My wife used to play them (thankfully never spent any money) but from what I can tell she’s given up because the designs are getting more and more blatant in terms of extorting money. It used to be when the companies were growing that they would give you these progression rewards for advertising their game with your friends. To them that was value, so you could make progress by constantly spamming your friends with requests to come play with you or gift you things by clicking on crap. Now that they’re past the point of diminishing returns the social spam isn’t as valuable and they all want to just cash in. It’s like the pyramid scheme has finally branched as far as it will go so it’s time to start making the money flow uphill before the structure collapses. There’s no long-term plan whatsoever here, just a cash grab.
Anyone left at Playfish should start looking for a new job now.
So until facebook responded to complaints and let users opt out of that spam you mean?
This is retaliation for EA winning Worst Company in America for a 2nd time in a row. In an effort to punish people, EA gladly cuts its own customers off. Look at the first time EA won the award, they released SimCity with ALWAYSON DRM. Now that they won the award again, they decided to hung out their F2P players to dry.
They put their space-buck currency on sale just last week haha.
So, what would be the acceptable time period after which it is OK for EA to close down a non-profitable business? Do people seriously believe these services would last forever if they were run by a saintly EA.
I’m really not trying to troll here. EA launched it at 2011, people played it, enjoyed it (I hope) and now its time to go on. How long do people expect EA to maintain their facebook sims online for?
How about “as long as they continue to include the game[s] in advertised promotions…”?
(image shamelessly stolen from Telefrog’s post in the main SimCity thread)
I don’t know about a timeframe but at the very least they should be doing something for those with outstanding balances. Not to be crude, but they are really shitting where they eat with this kind of behavior.
Why would anyone sit on a balance in such a game. People just buy EA money and sit on it, basically giving EA a loan? Don’t they just buy stuff when you need it?
Anyway regarding refunds, IMHO EA already delivered the goods, got taxed? (see thread about it somewhere) and included it in their revenue. If people didn’t use the service they bought its their own problem. BTW - can people still use these EA drachmas until June?
All right, who am I kidding. They are a bunch of greedy fuckers.