Originally Posted By: Tasorin
This is why Social media is a ludites nightmare. I generally dislike free to play with cash shop montization, because the Companies who produce titles under this guise are not there to provide you with balance and playing field to E-compete, the title is just a vehicle to get into your wallet and micro transaction you until you finally say, 'Ok, no more money for you Trino/EA/CA and other major offender out there". This is also why I have banned "Pre Alpha Founders" funding for titles and absolutely will not give another title a red cent until they have a title in full release and I can measure the merits of giving them money based on a finished consumer product.

It was only a matter of time before some of the "contract" workers started talking openly about what is really going on behind the Companies closed doors for the general sheeple to start to digest and rethink there spending and trust habits. In all fairness though, this guy was talking about Facebook free games with API, but the data mining logic and develop to your whales still rings true for the freemium AAA PC Title market. I think this mindset really does extend to the trend in releasing 75% of a PC title on day 1 with the rest of the title being Day 1 or Month 1 DLC, which you would have traditionally received for your $59.99 AAA Title price.

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This isn’t an article about the evils of free to play manipulation to get you to spend money. This is about how we can target you, because we (and our partners) know everything about you. We know where you live, we know your income level, we know your relationships, your favorite sports teams, your political preferences. We know when you go to work, and where you work. We can target an event to start for you when we know you have a long weekend coming up. We own you.


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Time passed, Free to Play became a thing. I went from company to company. Each time, every new project became less and less about how we can do cool things, and more about how we can track and target users to get the most whales possible, boost chart position and retain users to shove as many ads on them as possible.




What I love about this is that since people started using google analytics on their website I've been telling that it gave too much information to google and friends so they should block javascript. Almost everyone thought I was crazy when I told that.
And now the problem emerge everywhere and I'm not so crazy anymore. Worse, I was late to the party: I'm sure some ad networks were doing this 4 or 5 years before google release analytics and adsense. Not at the current amount of data but they sure must have been exchanging some stats before 2000.

One solution for this would be to setup multiple computers around the world to post shit and create false but possible activity linked to your persona to fuck-up all this data gathering. But this will be a race between noise generators setup by users and filters put in place by those companies.

[Linked Image from w3.the-kgb.com][Linked Image from w3.the-kgb.com]