally unnecessary. and cruel to some.
They could have fun with it even, send it out with a bang instead of a whimper. Make it possible to give your pet a "going away party" or something. What they're getting right now isn't too far off from the family dog getting hit by a car. Ya I know it's just bits, to you and me, but not to a lot of others. They've got an emotional attachment to those bits.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
They're teaching kids from an early age that keeping your stuff in 'The Cloud' is a retarded idea.
Investment implies some form of return.. Sinking time into pointless games in't an investment, it's a waste.
To you there might be no point but from the messages we can see there is very a much a point, and a return - that is emotional attachment.
That is the return people get from these games, and why it is very much an investment for them. It also explains why people are MORE put out by an "investment" like this vanishing rather than mere monetary investments failing, because there is a strong emotional component and a loss feels like treachery.
I'm not saying it's healthy, but that is what people are getting from these systems and you should not discount the power it has over people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Game companies inflicting emotional pain on kids is unacceptable. Perhaps a new payroll tax?
Sure! I'm all for government regulation, but I think you're working the deal all crabbed: A sarcastic asshole tax would probably earn more revenue, and pay for therapy for the emotional pain of said kids many times over. With the excess revenue, we could go on to fund research on it as an alternative energy source. I don't know how many watts a mlookaba can generate, but I'd love to find out.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Is a company called Tiny Speck. Maybe you have heard of them, some of you geeky folks pay attention to stuff. I mean that as a compliment, so please dont take offense.
I am posting AC because I'm just far too lazy to dig up my /. login and login. So dont get all gripey :P.
Anyway, Tiny Speck had a game called Glitch. It was a 2 dimensional side-scroller where you explore the world of Ur and craft things and interact with all the other users. It was very heavily Flash based (to Flash's limit and then some, according to one of the devs).
Glitch was cool because the developers would pop into Global chat from time to time (quite often). The game had lots of subtle adult humor but it really wasnt for kids at all.
Ur was a very pretty place, with lots of different environments; deserts, undersea places, mountains, forests. There were lots of things to do and usually someone to do things with at any given moment.
Anyway, my point in posting this in contrast to Zynga: The sad announcement came in November of 2012 that Glitch was closing. And in early December, it did indeed shut off access to the game servers and many Glitchen were sad about it, but we all got over it (most of us anyway, except for the one who ate Onion Rings constantly).
But what did Tiny Speck do with the subscriber money? Refunded it. I have no idea what percentage of it was left by the users to go to the newly out of work developers, but I am sure some did.
Unlike Zynga, Tiny Speck gave a shit about the users, their experiences and ultimately, what was in their wallets too - in that it gave back what it had gotten from quite a few of them.
I wish the guys at Tiny Speck well and all of us players wished that Glitch could have been sustainable, but in its current form it was just impossible. Flash was really at the limit and the overall costs (a lot) were just eating up cash like the Cookie Monster eats cookies.
We would all love it if Glitch came back in some other form. It was the anti-game. There was no real goal other than to just goof off in this odd world and see all the details in it. Maybe it could have used some higher level content for the maxed out players, but time would have given us that if it had been possible. Tiny Speck was very good about giving us new things.
So, while some companies can be like Zynga and have zero creativity, there are others out there like Tiny Speck. Ur was a hell of a place but I liked it.
Wow you win. You're so angry that we should all just agree with your view. Well played sir.
The harsh reality of capitalism is that there are plenty of people who kill babies to make a quick buck and they often get away with it. How, exactly speaking, do you propose explaining this in a way that doesn't cause emotional pain?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Hmmm... I thought I didn't have a much of a social life, after reading this turns out I do!
the the economy recovers..
all that cash, formerly going into the bank accounts of z and its executives.. now gets spent in the real world
many of those players swear-off z and its games... needing something to do, once they realize facebook is really a big joke of a waste of time, they get jobs... earning more money, paying taxes, and spending more money in the real world.
the news scares off others from giving z (or other f2p games) a penny... their current spending in the real world is not reduced.
a group of addicted players from ky and wv join forces and raid z's offices, taking every executive hostage and smashing all computers... the prez issues an executive order praising the group for their service to their country. the fbi does nothing. z disappears into nothingness. the final losers, those stupid enough to have bought into z as a viable public company... but they had it coming..... idiots.
