My wife has been playing this game on her phone for years, and is super sad that they are closing it down. She's probably bought a fair number of "gems" from them too, to beautify her island and trade fruit, I guess.
Some of the comments are funny, in a heartbreaking way. People really invested a lot in this game, emotionally and financially. They are wondering who is going to feed the pets they bought to live on their digital island.
The funniest/saddest thing about it is that, as a last hurrah, the maintainers of the game gave everyone 10 million gems to spend as they see fit in the remaining 2 months that the game is online. On the one hand, the players are kind of pissed off at the belated awareness that the gems they were hoarding were always fundamentally worthless, but on the other hand they want to buy the final superpet or whatever for their island before the volcano blows up.
> the players are kind of pissed off at the belated awareness that the gems they were hoarding were always fundamentally worthless
This is precisely how I "cured" my old girlfriend of Diablo 2 addiction. She would spend 12-15h a day farming items, no job no social life rarely eating anything. I got this _brilliant_ idea of helping her get the rarer items faster by downloading item generator - didnt go as planned, afair cost me something like couple of weeks of silent treatment.
Reading the comments is indeed fascinating. So many people claiming what a waste of time they now feel it was. Which is interesting, because obviously they didn’t think it was a waste of time when they played it the past few years. Did they expect the game to last forever? As a game designer/community manager, what would one do to make the shutdown of a beloved game be perceived in a somewhat positive (if bittersweet) light to the players?
This is specifically why I can't stand the idea of these "games as a service" offerings. They're entirely dependent on some corporate hosted cloud service, and corporations of course are known for long term support and sticking out temporary setbacks- oh wait no, they bail at the first sign of a game not being anything less than a meteoric success, fire the people who made it, shutter the studio then find something else to ruin.
Mind you King is the chief scumbag of the late-stage-capitalism AAA game industry scumbags, so I expect nothing less. Either a game makes all the money conceivable and some inconceivable, in which case it "meets expectations" or it gets chucked in the bin along with usually at least a few hundred people's livelihoods for good measure, while the decision makers sail away on golden parachutes to fuck up another good company with their nonsense.
But I digress, in answer to your questions:
> Did they expect the game to last forever?
Most casual gamers don't think about this stuff in this way. Hell, many of the regular kind don't either. It's the new shiny thing and everyone loves it because it's new and shiny, let's all play it for awhile until the next new shiny comes out, then we'll all go play that and forget however much money we sunk into the old one.
> As a game designer/community manager, what would one do to make the shutdown of a beloved game be perceived in a somewhat positive (if bittersweet) light to the players?
I wouldn't. I'd make a game with longevity in mind instead of just making as much money as I possibly could as quickly as possible, and avoid setting unrealistic goals so I didn't need to shut down a game hauling in what was apparently a sizeable portion of 200 million bucks a year, which should be more than enough to sustain a reasonably sized business, because I hadn't managed to corner the entire mobile game market to make some investor cudhole happy.
Sorry if the bitterness is strong here. I'm passionate about work like this and I don't care how casual a game might be, it clearly had a lot of fans, was making a lot of money, but now is shut down and 78 people are out of work because some arsehole high in a company somewhere wasn't making enough gold to put under his wings.
The whole thing is sad and stupid and unnecessary.
Some of the comments are funny, in a heartbreaking way. People really invested a lot in this game, emotionally and financially. They are wondering who is going to feed the pets they bought to live on their digital island.
The funniest/saddest thing about it is that, as a last hurrah, the maintainers of the game gave everyone 10 million gems to spend as they see fit in the remaining 2 months that the game is online. On the one hand, the players are kind of pissed off at the belated awareness that the gems they were hoarding were always fundamentally worthless, but on the other hand they want to buy the final superpet or whatever for their island before the volcano blows up.