Scandals of the Week #1

Why users have announced a boycott of Kabam, Zynga is suspected of cheating ratings, and in Russia it is necessary to develop games about Putin – read our article about scandals in the gaming industry.

The fuss around Kabam

Hardcore players don’t like free-to-play. Many of them, even in mobile games, prefer to farm for hours, instead of paying any amount that will save them time and often nerves. Last week, the hatred of monetization turned into a full-fledged riot.

After, according to Kabam, a minor update of the Dragons of Atlantis game, some players announced a boycott of the game, accusing the American company of unfairly changing monetization. Moreover, a special protest group was created on Facebook, which included more than 3.5 thousand users.

All of them were outraged by the serious tightening of monetization: the developers introduced a fixed maximum for one of the most important resources – Blue Energy, which is spent on military needs. Non-paying players are faced with the fact that when they return to the game, their “blue energy” runs out too quickly. Paying players can quickly make up for it for real money, and the rest have to “suck the paw”.

As a result, the rebels announced that they would not return to Dragons of Atlantis until it became possible to do without IAP in the game. Kabam stated that the changes in mechanics were due to the fact that some users resorted to third-party programs to gain an advantage over other players, and refused to change anything.

Dragons of Atlantis, which was released on Facebook four years ago (and this summer on iOS and Android), is still in beta. However, this did not prevent her from gaining more than 1 million likes on the social network. Her MAU, in turn, is more than 100 thousand on Facebook.

Cheating points

The second scandal broke out in connection with CastleVille Legends, launched by Zynga in early August. Marketers of the game were suspected of cheating ratings on the American store.

Most of the 250 five-star ratings for the game were delivered to the US App Store by those users who had previously rated only Zynga games or reviewed something in the store for the first time.

Given the recent changes in the App Store (recall that applications with a higher rating are now more likely to get to the top of the top), it seemed very suspicious to the unknown who reported their guesses to Pocket Gamer. Especially against the background of a relatively small number of assessments in other regions.

For our part, this does not seem surprising to us. As one of the readers of Pocket Gamer noted, Zynga is a big company. She is quite capable of asking her employees to help promote a new project.

Politics makes sense

There is such a series of applications – Talking Tom. Projects coming out under this brand can hardly be called games. Rather, a kind of form of entertainment.

The meaning is as follows: there is a cat on the screen, you can scold him, stroke him, give him milk. It is implied that the user gets pleasure from this. Considering that in three years the games of the series have been said more than 1 billion times, it probably is.

One of the fans of Talking Tom is Pavel Didenko, who produces this kind of application, but already about media characters. These are usually very low-cost free projects with a lot of advertising.

It is difficult for us to judge whether such a scheme works well. High-quality games with full monetization definitely earn more. However, Pavel’s latest game Talking Putin 2, released on the App Store last week, ended up in the top. The project, where you can put a pink hat on Putin, is now in third place in the Russian gaming chart of free apps.

Such a local scandal.

We mean that in our home market, as “Democracy” from NSMedia and Prosto Games perfectly showed at the time, you can rise to the top by touching on a political topic in the game. Perhaps it will be a local success, but games are now earning well in the Russian App Store (up to $ 13 thousand per day). It’s just not clear why developers so rarely look in this direction?