Another reason why abandonware should immediately lose copyright protection.
Learn to love Alaska
Welcome to the cloud!
Kill my pet? Cause depression?
I dread the day WoW gets shut down. Or maybe I should be looking forward to it, a few flats might get on the market again.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
One game made to appeal to pre-teens would let me buy 5000 game coins, for only $99! If I was a parent of a kid who charged $100 to a credit card for game coins, I would go ballistic! I sure won't be entering credit card numbers into any of my devices any time soon. So sorry game devs, but it's still the wild west out in the land of app stores. It's too damn easy to get zapped for hundreds of dollars for an accidental swipe of a touchscreen. When these app makers can demonstrate more responsibity and respect towards the public's cash by creating more safeguards, then I'll take a shot at putting my info out there. I'm sure I.m not the only person who's wary of the internet payment systems we now have
Yes - that will work. Cause kids can't get their hands on a device from ANYONE except their parent/guardian - we ALL KNOW THAT.
"Jesus fuck, it's $15 a month, the average person with a life spends way more than that monthly for much less hours of enjoyment than a MMO can a provide you in a month"
MMO's are a giant rip off, you can get more value out of stand alone videogames. Anyone who thinks MMO's are a deal is part of the braindead gaming generation who in their stupidity have fed dollars to the industry to better exploit them and fucking up games permanently.
Its..... almost like there should be these older, more experienced people supervising the growth and development of children. We could even make a word especially for these people. Lets say.. parents! One of the things they could do for their children is to teach them. Or perhaps keep them from getting involved in things for which the children are unprepared.
I see you are thinking with emotion instead of logic.
Learning how to wisely spend money is a part of growing up. If the kids don't learn their lesson with stupid social games, then they will never learn that the lottery and scratch tickets are just as big of a scam.
The problem with your argument is that people don't learn lasting lessons without some form of negative impact.
One very basic example, you can't teach someone math by only telling them when they are right. They need to know when they are wrong, too.
I can empathize with the emotional reaction (I'd be pretty butt hurt if my WoW character disappeared tomorrow), but you can't look at this through an emotional lens. This is technically the property of another company even if you paid something for it. You're not paying for the item it's self. You're paying for the use of said item while the game exists. There should never be an expectation that something will exist forever and always the expectation it will go away someday. Yes, they're kids, but that doesn't change anything. Invoking "but it's about the kids" is an argument for the person left with nothing to stand on.
Did they do it in a really shitty way? Yes, they sure did.
No need, just recognize that long time involvement in the game creates a minor legal interest in it. An interest that could be discharged in it's entirety if the game developer freely releases the server components if/when it decides to shut it down.
So you never go to the movies in theaters, right? Or see a play? Because those are transient events that you might derive some enjoyment from, but for the ticket price you get nothing to keep.
It's something that MMO players have had to deal with for some time,
When last I heard, Ultima Online and EverQuest are still going. Hell, if you really want to kick it old-school, MadMaze has outlived Prodigy itself.
If anything, I suspect this speaks more to Zynga's business model of relying on microtransactions rather than such online-based games as a whole. I'm not certain of the causal relationship between a game's failure and going "free-to-play," but it's hard to deny a correlation.
just print a picture of your fake puppy and stick it on the mantle you pussy weirdo
getting your dick chopped off by a robot purpose-built
Starting to get scared of that surgery, GIT?
Life is more real, more valuable, more purposefull than pain or pleasure! Many good, important things in life are painful. Many pleasurable things in life are bad - for you, or for the community you belong to.
Saying "toughen up" isn't necessarily being heartless: is good adivce for a successful and fulfilling life. Learn to succeed despite difficulty. Learn to seek your long-term self-interest, or your community's best interest, over immediate gratification. Learn to act like an adult.
