Shuffles it off to another developer.
Continue reading “Free Reign Has Already Abandoned Outbreak: New Dawn”
Tag: Incompetent
Early Access: Magnificent 5 Is A Magnificent Bomb
From the worst developer on the planet.
Continue reading “Early Access: Magnificent 5 Is A Magnificent Bomb”
Bad Press: How The Net Got Scammed By (Yet Another) Marketing Scheme
In the world of marketing, you’re only as valuable as the number of people still talking about you. This is why Coca Cola, a company who you could only be unfamiliar with if you live in one of those tribes that hasn’t yet come into contact with outside society, spends billions (with a B) of dollars on advertising each year to remind you that Coke exists, that you should drink Coke, and that you should definitely drink Coke and not Pepsi. I recommend the caffeine free version of the standard Coke, it tastes less syrupy.
But if there’s anything that should calm your nerves in the era of mass data collection, it’s the knowledge that the bozos in marketing for the most part don’t have the faintest clue on what to do with that information. Case in point, Aldi supermarkets recently launched a marketing campaign that has been compared to that disastrous Bully Hunters program, the one that turned out to be a giant scam so Youtuber Casanova could get a free Vertagear chair to more comfortably shout homophobic slurs at tweens online.
The program is called Teatime Takedown and the concept should be familiar to those who watched the Bully Hunters con. Hand over your kid’s gamertag and Aldi will send an elite hit squad to kill your child. In the video game, that is. The whole idea is that it forces the kid to go downstairs and have dinner, presumably in silence as their parental figures sit at the dinner table browsing cooking recipes they’ll never make via Instagram on their phone while taking a few moments to complain about how playing video games rots your brain. It’s an actual program, allegedly. Sign up on the main Facebook page and Aldi will send a team of adults to fail at disciplining your child as much as you did.
To the layman, the marketing campaign may seem stupid since all it has done is generated a discussion about how the program is ridiculous, it won’t work, it relies on parents knowing their kid’s (1) gamertag and (2) what game they are playing at that moment, (3) that the game is joinable, (4) that the elite team can beat the kid, and (5) that beating him won’t simply change the situation to a family watching their dinner get cold while also listening to the muffled sound of a kid throwing a tantrum while probably throwing many, many vulgarities at the television upstairs. This followed by a lovely dinner with some kid fuming, slamming his utensils, and generally ruining everyone’s meal. And since you signed up for Aldi’s elite gamer service, we all know you’re not a competent enough parent to do anything about that either.
To the Aldi marketing team, however, this is more than just ginning up a bunch of comments about how their local Aldi is dirtier than a unkempt KMart and a poor man’s Trader Joe’s, and more about generating that free coverage. Because in the heads of incompetent marketing teams, attentive eyes means paying shoppers. In fact, the folks at Aldi did so much research that they can shoot your child dead over Xbox One, PS4, and Twitch. You just know some out of touch, 50+ year old executive threw Twitch on there. It’s a gaming platform, his granddaughter spends all day Ninja’ing the Fortnights on it or some rubbish.
As one commenter on Destructoid put it; if you want to troll your kids into not playing a game, you can always dab in front of the TV until they stop.
Normally I would fault the press for giving attention and free marketing but I’m going to hold off in this case since it’s clearly not going to go in Aldi’s favor. With virtually no positives coming from this campaign, the company has instead painted itself as hiring creepy adults to stalk children and likely be paid to be humiliated on Call of Duty by some nine year old who shoots them in the head and teabags their corpse. The concept is so incompetent that the only people outraged are streamers who are already paid to feign outrage and act like reactionary children. Ultimately, all Aldi did was shout “who farted” in a crowded elevator, bringing attention to the fact that they’ve clearly soiled themselves.
The announcement tweet has managed to amass 182 retweets and 572 likes in the course of three days, making the campaign about as viral as the Measles in a properly vaccinated society. Still, who knew that Aldi existed in the UK? You learn something new every day.
Chaturday: MoviePass In Bankruptcy Hell
I’d like to talk about MoviePass today, because MoviePass can burn in bankruptcy hell and I’m slightly looking forward to the inevitable criminal trials and convictions surrounding this sham of a business.
If you’ve somehow managed to avoid the last year of coverage regarding MoviePass, I’ll give a brief summary: MoviePass has been around for years, but they really gained public attention back in 2017. MoviePass is essentially a subscription-based debit card for watching movies. You pay $9.95 per month, and you can watch one movie per day every day of the month at virtually any theater, you simply pay with the card.
