FBI collars exec who allegedly tried to nick secrets of game fronted by babe Kate Upton A former games company executive, who allegedly tried to steal trade secrets from his old bosses and flee to China, has been arrested and charged by the FBI. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) claims Jing Zeng, formerly the director of global infrastructure at Machine Zone, stole confidential information from the games maker, …
Yeah, but thanks to Farmville it is a scam that is proven to work.
All you need is to gag, bind and blindfold your conscience in the basement before embarking on such a career knowing you could have made an actual, fun game and instead chose to get rich.
Well, you can't really blame the game makers. If there were only 10 people on this ball of mud willing to pay (and pay, and pay) to play, then this kind of gaming paradigm wouldn't be all that successful.
Because a lot of people have been trained to think that these things aren't worth anything, so why pay for a game?
Because the traditional games developers have found it very hard to monetise social and mobile platforms, so they don't develop decent games for them.
Because the vast majority of gamers are casual players who don't want to invest in a 'real' game.
Because Kate Upton.
Because sadly we're all a bunch of slightly evolved apes and we don't place much value on quality entertainment over a quick fix.
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Be realistic. Ms Upton's line of work is being objectified and she is quite good at it. Her appearance in objectifying mags like Maxim and SI's swimsuit issue makes me think she is OK with it and it's her body. In fact, I suspect she would think it was good publicity to be called a babe.
Now if this was an article where the female subject was the lead dev for the game and El Reg called her a babe, then yes, that would be more than a tad sexist.
I have a mild Clash of Clans obsession and I think its really very balanced, and a great example of how these kinds of games can work. There is nothing in the game you have to pay for, as you get given small amounts each week for free of the in-game currency that you can also buy. The fun of the game is slowly making your way up the levels and while splashing the cash can speed things a little, you'll never notice the difference when playing between the people who have spent a bit of cash and those that haven't.
To be honest, you need a while playing to learn it well and the game penalises you to a significant extent you if you rush one aspect far ahead of the others. The people you can tell have splashed a lot of cash are usually really bad at the game, and have hugely unbalanced bases which make them easy and well worth attacking.
As to how much I've spent? About £15 through 18 months of playing, which I think is really very good value if I think of how much the latest Call of Duty cost me. I'm on level 9 of 10 so pretty far through (TH9, level 20 heros, max troops and part level 10 and part level 9 walls for anyone that plays it)
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