No refunds as the EA-owned firm suggests people spend credits elsewhere
Leading social games studio Playfish says it will soon shut down servers of three Facebook games.
Pirates Ahoy, Poker Rivals and Gangster City will each go offline on June 7th, Playfish said.
Playfish said it would not refund in-game currency that people had already purchased. Instead it urged customers to spend the currency – known as ‘Playfish Cash’ – on the studio’s other titles.
The firm, owned by Electronic Arts, said the trio of games “are no longer performing at a level in which they can continue to be supported”.
Yet data published by InsideSocialGames suggests that there was still consumer interest in these games. Pirates Ahoy, in particular, still has some 40,000 daily active users and attracts 267,000 customers per month.
Advertisement
The closure of the trio sheds light on an unexamined element of the social games space – determining the shelf life of a project.
In the past five years, social gaming has burst into a multi-billion dollar business. The phenomenon has been dominated by stories of rocketing valuations of studios driving the sector.
For now, little is understood of how social games are considered for closure.
More user data on the three games can be found at InsideSocialGames
"For now, little is understood of how social games are considered for closure."
Uh...seriously? Isn't it 'basically' just "Our expenses are exceeding our revenue"?
Is it? Should it be? What constitutes the decision making process? Where is the line drawn? Do you know? Is this not a relatively unexplored issue? etc
It's probably something more like: expenses + opportunity cost of development support > revenue. If something is earning marginal profits it's probably worth redeploying your scarce developers elsewhere elsewhere, in the same way a bank prefers you to have a credit card as opposed to an overdraft. Both are revenue positive, but the credit card has a bigger return on the funds lent.
There needs to be care how this is done, players feel cheated when this happens - and virtual goods could get a bad name. It's not the same as when a pay-per-month game folds. A token gesture such as 25% refund of what you have spent, or perhaps a refund of payments made in the last 3 months, may help. The refunds could be in the form of credits to be spent in the other companies games rather than "real" money, and could help to draw players into those games. Seems a little greedy, and harms the whole industry in my opinion. Both Zynga and EA have done this now amongst others so basically the message to consumers seems clear - don't spend your money on virtual goods unless it's a massive super-game. Unfortunate. ;(
