Real money invested into in-game virtual currency irredeemable and not transferable to other titles
750,000 customers have been left in the dark after EA PopCap dropped ZipZapPlay’s Facebook game Baking Life.
The game will officially go offline on January 31st, with customers told to spend their remaining virtual currency before then, as it will not be redeemable nor transferable to other titles after that date.
Money already invested on in-game items will also not be transferable to other titles either, with the entire game and user profiles being affectively deleted.
The removal comes despite the Facebook title having more than 760,000 monthly average users and 100,000 daily active users.
The move exposes the high level of authority online developers can have over their customers in the social and online games space.
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Customers may invest their time but, as is only made explicitly clear when games close down, they technically do not have ownership of browser games which are serviced to them.
The developer said on its Facebook page that it was upset to drop the game, but recommended users move to other PopCap titles such as Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz – two titles unrelated to Baking Life’s genre.
“Unfortunately, we had to make a very difficult decision to shut down the game,” said PopCap’s VP of communications Garth Chouteau to Inside Social Games.
“The Baking Life player numbers have dropped in such a way that Baking Life is no longer performing well enough to justify continued support. As such, we are reallocating resources to games that we are developing for future release.”
Chouteau did not clarify whether the game was still profitable at 750,000 users.
In July 2010, Zynga made a similar move by shutting down online game Street Racing, despite customers having invested real money into the Facebook game.
The social games giant then also directed users to other unrelated games such as FrontierVille, in a move to shift its userbase.
A petition was published on the Zynga forums, with many fans outraged at the game’s closure and refusing to play titles from the company in future, but the company did not reverse its decision.
Much as I would hate to be one of the customers left in the lurch I have little sympathy for them.
If people were prepared to pay a fair price for games in the first place then there would be no need for virtual currency anyway.
Virtual currency was only invented as a means of getting cash out of people who decided they no longer wanted to pay for their games.
To be clear as games makers and publishers we would all prefer to go back to the days where a game cost £2.99, £4.99, £9.99 or £19.99 a copy and that was that.
Imagine 100% paying customers... (except for pirates of course)
That constitutes theft. Class action people.
That does constitute as theft. If I bought a gym membership for a year and they closed half way through the year, you better believe the gym can be sued for it (getting your money out of a defunct business is another story - but Pop Cap isn't going defunct).
In reply to the "time to pay" post. I can't agree with anything you say in that post. These folks are casual gamers who aren't willing to pay much of anything for a browser game (I wouldn't either). So companies devised a brilliant plan of microtransactions. This has been a huge boon to the gaming industry and has made mountains out of companies like zynga.
So you think they want to get a flat $2.99 per game or any flat amoutn when they have 750k users likely pumping in $10+ per month? Why do you think WoW has been so extremely successful?
Flat rate games... I think they died in the 90s.
Naphier, I am assuming each customer wasn't pumping $10 in a month, or certainly not any more. Otherwise they wouldn't shut down a viable money making product. There are good examples of profitable micro-transaction games but again I assuming this either isn't one of them or they have got to the point in the games life where the running costs are starting to match the generated income. Also it might be worth pointing out that WoW was successful for many reasons, right company, right quality, right time, many subscribers, but micro-transactions was not one of them. Flat rate games are also still viable money making products on the console and mobile market, but the online market is not an easy one to break into anymore.
It's not just that free to play relies on fleecing so called "whales" who are either stupid or your biggest fans to work it also means that the game needs to be designed around that model.
Both aren't exactly preferable.
