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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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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
Yes - that will work. Cause kids can't get their hands on a device from ANYONE except their parent/guardian - we ALL KNOW THAT.