It's a lesson to few people have learned by 20 these days - far too few.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm almost 70 and never post here. Two-or-three years ago I knew a very warm-hearted young woman going through a very hard time in her life. She discovered Farmville and I started getting the Zynga message stream... a picture of a sad little animal and a message saying "An abandoned little baby llama has just been found and it needs to be adopted... so lost and lonely". I knew the incredible effort my friend put into fostering real animals, the insane hardships she had seen and how little money she had. And now some of that miniscule amount of money was going to Farmville. She was living in her car here in Austin scraping by with her two pet dogs and a coutimundi she was fostering (I kid you not). One afternoon we took one dog and the coutimundi out for a walk on leashes near the U. of Texas, where I live, and ever since I've been elevated by the frat boys to "The Coutimundi Dude"- a serious promotion. I didn't really know what Farmville was costing her, so after the"baby llama" emails I looked at Zynga and how it worked. What they were doing- carefully and systematically preying on the kind and the needy like some sort of hyper-evolved emotional shark while the tech press politely applauded- made me madder than anything I'd seen on the internet in years. Today I emailed the following to my now much happier and more settled young friend: "I saw thew following story and remembered the time in your life when Farmville was so important to you. I never said anything at the time, because I know how much you loved animals, even virtual ones, but I did look at the company that made Farmville, Zynga, and got incredibly upset at the tactics they were using to make money. The idea of charging for add-ons didn’t bother me at all, but the way they systematically targeting the needs of people who were both kind-hearted and vulnerable because of the way they loved without reservation and yet felt so alone really pissed me off. I’m so glad that today you are in a much better place. I just feel sorry for those who created and so generously loved those disappearing virtual pets." I'll make no comment on Zynga and its well-deserved fate. But the rest of us (including me) should remember with love and respect the sheer neediness of some of those we make for and sell to... or just meet on the street,and try to do a little better by them in 2013. Happy New Year.
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.
Saying "Open source the server" is easy. Doing it is hard.
What if the server (and heck, the client too!) uses proprietary third party libraries? Chances are they won't be able to license those for free.
What if the code has some patent infringing code, whether knowingly or not? With the utter plethora of software patents, it's a minefield to release any commercial code.
What if, more simply, the code ties into a lot of their centralized libraries, such as user account data and such? Removing such connections could become a nightmare.
All of this deployment takes a lot of time and resources. It's something very few companies could do, and even fewer would see a purpose in doing. What, after all, is their gain in letting others run their own product while they see not a cent from it? A product which might, later down the line, compete with a new product of their own.
Plus, this is Zynga we're talking about. Pincus would screw his own grandmother if he had a chance.
Cry moar. If only they would shut down Farmville; there would be riots in the streets.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
about artificial property
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
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So if my kid breaks my neighbor's window, that's not my problem either then, right? Little secret - that's not how it works in what we like to call the "real world".
Here's to hoping that this marks the beginning of the end for Zynga. It's about time some of these rubbish games got shuttered and dismantled. Perhaps without these games, their players will actually leave the house and not be social cripples.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
when the clouds fall.
getting your dick chopped off by a robot purpose-built to hunt down asshat slashdot posters
Holy crap, please mod parent up.
Write failed: Broken pipe
As the gaming industry in *general* moves away from 'selling' games toward subscription type stuff. Free to play and subscription services all indicate something you better not get too attached to. Even for single player games, things are dire. What would happen if Valve shut off Steam tomorrow? How many people's 'libraries' would become useless crap?
This is a perfect reason why online games suck. You put in the time and the company can decided at anytime to kill your toon. If you had the software on your own machine it's up to you when to stop playing not a corporation.
This is a company that has made hundreds of millions of dollars by preying on children and teenagers selling them products and services that have little value and are grossly over-priced.
And you are objecting to the company stopping doing this for what reason? Do you want the company to continue with these practices?
The more I see companies like Zynga and closed games online like City of Heroes, the more I love mame.
talk about a first world problem. If Zynga's game shutdown actually matters to you, you truely need to get out more.
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/
You must be a blast at parties. A bitter opinionated video game nerd, yeesh.
i always say.
I went to one of the game sites and Indiana Jones Adventure World says it has 570,000 have played it. How can you have hundreds of thousands of people that have played your game? Unless this counts the people who signed up and spent less than 10 minutes on it. I would really like to know how much some of these games bombed.
