A one trick pony
For those daft enough to buy shares into this (cough) wonderfully nice company, more fool you.
More than 13 per cent of Candy Crush game-maker King Digital's stock price was wiped off overnight – after it admitted players of its wildly popular mobile app were spending less and less money. King’s results for Q1 2014, the quarter in which it launched its rather poor market debut, revealed a couple of wobbles: net profit …
Probably not a great deal for Joe Public but probably resulted in some games developers leaving, although they probably account for a relatively small portion of Candy Crush's user base anyway.
King's fortunes will continue to slide as long as they are a one trick pony. All of their games are just cheap re-skins of Candy Crush, that cow isn't going to be milkable for ever...
It's less accurate to say "Stuck? Buy a power-up, plus some levels are almost impossible" than it is to say "Some levels are almost impossible unless and until you use a power-up". I've been stuck on some levels for days, then used a power-up I got from the Wheel and mysteriously it becomes much easier on following attempts. Dreamworld levels are especially bad for this; you get nailed again and again by huge numbers of candies from one side of the balance dropping and none from the other, then you use a power-up and suddenly you stop having three straight yellows drop to tip the owl off and you start getting neutral colours instead.
you get nailed again and again by huge numbers of candies from one side of the balance
So there's an imbalance in the force,
suddenly you stop having three straight yellows drop to tip the owl off
This is obviously some sort of bizarre sexual perversion. I mean I've heard of dogging, but tipping owls?
and you start getting neutral colours instead.
And after the rumpy-pumpy comes inevitable decorating...
It's possible there's more to this game than I previously thought...
First time I played it the game it was incredibly easy. I beat my friend's high score on most levels (and she'd been playing for quite a while). I remember thinking "she's not very good at this". When I got stuck, I went back to beginning and the levels were much more difficult the second time around.
I guess if you're trying to hook people into your pointless game, you want them to think they're really good at it.
I can see it now, when you are playing, all of a sudden this bubble appears, bursts, and the words:
You Lose Sucker appear on the screen.
Immediately hit the in-app purchase button for a reload to try again.
I hate to tell you, but it is a suckers' bet.
I wonder what the creators of such amazing concepts as 'shooting bubbles against same colored bubbles' and 'swapping things around to create lines of same' have in store for us now?
Maybe they'll do something like 'oddly shaped bricks falling down that you have to align' and the bricks can be made of soda cans! Surely a revolutionary concept.
Oh and if things are looking bad maybe they can add the option to buy the specific brick you need!
You start, you get momentum, you thrive, and then when at the top, you go IPO... What do you think happens then? Well, you're out a year too late!
Facebook did the same error. Or should I say, the investors who jumped on the IPO did that same error...
The internet and the mobile world is moving fast. Anyone here still have that 3~4 year old "smart" Windows CE phone in their pocket? Well, 3~4 years in an eternity. Once you get all the whole world in your boat (basically what Facebook, Candy-Crush and many others managed to do), who else do you go to after? Who else do you "recruit", to "jump in"? People who still haven't jumped in are likely to not "buy it" anyway. So where do you go from there? How do you get even more revenue? I seriously doubt that those late-coming IPO can fare any better that where they are at now (it's already at the top). So from there, it's either flat, or more probably down, waiting for the next bit Internet phenomenon to replace it, and join the list of "has been".
Just my humble opinion...
It's hard to admit that one is only being used as a conduit to hoover up loose cash coming from suckers and badly managed pension schemes, all driven by the relentlessly burning heat of our socialistic money printing policies.
TOOL!
Janet Yellen’s Bathtub Economics: Excuse Me Doctor—There’s Bubbles In That Tub!
As is well-known, one of Tobin’s first students to be conferred a PhD after he repaired from his Washington follies to Yale was Janet Yellen. That was 1971. If Keynesian economics in a national bathtub that was not at all a closed system was nonsense even then, it surely is nothing less than a laughingstock in the blooming, buzzing, churning global economy of today—-a place where the source of the marginal supply of labor and capital cannot even be pronounced in Washington, let alone be measured, calibrated and factored into a policy equation.
Yet here is Janet Yellen at a Congressional hearing yesterday faithfully lip-synching professor Tobin. She has not even learned any new jargon in 43 years!
“In light of the considerable degree of slack that remains in labor markets and the continuation of inflation below the (Fed’s) 2 percent objective, a high degree of monetary accommodation remains warranted,” Ms. Yellen said.
This was all by way of justifying the lunatic proposition on which the Fed is now operating: Namely, that for the 68th consecutive month it kept the money market rate at zero—a condition that has never previously occurred in all of human history. Well, outside of post-bubble Japan anyway, and its evident how well that’s working.
...clearly derivative so-called "games"
That's why akeane software industries Ltd. Have created the first original game design concept since 1869.
We call our latest beta "Floppy Bard", in which you guide an old-time playwright through a maze of evil parchments looking for his "magic" Quill.
When you help him discover his Quill he stops being "floppy" !!!
We plan to release the beta after we have trademarked the word "floppy", and patented the excessive use of quotation marks...
Buy some popcorn and a card game.
Invite some friends / neighbours over.
Have some fun.
Hold on a sec, I just have to nip down to the USPTO...
Here's a clue - games are not really expected to be fun on their own, they are just an excuse to interact with people.
Everything about "social" or mobile IT appears to be trying to drive people away from each other. Don't spend time with your friends and family, your phone has flashing lights like a slot-machine, it tells you when you are a winner and when you are a loser. You like the affirmation don't you, and you really don't want to stop when you've just been branded a loser, would you?
Free-to-play is an abomination which skews corporates to even more evil. I wouldn't play Monopoly where players could pay to weight the dice or could buy "Advance to Go" or "I win" cards. It's fine to buy games, but buy the game, not the outcome. These are slot-machines without even an offer of a jackpot. Winning and losing become merely a crutch for the insecure if the playing-field isn't level. Micro-payments are there to ensure that no player has an excess of fun they haven't paid for. It's price-adjustment on an individual level.
I've long assumed that anything on the TV isn't real or objective. Perhaps we can blame Snowden, or privacy-invading apps but now I trust very little with an internet connection. Things are just not what they seem and I just get a bit tired of dealing with the constant barrage of lies. Loyalty card sir? No thanks. Could you tell me why you need my address, mobile number, mother's maiden name and first-born son in order for me to evaluate your software? Try our real-time, cloud-based download threat prevention system! How is that different from the A/V I already have?
IT has become a circus sideshow event with mystics, snake-oil salesmen and games you'll always lose. Meh! Friday. Time to look for a new job!