Is there anything as sweet as the simple joy of caring for fictitious animals, growing fictitious crops and making fictitious money? Sounds like fun, right?
But while people on FarmVille are making fake dollars, Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, is making real ones. His company is responsible for three of the top five games played daily on Facebook including FarmVille, Mafia Wars and Cafe World.
I know a few people who play FarmVille, and they all assure me they never spend real money on the game. Real money is required to buy extra land and equipment for your farm.
But with up to 500,000 tractors being sold everyday at $20 a pop, my friends are either lying or there are a lot of other suckers out there wasting money.
I really don’t get the concept of spending money on fictitious items. Where does it get you? It’s the equivalent of spending $20 on a shirt that doesn’t fit and then hanging it in your closet and never wearing it. Who does that?
Zynga has been making a profit every month since September 2007, according to CNNmoney.com, and is likely to make more than $100 million this year. That’s a lot of tractors!
The key for Zynga is getting hooked. Once you’re committed to playing some Internet game, you become more willing to buy stuff. Pincus said people spend real money on virtual items to get to higher levels. And, since it’s a never-ending game (the designers are constantly adding new levels), people will continue spending money, making Zynga even richer.
What a weird day and age we live in where people can profit from selling make-believe items for real money. It’s almost like playing shop when we were little. One sibling would set up a store with toys or plastic food or a combination of things from around the house. The other sibling(s) would buy these items with Monopoly money, or better yet, invisible money. It was all part of the fun of playing grown-up.
Yet somehow, our generation has been conned into spending real money for these unreal items. What is going on here?
It’s even more amusing to me that we’re in the middle of this economic depression, with people worried about getting all their bills paid and buying necessities, yet people still have money to throw away on things like FarmVille.
You do realize that’s what you’re doing when you buy extra land or a tractor on FarmVille, right? Throwing money away? You might as well burn it for warmth if you want to get something out of it.
While I think it somewhat genius to figure out how to make such a large profit during trying times as these, I almost feel like people are being cheated. Obviously the people who play FarmVille and Mafia Wars know what they’re getting into and can choose whether to spend money or not, but it feels much like sheep being led to slaughter.
Someone thinks it’s all fun and games, an enjoyable way to procrastinate, until he or she finds, that over the course of six months, he or she has spent $500 to get to the latest FarmVille levels and regrets being so foolish.
They say hindsight is 20/20, but hopefully, reading this article will act as a cautionary measure for spending money on meaningless things and you won’t have to regret anything. Consider this your warning.
Hannah Kaase is a senior majoring in animal and dairy science. She can be contacted at [email protected].