A hand-me-down laptop has more processing power than a new iPad or smartphone, and a first generation iPad has more than enough processing power for any of the zynga games. Zynga games are nothing more than an elaborate form of stamp collecting. Grind for a bit, collect gold, buy next stamp, rinse, repeat. If the grind gets too dull, exchange cash for virtual gold, and you can skip some of the tedium. The server storage per player won't be much beyond a few hundred bytes for the game data, and maybe 1 or 2 meg to store the 'friends list' (zynga games use nothing more than a MySQL database). The server 'owns' the stamps you've been collecting. If it didn't, you'd be able to buy and sell stamps without needing to pay money to zynga, and at that point they'd have no business model. The only Zynga game(s) that were any good, were the very early scrabble/risk rip-offs (I was quite partial to a bit of risk). They were free to play, generated no income, and were only used by zynga to get up the numbers of facebook users for the later cityville/farmville spam assault that we all know and love Zynga for today. Those servers were sadly shut down quite early on (and I've yet to find a better version of online risk).
It's just a game. Does it make some people sad? Sure but then it's sad when pets die. What would you propose? If only 1 person were using petville or whatever should zynga continue to maintain it? Have you ever admitted being wrong about something or do you just keep digging into your position deeper and deeper calling others assholes?
Your common sense is wrong . Look up how copyrights apply to games sometime.
where is obama when you need him?
So go get a real one. Go to the nearest animal shelter and go find a cat or a dog who needs a home. Isn't it better to make a real difference in a life than to pine over a record in a database?
Kill the online pet? Maybe this is a good thing. Many people spend too much time sitting on their computer douing these stupid games. They need to get out, meet people, socialise. They need to get married and have children. So maybe this is a good thing for society that they will be encouraged to do so. In many countries people are having too few children, for instance in Italy the fertility rate is 1.2. Do you know what happens when you have a fertility rate that far below replacement level? Its basically genocide, driving a nations people to extinction. So people need to get out, get married and have a lot of kids, for god sake.
My understanding from relatives is that the games are primarily played in short bursts when visibly socializing isn't an option and the person wants a little mental downtime, so it'd have little-to-no bearing on what kind of social life the person has. I faintly recall some kids in my younger brother's crowd being like that with the tamagotchi toys they were into back in the 90s, and becoming emotionally attached to one or more objects (real or virtual) one collects or focuses on during downtime is hardly a new concept for humanity.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Someone who keeps doing crystal meth must value it more then being in the alternative reality.
It's not our right to judge this as a waste of a life. [sarcasm]
What would really be cruel is take away all consequences from people's lives. They will be utterly helpless individuals that rely on government aid to survive, IOW perfect marks to be bred for control, exploitation and abuse.
No, life's lessons are valuable. Taking them away is a cruel punishment and only promotes superficial attitudes and modes of life.
Hm, I just presumed from his story that his friend had diminished intellect. I mean, if you're living in a car, with very little money, and you feel a *compulsion* to spend what little you have in order to "save" a goddamn virtual animal? That's prima facie evidence of mental incompetence.
Zynga's management should fall down a well and die, but not because low IQ people cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality. This person sounded like she needed to be in an institution or group home, probably with limited, supervised access to the internet.
I'm all for escapism, but when you pursue your escapist hobbies to the detriment of your ability to live independently, then that's at least an addiction (if not worse).
Have fun with your virtual animals. Just don't forget they're *not real*; you and your real pets need *real* food in order to survive. This customarily costs money.
I can't believe how heartless some of you are. Apparently the age of communications has only fostered bitchiness and superiority complexes.
It's not like the rest of us are immune; How many of you mocking these people use Steam? You're in the same boat too you know, and doubly naive if you think anyone is going to make every Steam game standalone if it collapses.
The fact is, most of the people on the 'net today treat it as an appliance; They are noobs.
I was one of those naive idiot noobs back in the day (You know the sort: Enthusiastic, filled with self-confidence and implicit knowledge of my own awesome coolness; An idiot in other words), but the people around me - IRC, usenet, forums - they all passed on their skills and advice, and I *learned*. And this was not uncommon! Practically nobody worried about viruses and shit back then because everybody knew not to click on stuff from unknown sources etc. - You developed a danger sense of Good Stuff and Bad Stuff that many lack today. There was a level of civility between people; Netiquette it was rather charmingly called.
Now, this information is not being spread - all people do is mock people after it happens but don't teach them before hand.
Partly it's because of the huge flood of people onto the 'net (The beginning of which was often attributed to AOL!) but even so... I don't know; Maybe there needs to be some sort of Adopt-A-Noob scheme. It just requires some patience and maybe a bit of eye-rolling but .
I think it might be more difficult today due to the various chilling effects - For instance, you didn't know or care about peoples' age, race or gender so much back then - You judged and were judged on how you presented yourself.
