![]() ![]() Continuing to please that segment of players will be a challenge not only for PackRat, but others like it.Īlso in question is how far Facebook can be taken as a gaming platform. Almost all say they can’t pay anything for their gaming. Some are stay-at-home moms, others office workers. Many of the comments, and all of the emails I received, were from women - a group that’s often measured as the largest constituency in casual gaming. If I could multiply the number of people by an order of ten, and reduce the engagement by half, I’d obviously make that trade in a heartbeat,” he said. “We’ve had days where we did 15 million pageviews on 25,000 people. And PackRat’s player base has gone up to 81,735 players at time of this post, a gain of well over 10,000 in just a week since I talked to Williams - though it hasn’t been long enough for players who quit over the changes to show up as inactive.įor Williams, the aim isn’t to please everyone, but to achieve a delicate balance in the player base, bringing in fresh blood that won’t necessarily be as obsessed as the old players. That may be the case: Some new five-star ratings are beginning to appear from satisfied players. “But people are very intuitive, and I guarantee that a week from now, there will be people playing PackRat in ways I never imagined.” “When you do have a fan base who really loves something, they get really pissed off when you change it,” he said. Speaking with me over the phone, Williams, Alamofire’s CEO, sounded resigned to the nasty comments. ![]() “I am losing all will to continue playing.” Several players also sent me irate emails, based only on a short story I wrote when the company raised over $2 million in venture funding. “he community is really turning against them,” another notes. Not impressed at all!!,” reads a recent one. One-star ratings and negative comments flooded the application’s homepage. “he devopers should be sacked…and the game restored to it’s previous glory. Duels keeps the paying players from dominating by selling randomized grab-bags in the same vein, PackRat decided to periodically hand out random cards to non-paying members, giving anyone a chance to get the best cards in the game on a fluke.Īll the same, the existing player base flipped out when PackRat made the changes. The items then theoretically trickle down to the rest of the player base. In Duels, for example, I’ve been told some players have each paid over $1,000 for virtual goods. Small groups of cash-flush or obsessed players do most of the buying. The idea behind micro-transactions is that the game in question will remain free for most players. Players can eventually trade for these cards, but of course the ones that cost actual money also tend to be the most valuable in the game. ![]() With this system, PackRat made certain cards easily accessible by purchasing them with “tickets,” which in turn cost real-world greenbacks. So his team decided to do a major design overhaul.Īlong with the new version of the game, in which players must trade instead of steal, Alamofire added micro-transactions. It became this weird inverse growth inhibitor,” says Williams. “We’d get these comments saying, I love PackRat, but I’m always afraid this certain friend will steal from me. We could serve up millions of impressions and just make a pittance off it,” he told me in an interview.Īnother problem: The way PackRat worked, with players constantly nabbing cards from each other, was putting some people off. “People are engaged, they won’t disengage for an ad. Facebook allows click-through ads, which CEO Josh Williams briefly experimented with only to find that players weren’t interested. That left only one hurdle: Figuring out how to make money. ![]()
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