In a post I did a little while ago, I talked about Facebook gaming and how it may have some potential, if it moves on from bite-sized experiences, and maybe got something a bit more complete. Nice and addictive, not really for everyone, however Farmville is probably one of the most played games ever.
Well, according to a recent post on TechCrunch, it’s all one big scam. The business model of Zynga (the developer behind Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Yoville) is broken down in great detail, bringing up both aspects of obtaining currency in their games. Flat-out paying for the currency with a credit card isn’t all that bad, but there is another, darker side to obtaining the secondary currency that you can’t obtain (enough to make a difference) through normal gameplay.
On the page that you purchase the “Farm Bux” from, there are several offers that players can sign up for — most requiring a credit card — like a Netflix free trial, IQ tests, and a slew of others. These offers don’t seem too terrible on the surface but read the fine print, bub. Looks like a few of them are very misleading including a “free trial” of some Video Professor DVDs, that in actuality gets you the whole set… including the $189.95 bill.
There’s some shady stuff going on in Facebook gaming. While there are developers that keep it clean (Popcap, EA) and don’t put any micro-transactions into their games, Zynga seem to squeeze $50 million a year for the Facebook advertisements that attract more chumps to their games. I’ve never signed up for any of the seemingly legitimate offers and I never plan on it. They always seemed a bit shady to me and now my fears have been justified. A lot of these games are just traps. Not worth it at all and most importantly, unrewarding.
Recent developments on this story have suggested that the scam offers were not known of by Zynga, and that they’re actively working to get them off of their list. As much as I can applaud them for fixing their product, you would think they would have screened the offers before they were put on the list. Sure, it might be an easy thing to overlook in the haze of trying to earn money, but not scamming your customers should be a greater priority than making bank.
It isn’t entirely the developers fault, however. The company that supplies all of the offers, Offerpal denied the fact that some of their offers are scams. At least be up front about your problems, don’t just shove them under the rug, or — in this case — deny them flat out. They got a new CEO in light of this development, and seem to be rectifying the problem.
As you can see, this is a multifaceted problem. There are several parties involved, and none of them seem to be able to communicate with each other properly. There’s a lot of journalism going on, and some fact checking that didn’t get done (as seen in the quote from Zynga CEO Mark Pincus here). Not that it was an argument-breaking mistake, or that Mike Arrington was wrong to put up the post. He was right to bring the story to the world’s attention, and all of the subsequent updates are great supplements to the issue. We’ll have to wait a while longer for a resolution though, with the CEO swap of Offerpal, the CEO of Zynga coming out and saying what he did, and the many other contributing factors to this situation.
Techcrunch have done several updates to the story, so if you want to get much more in-depth than this quickly supernova-ing post is, you can read those. Oh, and here’s an interview from Gamasutra with the Vice President of Development for Zynga about how casual games are making the transition to “social games” for platforms like Facebook and Myspace. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to “real” games.
Tags: Casual, facebook, Farmville, Zynga Posted in: Editorial, Article
I hate it when people call their games “real games” to differentiate them from “casual games”.
@ParaParaKing: Yeah…it’s a joke.