And I know what you’re thinking: A business that charges $10 per month that stands to lose, let’s check the calculator and round up our figures, upwards of $320 per month per member (I’m low-balling depending on your local ticket prices) sounds like a horrible idea.
You’d be right. As an investor, you’d only see slightly less of a return taking $100,000 and making it rain at a strip club. I say slightly less because $100,000 in MoviePass stocks bought in October would now be worth $1.85. I’m not exaggerating, that’s not a joke.
And I’m not going to dive into whether or not the folks at New York State investment bank Maxim Group, who continued to advise buying MoviePass stocks despite knowing their business plan, and despite its dropping value, performed any criminal acts. They made tons of money by advising people to buy stocks in a failing business. I’m just saying if you are an investor, take a moment to consider the judgement of a broker who sets a price target of $20 for a stock that closed at nearly half that before you take their advice on investments.
According to Business Insider, Maxim also helped Helios unload hundreds of millions of shares, pulling in lots of money and reaffirming their buy rating with a target price of triple the actual stock’s value. Maxim has never given MoviePass a sell rating, despite its value now being worth pennies.
And MoviePass wasn’t always run by the criminally incompetent, and ignoring the first five years of this product’s existence would be doing a disservice to the two people who founded it: Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt. During the first few years MoviePass had a mostly sustainable program that experimented with plans, including one in which you paid $40-50 per month for unlimited movies (1 per day) and the service reportedly had 20,000 subscribers at the end of 2016.
And then it was sold to an analytics firm, Helios and Matheson, who proceed to push the flight sticks all the way forward and crash the company within months. For those keeping track, Helios is the owner that introduced the horribly unsustainable $10 unlimited cost, with the goal of offsetting the losses by bringing in a massive amount of people and then collecting data from them to sell on the open data market. In short, Helios seriously overestimated the value of the data and underestimated the drive of the consumer to make the most of their money.
Like an elementary school class president who campaigns on the promise of soda machines in every hallway that dispense free Coca Cola, MoviePass faced the harsh reality of rolling back its perks and making a lot of people angry, or going bankrupt and making everyone angry.
MoviePass no longer allows you to see the same film multiple times, likely to cut down on card sharing. The company initially planned to increase prices to $15/month, which it reversed course on, and introduced peak pricing which was also reversed. It is limiting pass holders to three films per month, still a deal, but began removing some of the more popular films completely. This weekend began altering its available films to either be low-rated schlock (Slenderman) or inconvenient film times.
For three times over the past three weeks, MoviePass has actually run out of money and briefly gone dark. I have no idea where they are getting the cash infusions to keep the service going another week at this point, I can only assume that their list of investors overlaps with that of the Juicero, the $800 Capri-Sun juice presser.
Thankfully, the death of MoviePass can at least be attributed to one productive model: AMC has introduced its own pass which costs $20 per month and allows its viewers to see up to three films per week as opposed to MoviePass’ three films per month. It also, unlike MoviePass, allows subscribers to see IMAX and 3D films and offers concession discounts.
Oh and AMC isn’t constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, unlike MoviePass. MoviePass’ new subscription plan ($9.95 for 3 movies) goes fully into effect on September 15, and according to CEO Mitch Lowe there are still investors willing to stick around and they have confidence that the service will be able to pull itself up under this new subscription plan.
Other than that, I have no opinion on the matter.
Firefall Shut Down For 2 Weeks In December, Nobody Noticed
In my predictions for 2017, I said that Firefall would shut down and nobody would be surprised or really notice. What I didn’t realize was that Firefall had already shut down, for two weeks, back in December. And nobody outside of the community noticed. According to posts on the community forums, the servers first went down as early as December 7th and didn’t come back online until December 22nd.
Hello, we have found that our datacenter is having critical issues and all services including the website and game are impacted. We hope to have everything back online ASAP.
But don’t let that fool you, according to posts on official Facebook notice, the game is still essentially broken in many areas as features like Battle Lab do not work. The official website has not had a news update since May, it may still be impossible to level past 20 due to unfixed bugs in the main mission, and nobody seems to be present to answer emails.
So Firefall is still a bit broken, has less active Steam players than a full Battlefield 1 server, and seems to be riding the breeze on a prolonged descent while nobody is around to save the sinking ship. In the future, it will likely be known as one of the most incompetently run MMOs of all time, between the constant shift in direction and staff to the allegedly high sum spent to develop it.
(Source: MMO Bomb)
MMO Fallout 