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."

Comments

And nothing of value was lost

[mlookaba]

bye bye

Re:And nothing of value was lost

[davester666]

What 'trust' was there in Zynga? There are lots of "freemium" games that people have "invested" time and money into that have disappeared into the ether.

If you want something that won't disappear 5 minutes after you pay for it, you need to take actual physical possession of it. Or at least get whomever you are purchasing from to say "We won't take this away from you for at least 10 minutes."

A brilliant strategy...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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?

It's not your game -- or website

[Roblimo]

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? :)

Re:Enablers

[girlintraining]

But you have no idea how to properly deal with yours.

You assume they're my children. Strangely enough, other family members have a desire to breed as well, and even stranger... my reputation as a computer geek makes my phone ring when things like this happen. And the worst of it is, being that they're family and have done so very many thing to help me out over the years, it's not like I can say no. But you go ahead and rock the condescending angle, man.

Blah blah blah PXE blah blah saved image blah blah.

Running each scanner one at a time, plus cleaning whatever is missed, takes many hours. After doing this a few times, it becomes easier to just build an image backup/restore. Of course, you, having apparently no family, social obligations, or desire to help anyone but yourself, would never consider the benefits of being able to tell said teenager(s) to "press F12 and wait" and then reaping the favor of others, perhaps leading them to say, replace that water pump on your car that died, etc.