Hello and welcome to Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column the 33rd of its kind. Coming to you from Nova Scotia Canada where we are about to have Christmas in a couple of weeks. I hope it’s the same where you are. I get confused with the time difference sometimes.
Theme tune! (AUDIO ONLY, NATCH BUT CLICK AND GIVE IT A SPIN. GO ON. I SOMETIMES ADD RANDOM STUFF TO IT!)
I want to talk about Pay to Win games and microtransactions this week because they are involved in the big game I played this week, Which DOES involve microtransactions. And ones you can use to Pay to Win. It’s in the section for PAID PALS I am afraid so if you want to read/hear it you will have to subscribe here
but it’s more than five times the length of the free teaser, this week it is about one of the biggest games of the year and it costs you less than four quid a month – the column/podcast, not the game - which is less than a quid per podcast so that is bargain central!
Ok my attempts at getting microtransactions from you are over for this week – let’s move onto other people’s attempts at getting them!
Playing The Big Game this week got me thinking about the first time I was ever lured into the filthy world of microtransactions, With me it was the dumbest game thing ever.
Fucking Mafia Wars on Facebook.
Back in 2010, I think? From the company Zynga. One tiny step above Farmville in terms of credibility. In fact, I feel worse that it was Mafia Wars that did it for me because it was so obviously and cynically meant to take Farmville and make it more palatable to so called men like me by giving it a Mafia makeover. What a fool I was, what a damnable fool.
It was brilliantly clever. You had to build up your Mafia clan by taking on missions and/or attacking other human players. You needed energy to do missions. And health. And those got rebuilt over time. And that was where they had you by the nuts: You could pay real money for energy and health rather than having to wait. And there, in a nutshell, was where those guys were evil geniuses. You paid money so you didn’t have to wait in line. It was like those special passes at theme parks. It’s basically time travel. And that, my dear friends, is the main thing money can do in life. It can save you time. Yes, it can buy you nicer tasting food and a big house, but you mainly fill that big house with stuff that makes things easier therefore quicker.
In its defence Mafia Wars did create an intoxicating world. The storylines were decent, the graphics were perfect and the timing they had with creating new missions and locations that took you from your starting location of New York and Chicago to places like Mexico and London was fiendishly perfect. Just as you were thinking to yourself, “This really is a load of boring shite. I’m effectively playing a spreadsheet with pretty pictures!” BAM! They would launch a new thing for you to grind for. So, I dropped coin for it. Real coin. As an adult father of three kids. What a muppet.
(PIC - Mafia Wars. Jeez. I broke out into a cold sweat just looking at this screenshot)
I thought at one point Zynga were going to take over the world. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Elon Musk was part of them back then. But no. Mafia Wars 2 got shut down just over a year after it was released. EA sued them for copying their game The Ville from The Sims. Zynga shut down most of their games and were even accused of insider trading. All of this around that 2011/2012 period if memory serves me. I went online to find out where they were now, expecting a dusty corpse of what once was.
Nope.
Apparently Take 2 bought them for 12.7 billion dollars in May of this year, showing this is one war Zynga most definitely won.
And on that financially triumphant bombshell – thanks for reading And or listening to the Free Teaser part of Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column this week – until the next keep it little keep it old keep it purple.
Dominik's Little Old Purple Column #33 FREE TEASER