That was the beauty of anonymity - You were your handle. We need that back!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As a player of all types of games, although not so much FPS these day, yes, yes we expect some shitty little server in the corner of an office to run forever.
I've invested time, money, and knowledge (captured for others to use) on these F2P games. And yes, I do expect them to run forever. I'm playing one of Zynga's at the moment and I enjoy the casual nature of it. There's no pause button. I can chat to the wife while playing. I can even surf during those "resource recharging" moments. I've met new players...
There's a metric shitload of bugs. There's zero feedback from Zynga. All in all, Zynga dump a beta version and the community field all the bugs reports and possible workarounds. All Zynga does is count their cash and reboot the server once a week.
So, to repeat myself again, yes, yes I do expect the games to run forever on a shitty little server stuffed in the corner of an office.
I've run servers myself in the past. The cost was minimal. The effort involved was a few mouse clicks once a week. I could still do it today with even less effort, but maybe a little more electric, and I'm only one man.
No excuses. Run those servers forever.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Even more improbably, the mac-only Al'Kabor server for Everquest is still going, despite bringing in no direct revenue--it became free-to-play without the microtransactions last year. More or less frozen in time in 2002, it has had little support other than the heroic maintenance efforts of one Sony developer. Yet the lights are still on (with no promises but no public plans to shut it down), and there is a small but loyal player community.
Everquest still turns a profit, to my knowledge. EQMac seems to be a rare case of Sony choosing customer goodwill over the bottom line?
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.
But, isn't that the core of capitalism? We invest in something; when it fails we lose our investment, and we make wiser choices in the future. We regulate certain aspects of capitalism (or, in the US, we're supposed to...) to protect the investor from fraud. In this case, where the purpose of the monetary investment is immediate entertainment, fraud is not an appropriate argument, since it is not unreasonable to believe that the entertainment value was exhausted very shortly after the money was spent (think a movie, where the value is "used up" in two hours).
Maybe what need to be addressed is how these products are marketed. These microtransaction purchases are often perceived as assets, rather than access to more entertainment. I still don't believe these are marketed in a fraudulent way, but I do believe the perception is there. Market forces will most likely correct any possible problem, and Zynga is apparently already feeling the affect of these market forces as they are shuttering a large number of games.
It's a tight balance between protecting consumer investment and protecting shareholder investment, as both are dependent upon the other in a balanced economy.
A sarcastic asshole tax would probably earn more revenue, and pay for therapy for the emotional pain of said kids many times over.
I give away my sarcasm for free. Good luck taxing that!
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
People *should* experience this pain. Maybe that will teach them not to **rent** software and not to trust software-as-a-service. If you let your save file and the entire game be stored on someone else's computer, especially at their expense, sooner or later you will lose access to it or have it (mis)used by another party. It's better that people wake up to this sooner rather than later, and if it takes having years of effort poured into a time-sink game to make people start thinking that maybe, just maybe, there's a reason to not give away their data, then that's *good*.
If you can't control it *you do not own it*. Learn to love Free software, learn to love the AGPL and learn to love *open* services you can, if necessary, host yourself or, at the least, pay multiple parties to host for you.
And stop using facebook! If you think *this* is bad, just wait for when that behemoth starts to fall.
I want my Cowboyneal
My sistrer loves hanging with friends and words with friends. I play them also, but not consistentlyn enough to keep from having my games resigned out from under me if I don't pay enough attention. When I started to look around at their other games, I was immediately shocked at how it was about microcharging items that made you more competitive. And not spending money you earn in the game, but real cash on the credit card. In hanging with friends, the avatars they provided for free didn't include caucasians, but for money you could be white. The rest I have been disappointed with, very disappointed.
I don't know, $15 a month for having met and befriended a couple dozen people from around the US, Canada, and Europe over the past couple years playing WoW, I don't consider that a particularly bad "investment." Many other hobbies cost a lot more than $15 a month, and generally narrow the pool of potential new friends to "people who live within 20-50 miles of you."
This lack of "long term value" is inherent to the MMO grindfest of gearing - nothing is permanent in a game like WoW, no matter how best-in-slot you are today, there's always a new expansion, tier, raid, dungeon, etc. on the horizon that's going to obsolete all the gear you've got today. The VALUE of any online game is in the enjoyment you have while playing it (I've had a lot of really fun evenings doing arenas & raids with friends over the past couple years), and the social connections made while playing.
