(no subject)

[arethinn]

news sez: We're pleased to announce the beta-launch of social games on LiveJournal. In partnership with i-Jet Media, an international game studio, we've released four new games--Farm Frenzy, Crazy Cars, Hospital, and City Gangs--with additional titles to be added. You can check out our games on the homepage or at the Games Center. For more information, check out this FAQ.

kistaro sez:

"LiveJournal has just partnered with a company not sufficiently unlike Zynga for my taste to provide micropayment-driven Facebookesque social games."

Oy vey. Great. All I can add in response, I think, is this:

Comments

[rialian]

===Erg.

[rialian]

===I do suspect that part of it is due to the steady loss of paid accounts due to the other idiocies they have committed.

===Yet another reason for having my own blog, with cross-posting ability.

[digitalsidhe]

That image comment is so wonderfully appropriate.

[charcoalfeathers]

...wow.

I big-time groaned when they added "games" to MySpace too, and that was already a crappy site. Now it's basically a really bad wanna-be clone of Facebook.

It seems like it's typically a kiss of death for any social network to start trying to be like Facebook. It somewhat defeats the purpose of it, since .. well .. there's Facebook. It's bigger and they've been doing a better job at being Facebook for 7 years now, apparently.

[arethinn]

Yeah. As silussa said, if we wanted to be on Facebook, we'd, you know, go be on Facebook.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

As long as people who aren't interested don't have to see them, I don't see what the problem is. I think such games are really dumb, but what I read makes it sound like you need to actually seek them out, in which case I don't see any reason to care one way or the other.

[arethinn]

It's not that I fear being accosted with game content (although I wouldn't be surprised if, Facebook-like, you could autopost updates about what you're doing in the game to your journal), but that I don't like what it says about what they want LJ to be, and as kistaro said, it's at least a little ominous re: privacy of personal data.

[danodea.livejournal.com]

I completely agree.

[valkyriur.livejournal.com]

As long as it doesn't effect how LJ runs and doesn't pose a security risk, the people who like them can go ahead and enjoy them. I won't be playing them, though.

[silussa.livejournal.com]

I'm not at all sure how LJ thinks these games are going to work without pretty much intruding on everyone...and this isn't Facebook. If we wanted Facebook, we'd be there.

[arethinn]

Exactly.

[dragonzuela.livejournal.com]

When I saw that on the home page, I thought it was an April Fool's joke for a second until I remembered that it is February.

[tysharina.livejournal.com]

I admit I do play some Facebook games, mostly Zynga's FrontierVille, but I did groan when I saw them in LJ's news email. I don't see why LJ needs games, it's a journalling/blogging site.