Yup. They’re complaining about a Facebook game. No fucking shit that company will unceremoniously end support. Everyone who bought into Zuck’s vision deserves what they’re getting.
Mark Zuckerberg admits in a New Yorker profile that he mocked early Facebook users for trusting him with their personal information. A youthful indiscretion, the Facebook founder says he’s much more mature now, at the ripe age of 26.
“They trust me — dumb fucks,” says Zuckerberg in one of the instant messages,
It’s developed by Facebook, but it’s not one of those in-browser games you might be thinking of. “Meta Quest” is their VR platform. So, while the quality might be similar, you do need to buy rather expensive gear to play this particular game…
I read more, and I changed my mind. I think it’s fair to require games to state a minimum time frame of support. Like say, a year. And if they cancel the game before then, you get a full refund including microtransactions etc.
This strategy can backfire if your game gets popular enough. If both versions are counted separately and they each pass 1mil downloads and the 12 month revenue threshold then you’re paying the higher per-install fee brackets twice.
To demonstrate, let’s imagine a game like this has 4 million installs in the first year and uses the Enterprise plan for the best pricing structure.
Scenario A: single version
First 1,000,000 @ $0.00: $0
1,000,001-1,100,000 @ $0.125 : $12,500
1,100,001-1,500,000 @ $0.06 : $24,000
1,500,001-2,000,000 @ $0.02 : $10,000
2,000,001-4,000,000 @ $0.01 : $20,000
Total cost: $66,500
Scenario B: two versions priced separately, 2 mil installs each
Each one is the first four lines above, so the total cost is $46,500*2 = $93,000
In either scenario, additional installs beyond these 4 million cost $0.01 each (regardless of which game it’s installed on). There’s a fine line of staying below the annual revenue thresholds (or not too far above) where this strategy does save you money.
Unless we sell less of it than the arbitrary sales number we used a bunch of estimated pseudo math on to ultimately guess. Because if we sell less than that number we pulled out of our rectums with a faulty Excel sheet, we'll just shut the thing down immediately. Because, you know... fuck you.
If people stopped renting games developers would start selling them again. Until then, the incentive is for them to keep pulling this nonsense.
There’s a difference between a game having online elements, such as a MMO, and games that require a connection just so they can keep charging you. Even in the first case though, you should own the client, and ideally it either has a single player mode, or the developer releases the code for a basic server when they shut it down.
That’s why I stated that it should be illegal to promise product while selling a undefined time limited license, there should be a clear minimum time stated when you “buy a subscription” for (single player?) games.
Fair, stating a time-to-live when you’re paying might make some people think twice. At this point though, I think people need to just not be paying unless they get to keep it permanently. Paying for access to the online portion is fine, but the rest should keep working and you should be able to get your data out of the developer’s system.
I concur Buyer should not gain rights to product, so they should not be allowed to profit from it, but they should be able to preserve it, unless the license that you actually buy had a time limitation, but that should be clearly stated when you buy it that you only buy access to it to (at least) X amount of time like you have with online subscriptions.
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