You know, everytime I see 'FarmVille' typed on this webpage, resting in my peripheral vision, all I notice is 'F...V.ll.,' which makes me think there's a reference to Final Fantasy VII somewhere in the article I keep overlooking.
A View From the Road: FarmVille Isn't Going Away
- Thread starter John Funk
- Start date
It does seem to be all that some people know abouyt gaming.
I really dont see whty its so popular, but, that is prolly because I am not part of the markert, I can see how people can get into it though...Through the social networks it seems anythin is possible.
best we can do is try and ingore it, hoping it goes away!
I really dont see whty its so popular, but, that is prolly because I am not part of the markert, I can see how people can get into it though...Through the social networks it seems anythin is possible.
best we can do is try and ingore it, hoping it goes away!
You made me laugh out loud! At work! Probably because I tried to do something like that a few years back and I can tell you exactly why it's not a "breeze":Glademaster said:
1. Controller complexity/unfamiliarity. Hitting the right bumper and wondering why your gun isn't firing. Or spamming A instead of X trying to reload.
2. Separate move and look controls.
3. Time pressure. You are being shot! Get out of getting shot! You are going to dieeee! Aaaaaaaaaaaah! You are not in your best level-headed thoughtful state.
4. A visually nondescript scene. Experienced gamers are familiar with the general layout of a combat zone in games, what cover looks like, how to quickly scan a scene or where enemies are likely to be hidden. New gamers, not so much.
I have many memories of playing Halo and trying to figure out how I got stuck in a nondescript box because I couldn't see anything no matter how I tried to move or spin the camera. When it turns out I was just looking at the floor. Usually I figured this out just in time to look up before dying.
I don't want to see FarmVille go away. As long as that piece of crap exists, and as long as people play it, they can't criticize me for being a gamer when they spend up to 8 hours playing that crap.
Facebook won't dethrone Google until the mouth-breathing computer-illiterates can actually FIND Facebook without using Google ala the ReadWriteWeb fiasco of a couple months back. Remember that? If there was ever a single event in human history that made me lose all my remaining faith in humanity, that was it.
That's as may be Funk, but lots of things are significant and yet go unremarked upon by specialist gaming websites, and a world significantly shaped by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga is one I dread with every fiber of my being egad, and judging by the fact you felt this article was needed, I'm not really in the minority here.
Why do we prefer to cover our ears and shout "La la la I can't hear you la la la"? Zynga doesn't make games, that's why. Somebody is going to take umbrage with that (possibly you), but allow me to elaborate - what they make are games in the sense that a slot machine is a game. Clearly, its not - it's a system designed to make you pull a lever over and over in the hopes of randomly receiving a reward, engineered as such precisely to make you hopelessly addicted until you give it all your money. Likewise, when you 'play' the lottery you are not actually playing a game (unless you want to qualify "give the government all your money because you suck at math" as a game).
A lot of people don't like MMOs because they all resort to those sorts of tactics to keep their players paying forever and ever, but generally there's still some gameplay layered over top the Machiavellian addiction-triggering underpinnings - the good MMOs can actually muster up some fun that isn't just your brain being rewired to associate your shiny new addiction with happiness. The titles Zynga releases are what you get when you strip all those 'extraneous' trappings of gameplay away, leaving only the slot machine that punishes you when you try to stop pulling its handle.
They aren't even slightly fun, but they are very addictive, so it doesn't matter that they're criminally boring and lack any real entertainment value - pulling a damn lever over and over is every bit as unfun and yet there's Vegas. The ridiculous success of these thinly disguised digital slot machines is a sign we should be deeply afraid for the future of games development.
Because those aren't games, and treating Zynga as if they were a legitimate purveyor of entertainment software is an insult to developers of casual games everywhere.
Why do we prefer to cover our ears and shout "La la la I can't hear you la la la"? Zynga doesn't make games, that's why. Somebody is going to take umbrage with that (possibly you), but allow me to elaborate - what they make are games in the sense that a slot machine is a game. Clearly, its not - it's a system designed to make you pull a lever over and over in the hopes of randomly receiving a reward, engineered as such precisely to make you hopelessly addicted until you give it all your money. Likewise, when you 'play' the lottery you are not actually playing a game (unless you want to qualify "give the government all your money because you suck at math" as a game).
A lot of people don't like MMOs because they all resort to those sorts of tactics to keep their players paying forever and ever, but generally there's still some gameplay layered over top the Machiavellian addiction-triggering underpinnings - the good MMOs can actually muster up some fun that isn't just your brain being rewired to associate your shiny new addiction with happiness. The titles Zynga releases are what you get when you strip all those 'extraneous' trappings of gameplay away, leaving only the slot machine that punishes you when you try to stop pulling its handle.
They aren't even slightly fun, but they are very addictive, so it doesn't matter that they're criminally boring and lack any real entertainment value - pulling a damn lever over and over is every bit as unfun and yet there's Vegas. The ridiculous success of these thinly disguised digital slot machines is a sign we should be deeply afraid for the future of games development.
