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

[vlm]

First they came for my pet and I said nothing
Then they came for my fish and I still said nothing
etc
Just wait for the delicious tears when someday WoW shuts down

Re:And nothing of value was lost

[girlintraining]

And why should we care about this fluff, anyway?

You clearly don't have children. You will learn what a Bieber is, and why iTunes gift cards and not the President, is the current incarnation of the anti-christ. You will discover the joys of cleaning out a malware infested computer in your teenager's bedroom on a biweekly basis, to the point that you, in a fit of anger, spend a weekend building a vm image with a pxe server and restoration image so your solution to their pepetual inability to listen to you and then try to actively override any security features designed to keep them from screwing it up is "press f12 and wait an hour, and no bitching about your 'lost music', dumbass." And you will also learn why a random sampling of teenager's glowy rectangles show that Facebook is almost always on it... and thus, Zynga is as well.

Re:And nothing of value was lost

[JWSmythe]

    They've stepped up their bastardery too. I got a spam today where a "friend" (someone I'd never heard of) invited me to play "Ruby Blast", which is on of their games.

    The links are legit, they go to their game, so it's not a phisher. It's just them being rude. I've been blocking all their apps, as people start spamming me with FB invites.

Re:And nothing of value was lost

[Anonymous Coward]

I would tell my son that he's a faggot for being so needy for attention, like a little girl is, and then drive the point home by bragging about how my generation jumped bikes at construction sites and played sports instead of being big sissies like guys are now.

Daughters are much more simple - You tell 'em that if they get knocked up, the baby is being aborted or else they and their baby are both given up for adoption and/or kicked out on the street. No ifs, ands, or buts.

The problem with your approach is that you're being too soft - You're setting yourself up to let kids get away wtih all that and walk all over you. That is a perfect example of today's impotent parenting, lacking discipline. You lay down the ground rules, and the second they fuck up, disable their access to the internet for a week, and smack 'em in the mouth with a rolled-up newspaper if they start givin' you any lip. You're the one in charge, so take charge. If they need the internet for anything like homework, then you install an ultra-repressive linux install with permissions for only Firefox and LibreOffice. Generate the kids' access keys for the router on a day-to-day basis to ensure compliance. If they start whining about Facebook and Farmville, kick them outdoors on their bikes for a few hours. Sheesh, what is wrong with parents nowadays?

-- Ethanol-fueled

Re:And nothing of value was lost

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Personally, I think the logical conclusion to Pincus's master plan is eVille, where you have to make as much money as possible from your game characters' on-line activities.

Luckily, some of the smartest guys on the Internet saw it coming, hence Google's well-known motto, "Don't play eVille."

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."

Re:And nothing of value was lost

[couchslug]

Good question.

I keep mine safe in the walled garden of 4chan.

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?

Re:A brilliant strategy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, why the fuck do unordered lists on /. not get bullets?

They were removed as a cost-saving measure some time ago.

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.

Re:You pet isn't dead

[Zed0mega]

What!? They told me Sparky was in a server farm upstate! /cry

My anger; thier vulnerability

[Joe Branya]

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.

2012 Worst CEO

[cpaglee]

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/