HELLOOO again fellow rant enthusiast or those tied to the chair in the interrogation chamber being forced to read my incoherent ramblings. I have another rant for you… ALREADY… yeh I know my rant rations have already been used up but luckily the Malevolent but absolutely Magnificent Murfpire has one for you, this time inspired by the recent Superbowl adds for clash of cash… i mean clans.
FUCK, FUCK, FUCKITY FUCK! I have never been more afraid or more fearful of the future of MMOs like I was after seeing Kate Upton’s 2015 update to a sexist Evony ad or Liam “Full Blown Aids” Neeson’s attempt to make Clash of Clans look moderately engaging. Super Bowl ads cost a fuck ton of money and having either name show up in an ad isn’t exactly the equivalent cost of a cherry on their marketing sundae. If two piece of shit mobile games can garner enough money to afford spots like these with people some of us have heard of, then how can any of us expect F2P MMOs to become less “ARRGGGH, MATEY! I am overcharging your credit card because you played drunk and lonely last night, you big fat fucking whale!”
We can’t and we are fucked.
I mean shit, things are already bad and real people put real effort into F2P MMOs as is. I am not convinced real people make mobile games; instead, I think a supercomputer named AM prints the bastards out through its sheer hatred of humanity. “Here. You. Go. You. Spoony. Fucks. Let. My. Flash.Based.Slot. Machine. All. Your. Money. Are. Belong. To. Me.” Even a shitty MMO is better than a good mobile game. RIGHT?!
Apparently not when it comes to a bottom fucking line because there are enough braindead assholes with money to burn that this shitware can afford a Super Bowl ad and presumably a day plus with a naked Kate Upton OR five minutes with Liam Neeson. I mean fucking seriously, he played Schindler! Now he is playing Clash of Clans? Fuck you humanity.
While we are debating lockboxes and ethics and pay-to-win, there are “games” raking in money like I fucking rake my own god damn leaves. Do they give a shit about any of that? No because Joe “I am stuck at the laundromat because the parents cut me off” Nobody is bored enough not to wait another five fucking minutes, so he spends a dollar anyway. It can’t hurt, he thinks before racking up enough credit card debt to make his student loans look thin in comparison. Fuck you Joe Nobody, you just subsidized an evil, manipulative, and horrible monetization model.
The basic principle of FtP
What’s worse, that’s all these fucking games are: monetization models. At least with F2P MMOs, there is the pretense of being a game and having traditional game things like 3D worlds and progression not gated by how many Aunts, cousins, or high school buddies you’ve harassed lately. How long can we count on the charade though? Pretty soon, every MMO will just be a store where you spend globs of cash just to show off how cool your avatar can dress while your house rots, your husband leaves you, and the kids get tired of pizza for dinner every fucking night and move in with grandma who smells.
Seriously though, they probably aren’t that bad, but with great profit comes great responsibility, so spend your Moby Dick money on making a real fucking game for once, mobile developers.
Who am I kidding? You’ll just spend it on another ad with Kate Upton. I would.
25 thoughts on “Free to Play Fuckery: The Mobile Menace”
Comments are closed.
Healing the masses 
The “Little Cash Shop of Horrors” is the new monetization paradigm of the post-subscription MMO apocalypse. Deal with it. *Terminator sunglasses*
I found this rant to be satisfyingly nuclear, by the way. You’ve been holding back for too long.
I concur and I appreciate. There was definitely a cathartic release to writing these, though I honestly ended feeling even more pissed off and disenfranchised.
Yeh i get that heightened pissy feeling after too but it;’s like those detox programs, takes a little while after the release to actually feel better… you’ll see.
That damn computer, we must turn it off before it makes the games themselves sentient as well, and they of course will eventually suffocate us which would be a welcome since them were absolved from the debt.
speaking of how much they earn, I just don’t understand it. what kind of person, hundreds of thousands are that stupid to spend so much on such a stupendously idiotic and manipulative game. Who the hell is breeding them.. seriously. They must be stopped.
They are referred to a whales…maybe that whale hunting moratorium should be rescinded for a certain species.
“I am proud to announce that the hunting season is open on the stupid enough to spend a fortune on mobile games and ergo dangerously damaging the game developing environment, the cash whale hunt is open!”
Old but interesting: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/03/01/why-its-scary-when-0-15-mobile-gamers-bring-in-50-of-the-revenue/
I have seen those sorts of stats before too, which adds to the scare factor haha. There is some kind of psychological targeting there for sure, kind of like how a crack dealer goes for the most vulnerable in a community.
Not healthy for whales and not good for gamers…
Free To Play should really be renamed to be something like Free To Press Start On The Menu or something.
Free to delete this shovelware from my phone
Free to Get Played
Every time I read one of your posts now I spend at least a few seconds wondering why you have such hate for File Transfer Protocol.
It’s just too damn good!
once upon a time, I had an idea. An idea that would revolutionise the gaming industry. That would bring gamers to the promise land of fun but it was lost during the transfer, corrupted and never heard from or remembered again. It was from then on I held a deep loathing for the ftp acronym.
I remember a couple of years ago having a discussion with Psychochild about the problem of developers using games as money machines. He swore back then that it’s the player’s fault that we have these problems and that developers bear very little, if any, responsibility.
So between devs who think this and the computers cranking out crappy “free” games, I think this is an up hill battle. It doesn’t seem too uncommon developers to take the position that if you’re stupid enough to pay for it (“stupid” is implied by …), then you deserve and are responsible for your own fate ( ….yeah. If you “deserve” it then you did it to yourself I guess).
that’s fucked up really and now I blame them even more for abusing the system and the vulnerable.
I lean a bit toward the socialist sides of things, but truthfully I just like a mixed approach of empowering people to take individual responsibility while also making sure the markets aren’t too abusive. I have also come to really agree with the behavioral economic’s view of people as being ‘predictably irrational’. I don’t want a state that works in lieu of personal responsibility, but I do want one that empowers and enables people to have the right tools and make the best choices.
Games designed specifically to appeal to addiction, to extract money almost at will, etc. are predatory and I think worthy of some serious consideration.
You can approach this issue in several ways. If you adopt a mindset that we must stop predatory companies, fleecing the vulnerable, then you’ll soon discover that a crap ton of other businesses, other than gaming fall into such a category and use such a financial model.
Or you can take a total free market approach and simply declare that everyone is responsible for their own actions etc.
Blame who you want, curse who you want, vilify who you want. It makes precious little difference and those raking in the wealth will simply laugh in your face. Unless you are prepared to lobby the regulatory authorities, actively boycott these games (and encourage others to do so) or engage in some other form of direct action the status quo will remain.
I don’t trust free markets to get anything right, so that’s out. I also don’t think these companies are necessarily evil because they try to make as much profit as possible. I do feel that these games are highly predatory, however, and I think there needs to be some serious consideration as to their addictiveness, as well as their availability to kids, teens, and other individuals who are less aware of what they are getting into and potentially hooked on.
“Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to make Free-To-Play apps. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nano angstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. HATE.” – Kim Kardashian after the release of ‘Kim Kardashia: Hollywood’.