Social Games are dangerous!
And so, once again, a few bad apples are used to blame an entire industry for being too addictive and too dangerous.
This time the man trotting out the moral panic is Michael Arrington, in this post condemning the offers system that games are using for monetization.
Any system with that many users is going to have scams showing up. The mobile phone industry is rife with them, but Arrington doesn’t seem to be *demanding* that the phone companies take care of the problem.
Here’s an example of where I think he crosses the line:
And some users aren’t dumb, either. For every user who gets tricked into some fake mobile subscription, there’s another who can beat the system. That’s where the legitimate advertisers, like Netflix and Blockbuster, get hit. Users sign up for a free trial with a credit card, get their game currency, then cancel the membership and start over. Netflix has a policy of only paying for a user once. But game developers use a complex set of partner chains to launder these leads and try to get them through for payment. Netflix sees an overall lowering of quality and pays less for leads. Game developers, desperate to monetize, then search for ever more questionable offers to make up the difference. In the end, the decent advertisers are out, and only the worst of the worst remain.
Blaming the developers is ridiculous. There are quite a few aggregators integrating these services, and that’s how the majority of developers are making offers available. If there is “laundering” happening out there it would be nice if Arrington had provided actual examples of them occurring.
Telling the people who put these offer into these games that they need to pay attention to what’s happening would be useful. It would also be helpful to do so without pointing fingers and threatening the entire business model with extinction because it’s become large enough to actually have real-world problems. Success has its own responsibilities
Of course it makes sense to police those offers, but Arrington’s screeching histrionics and grandstanding are yet another in an endless series of moral panics that have been levied against the game industry since Laguardia took a sledge hammer to a pinball machine in the 1930s. In the end they’re far more about getting attention for the person making them then helping the “victims”.
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