If WoW magically disappeared in its entirety tomorrow, I'd still have a couple very good friends and a couple dozen looser acquaintances to show for my time spent playing - they don't cease to exist, and I am in touch with most of them outside the game. At a cost of $180 a year, I'm inclined to say that's pretty good value for the money spent, if you want to really boil it down to idiotic "cost per unit of enjoyment."
Right, instead Zynga developers should be forced to live in cardboard boxes and work for free until they starve to death.
This is a far better lesson to teach children - that if you shout about how upset you are about something, somebody will step in and harm somebody else on your behalf to prevent you from ever having a less-than-positive emotion, ever, in your life.
You're an idiot, that money actually goes a significant way and unless you compare with games like TF2 it's pretty hard to beat the fun you have a for the money you spend. The average call of duty game will charge you $20 for 4 rehashed maps you already played in the previous game.
If getting content for my money is stupidity, then I hope the entire world turns stupid. Right now what most game developers provide is a money sink with not much fun, and a dead game afterwards that will never be maintained.
So enjoy your impressive "tens of hours" of content while I spend days of play time for a fraction of the money, and a multiple of the fun. Meeting friends along the way too.
...unless you enjoy the MMO. Can you get more hours per dollar out of standalone games? Maybe... But fifteen bucks a month for something you enjoy isn't a huge deal (and I don't even play anymore). I've spent far more money on my "active" hobbies than I ever did on WoW and have gotten far fewer hours of enjoyment out of them. Does that mean they're rip offs too? The value of money is more or less fixed, but the value of what you buy with that money can be all over the place.
+1 Disagree
Whoa whoa whoa. Seems a little black and white there. If I ask my daughter to do chores and she doesn't want to (there's certainly some emotional pain there) does that make me socially predatory? What about if I ground her? What if I just tell her she can't have a new [toy] when she thinks she needs one? Not ALL pain is evil, or even unhealthy. Some is necessary AND healthy to grow and mature. That might be the kind of pain the OP was referring to.
I think Zynga and any business selling shit that doesn't exist should be illegal for exactly these reasons, and the reasons you mention. THEY WILL be shut down, and people WILL be hurt. But the only way some people will realize that is to be hurt, and then learn, and then grow (well *crosses fingers*, one hopes anyway).
I didn't see it as anger, but as humor. Your post was completely retarded, his was a funny jab at your stupidity in return.
Another reason why abandonware should immediately lose copyright protection.
Abandonware implies already the not enforcing of copyright protection. How does one find out? By trying to trigger the enforcement? That would be a copyright violation until there would be no judicial response to be expected anymore. It would open a new niche alike patent trolling.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Abandonware implies already the not enforcing of copyright protection.
Laches (or estoppel) doesn't apply to copyright. So if one company abandons something, and the rights are acquired by someone else, anyone who treated the abandonware as non-copyrighted would be in serious trouble (some things like that have been known to happen).
All those worries would be gone if the loss of copyright was official. The point is to secure things for income, but if that's abandoned, then there's no reason to maintain the copyright. So let's just make it official.
Learn to love Alaska
Abandonware implies already the not enforcing of copyright protection.
Laches (or estoppel) doesn't apply to copyright. So if one company abandons something, and the rights are acquired by someone else, anyone who treated the abandonware as non-copyrighted would be in serious trouble (some things like that have been known to happen).
All those worries would be gone if the loss of copyright was official. The point is to secure things for income, but if that's abandoned, then there's no reason to maintain the copyright. So let's just make it official.
As in explicitly releasing into the Public Domain? Would be a great idea, but it might be a bit difficult to get the right-holders to do that. After all, it might not be clear who that right-holder is, and wether he might suddenly claim rights after the public assumed the work to be abandonware.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
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After all, it might not be clear who that right-holder is, and wether he might suddenly claim rights after the public assumed the work to be abandonware.
Given the cases I've seen of someone getting in trouble has been from someone improving a game that's been "dead" for years, then the rights to the game were acquired by someone else who then decided to enforce the copyright, I'm more worried about acquisitions, and they are easier to put rules on because of the identification and transfer or assets.
Learn to love Alaska