Because those aren't games, and treating Zynga as if they were a legitimate purveyor of entertainment software is an insult to developers of casual games everywhere.
more stuff about Zynga, huh? I am starting to agree with the "you where paid off by Zynga" crowd. first they won all but the round against VALVe, and even then you where banning VALve voters for things that Zynga people did and got away with, then there where about six articles about facebook and farmviile, your ganging up on people for saying things you don't like(seriously, three mods vs one guy?), and now your yelling at us in the first part of your articles. you guys really aren't making yourselves look good with this, just getting the people that actually stayed through the madness and the people that have been around a while mad at you.
Ok, we get it already...
Now what's that big gaming news about farmville you wanted us to pay attention? Is it some secret scoop on farmville 2?, zinga is creating a new division (bazzinga!) that will be managing a new bold spinoff of the franchise?
Or is it farmville because farmville?
I don't know man, I've seen hundreds of articles talking about how relevant are facebook, tweeter, farmville or are or how many users do they move each day and shit like that, but I think I can count with my right all of the actually interesting articles (and that's to give it the benefit of the doubt) about them.
Plus wasn't something VERY similar to this coverd in the last "experienced points"? (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/7373-Experienced-Points-Zynga-and-the-Rise-of-the-New-Gamer)
Now what's that big gaming news about farmville you wanted us to pay attention? Is it some secret scoop on farmville 2?, zinga is creating a new division (bazzinga!) that will be managing a new bold spinoff of the franchise?
Or is it farmville because farmville?
I don't know man, I've seen hundreds of articles talking about how relevant are facebook, tweeter, farmville or are or how many users do they move each day and shit like that, but I think I can count with my right all of the actually interesting articles (and that's to give it the benefit of the doubt) about them.
Plus wasn't something VERY similar to this coverd in the last "experienced points"? (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/7373-Experienced-Points-Zynga-and-the-Rise-of-the-New-Gamer)
What he said. The fact of the matter is that, as gamers, we simply take for granted the skills we've acquired over the years and we forget what these would look like to someone not familiar with system's we've come to accept as fundamental.John Funk said:
I mean I don't know about you guys, but I've been playing games in some capacity or another since I was six years old. You teach a kid multiple languages at that age and they'll pick them all up more often then not, but you try to teach me Japanese now and I just can't retain it. Does that make me an idiot? No, it's fucking hard!
This point became very clear to me back when I played WoW alot, and was still living with my parents. Now my Dad and I have an interesting relationship. On some levels, we see eye to eye. On others...I don't think he has ANY idea what to make of me, but he does try. Gaming is one example.
So I was playing WoW a bit, and spending alot of time with it. So one night my Dad comes in and asks me to tell him what it's all about. To his credit, he sat there and absorbed everything I threw at him,and perhaps owing to my job at the time of explaining complicated computer programs to consumer users, it took on a very tutorial mindset.
And he actually started to think it looked really cool. I showed him a few things, talked about the different classes and how they balanced each other out. In particular the look on his face as we rode the tram underground from Stormwind to Ironforge, and then went back via Gryphon was priceless. He got into it.
THEN...I explained that to play, everyone had to sign up for an account which you paid monthly for.
Yeah, and that's when I lost him.
See at that point, it's a basic understanding of games that you pay monthly fees for MMO's. It's a persistent online gaming experience so unlike a single player game, this is the model it works off of. To him, that was absolutely ridiculous, (and there are days where I don't necessarily disagree with him I gottta tell ya)
The fact of the matter, gaming is not a bike. To insist that anyone who can't just pick up a controller day one and beat Call of Duty is an idiot, is at best unrealistic, and at worst, insulting.
I agree that gaming is quite complex to get into nowadays. If you doubt it, give a PS3 or 360 controller to a non-gamer and ask them to hold it. If they manage to correctly put their fingers over the shoulder buttons, I shall eat my hat. And I love my hat. Shamus made a good point about no one who wasn't into gaming knowing where the hell the R3 and L3 buttons were, and since I, a gamer since the N64, took some time to figure out what they were, I know what he's talking about. This matches into some other article I read some time before that essentially said, 'people want to game, but no one helps them get into it'. And since modern game design pretty is pretty much addicted to that complexity, there's no easy way out of this dilemma.
The problem here is a 'no true scotsman' problem. Someone mentioned up there that FarmVille is not a game in the same way that slot machines and lotteries are not games. But if you define a game as 'an activity in which you perform an action that, depending on skill, luck or a combination of both, may or may not yield a personally positive result' then you've created a definition that covers both of those. Likewise, a fan of books might say that the Twilight series aren't real books, but they are words on paper meant to convey a story. Plenty of music fans will say heavy metal isn't music, but it's a series of sounds that follows an internal harmony. So on, so on, so forth, so forth. But the most important part here is that, to the person enjoying the medium, it is whatever it claims to be - a Twilight reader considers it a book, a death metal fan considers it music, and a FarmVille player considers it a game. The discussion ought to stop there.
