by metonymy » Thu Jul 26, 2018 7:03 am
i rarely come out from the oekaki but this is distinctly rubbing me the wrong way.
in an absence of published official information, it's logical to assume that all options are equally weighted. this is especially true because chickensmoothie is primarily marketed and played by tweens and teens - people who have not had that much training in statistics. since there's no other official information to go off of, i think it's perfectly reasonable to say "i guess these are all weighted equally".
when you take all the banner items as weighted equally and occurring at the same frequency, the game then is distinctly on the cutthroat to exploitative side. it's a bit punishing.
this leaves interested consumers to make a couple of choices, to feel like they need to get everything or as much as possible (because chickensmoothie is, ultimately, about collecting and completionism)...
1. they can bot, an illegal action that will get their account banned.
2. they can trade other people for their tokens with c$.
3. they can grind out the banners.
i am worried because quite frankly, the second and third options can very easily become exploitative. i know chickensmoothie needs to make a buck, but this is very much on the slippery slope to really disgusting monetezation strategies that are getting lambasted in the games press every day, much less the regular press. we must remember that chickensmoothie is ultimately a game for kids, so when these practices get exploitative, a bunch of people will take interest in the exploitation of children.
-trading tokens for c$ means there is significant pressure for children and teens to spend money on microtransactions.
-grinding out the banners i would argue is actually somewhat worse. not only is that pressure now on to grind banners for your own tokens, but also to grind banners for c$.
this is creating an environment where children are being encouraged into unhealthy habits, like staying on the computer literally all day looking for banners, interrupting whatever they are doing every 15 minutes to look for banners (thus breaking concentration on whatever they need to be paying attention to, setting up their minds to expect an interruption every 15 minutes - i'm not saying CS is gonna give you ADHD, but incentivising this behavior is going to create habits, and habits are easy to get into and hard to break), waking up to look for banners, feeling pressured to spend their spending money right now on c$...
i realize the servers need money to stay on and the owners need to eat. however, if it starts to feel exploitative, it probably is. there are a lot of bad business practices, especially with regards to games meant for children, becoming industry standard. and governments all around the world are going "ENOUGH!" and getting ready to legislate harshly.
i don't want cs to be cannon fodder for this, but if people are feeling exploited, if people are feeling like a system is unfair - cs is going to be lumped in with the obviously really really really bad ones out there chasing Timmy The Whale Who Just Stole His Mommy's Credit Card For The Fifth Time, and is going to get just as much blowback.
this is compounded by the fact that in the moment, chickensmoothie has absolutely no reason to care about these exploitative practices; in fact, it's probably pretty good business right now. after all, there is probably a great demand for c$, which is pure profit in microtransactions (due to the pressure for people wanting them to trade for tokens). and the banner system is probably designed in part to be a major draw to the site and to get people refreshing it, looking for those banners, with more pageviews which means more ad revenue money. i also don't think it's a coincidence that these events usually run in the summer, where most of the player base is on vacation from school - it is to give players a compelling reason to come back to the site, and often, when they have a lot of free time (and when player involvement, through buying c$, or simply pageviews for the ads, means money).
i hasten to add, i don't know if cs is actually exploitative. i think that's largely immaterial right now. however, that's what it's coming across as, and that's what people are reacting to. ultimately such business practices are "some profit right now for not so much profit later". this leads the system to become more and more unbalanced on down the line, as they make up for the people who have left. and this leads into a vicious spiral. "hunting the whales" is not a sustainable business model for most games. right now large parts of the video game industry think it is. unfortunately, this also includes games marketed to children. if cs adopts exploitative tactics, or tactics that SEEM or FEEL exploitative, ultimately consumers will treat them as if they are exploitative, and it will damage future growth of the website significantly. (this goes double since cs is, at heart, a game for children and teens - non-adults who largely rely on things like allowances or spending money from adults. a parent is only going to hear a little bit of the whole story, and will be quick to chuck cs in the same pile as the really vile business practices out there.)
it doesn't matter if things are actually fairer than it feels and seems like, because consumers will act on the information they are given - what it feels and seems.
this is a pretty valuable feedback thread of people going - "hey. this smells rotten." and i hope the chickensmoothie admins listen to it. ultimately it's chickensmoothie inadvertently getting into a really hot-button issue at the moment, even in part. there are two choices, really - a, they address the issue officially by doing something like publishing the probabilities of what you can get in banners/fiddling those probabilities so that it reads as more fair and balanced, or b, they say it's just whining and dismiss concerns. dismissing concerns here will lead people to expect dismissal of future concerns. in other words, it is a declaration of "we know we're coming across as toxic, and we're going to just lean into it. we set out as we mean to go on - just like EA and other exploitative game developers".
that's not going to be good for community and business.
honestly, as dire as this sounds, the actual truth of "is this fair?" is largely immaterial here. there's a significant part of the player base going "this feels a lot more unfair than past years because of the number of tokens in variety and number you need to buy stuff". most consumers operate on feeling: humans are not perfectly rational consumers. and feeling like a company is out mostly for your wallet - especially when it's a company designing a game for children and young teens - is something that other people are really alarmed about right now (and rightly so). i don't want chickensmoothie to go down that dark path.
i know i may sound a bit cassandra speaking dire prophecy here, but i think this is a real "check yaself before you wreck yaself" moment. it's bigger than simple probabilities of tokens - it's a moment for chickensmoothie to reaffirm or define their corporate ethics and their relationship with consumers, and stakes for that are pretty high.
ultimately chickensmoothie is a game, and the people behind it are game devs. they're not immune to trends in the rest of gaming right now - including what trends people are tired of tolerating, and what trends will get you some harsh (and i think deserved) pushback. i don't want to see it get ugly, but i feel like dismissing concerns on this point will just make people expect future real ugliness and turn away players.
edit: i hasten to add, to reiterate: i don't think either monetizaion strategy is on its face exploitative. i think that it can pass into becoming exploitative based on how the rest of the game is designed. i understand game devs gotta eat. however, once consumers start feeling like it's exploitative - see this thread - that means they're giving valuable feedback. if this feedback is officially addressed and the game rebalanced so that the strategies are nerfed a bit, as it were, it's often a source of major consumer goodwill that actually leads to a game's increased success. (i think the warframe developers, for instance, have done very well at this.) but if the company line is that it's fine, *even if they change it later and 'repent',* it can become too late after losing consumer confidence. (if you want to see this going very badly: please see EA's star wars battlefront 2 kerfuffle. "The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes" is still a quote that lives in infamy, and many consumers have been turned off *all* EA games.) chickensmoothie is at a crossroads here in terms of their relationship to their consumers.
before anyone says that i just hate chickensmoothie and want them to fail: ....if i was actually interested in that outcome, i'd just keep quiet and enjoy the distant explosions LOL. i'm putting this two cents in because i don't think the devs and admins have perhaps realized how they've stumbled on to a larger conversation here.
right now it's pretty easy for a parent to hear their child lament about how they need to check for tokens, because it's more unfair than last year; for a parent to see how their child's tasks are disrupted by this; for a parent to then see an alarmist segment on the news about "gambling for kiddies! exploitative games coming for YOUR CHILDREN!"... and make the connection. will there always be some curmudgeons out there? of course. however cs has accidentally stumbled into a real hotbutton issue here, and i think to keep consumer confidence, the problem of "tokens seem very unfair this year" needs to be officially addressed (not just by mods - but by the admin team/devs).
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