I doubt Zynga would draw this much ire if they had made a simple RTS game for Facebook. So for me the problem gamers have with Zynga is not so much that it's not a real game but that it's a bad game, i.e. it's poorly designed, and it's aimed at non-gamers so they can't know it. But if someone created a better, more engaging version of FarmVille, using the lessons three decades of game design taught us, it would be better than it and it would eventually surpass it. Like it or not, Zynga is a trailblazer, and is taking advantadge of it, but trailblazers are eventually surpassed by imitators.
It doesn't mean that we have to like it. I abhor reality shows, but that doesn't mean I'm going to pretend they are not real TV shows. I happen to prefer a well-crafted lie to a boring truth, but if the majority of people happen to disagree with me, that's their problem.
Lastly, if you like heavy metal and is angry that I compared it to Twilight, think of how angry Twilight fans are that I compared it to heavy metal.
The problem here is a 'no true scotsman' problem. Someone mentioned up there that FarmVille is not a game in the same way that slot machines and lotteries are not games. But if you define a game as 'an activity in which you perform an action that, depending on skill, luck or a combination of both, may or may not yield a personally positive result' then you've created a definition that covers both of those. Likewise, a fan of books might say that the Twilight series aren't real books, but they are words on paper meant to convey a story. Plenty of music fans will say heavy metal isn't music, but it's a series of sounds that follows an internal harmony. So on, so on, so forth, so forth. But the most important part here is that, to the person enjoying the medium, it is whatever it claims to be - a Twilight reader considers it a book, a death metal fan considers it music, and a FarmVille player considers it a game. The discussion ought to stop there.
I doubt Zynga would draw this much ire if they had made a simple RTS game for Facebook. So for me the problem gamers have with Zynga is not so much that it's not a real game but that it's a bad game, i.e. it's poorly designed, and it's aimed at non-gamers so they can't know it. But if someone created a better, more engaging version of FarmVille, using the lessons three decades of game design taught us, it would be better than it and it would eventually surpass it. Like it or not, Zynga is a trailblazer, and is taking advantadge of it, but trailblazers are eventually surpassed by imitators.
It doesn't mean that we have to like it. I abhor reality shows, but that doesn't mean I'm going to pretend they are not real TV shows. I happen to prefer a well-crafted lie to a boring truth, but if the majority of people happen to disagree with me, that's their problem.
Lastly, if you like heavy metal and is angry that I compared it to Twilight, think of how angry Twilight fans are that I compared it to heavy metal.
comparing the 60 million Wiis and the 60 million farmville players doesn't really work out. Each and every one of those Wiis raked in 200$ each, the farmville players? Not as much.
Same with 10 million MW2 sales.
Once FV starts charging 50$ a farm, we'll see who's talking. Call it Farmville 2 and 3 and all numbers subsequent when you open a new farm.
Same with 10 million MW2 sales.
Once FV starts charging 50$ a farm, we'll see who's talking. Call it Farmville 2 and 3 and all numbers subsequent when you open a new farm.
Indeed, lol.Aurora219 said:
Wow, i missed that article entirely. And... quite frankly... it's a bit misinformed. The strength of Zynga's and other social developers games isn't the casual aspect, no, social gaming is a whole beast altogether. Casual gaming, as the Wii's first titles, can actually expand their gamers into upper tiers of gaming. Nintendo decided to go back to basics to fetch the lower entry point gamers that had been neglected by the current gen wave of gaming, and ascend them upwards from there (again, i must link to this article [http://malstrom.50webs.com/birdman.html] that someone posted during MM). Social gaming, however, is a dead end in this aspect, it will not evolve in the direction of complexity (or at least, not for a large number of years), because the entry-point is even lower than the Wii's, and they have no intention of disrupting the industry, they got themselves a whole different market altogether, and a whole new and more profitable platform.SilverKyo said:
It was a bit tricky to follow, yes, but i understood your point. History is very cyclical, and some aspects are repeated in different dressings time and time again. In fact, yes, i believe the biggest limitation for the phenomenon is it's potential to swallow itself whole. Given the particular platform, and the aspect of appealing to the lowest common denominator for broader appeal, the more hype is generate and developers step into the fray, the more likely it is for a single game, that has the metrics-driven formula more perfected to polarize the bulk of the market, leaving other games and developers without decent profit. But i won't pull a Nostradamus and predict it, we'll just have to wait and see how it evolves.Therumancer said:*Shrugs*
I'm one of those that thinks Zynga gets too much attention, and I think those numbers are very deceptive. Right now Zynga has the advantage of being the first ones on scene using this method to sell advertising. I believe (personally) that this is where most of their revenue comes from, I do not think they are making all that much money off of the "cash shops" of games like Farmville or whatever despite what they might present. Still getting millions upon millions of "hits" is an impressive thing to someone who wants to sell advertising space.
The problem though is that as more people get involved in this, that audience is going to be increasingly divided, the hits in each area are going to go down, and it's not going to be all that profitable or special in the long run.
Back during the 1990s you had all those mall survey guys, which started out being fairly popular. You'd have some dude approach you, and offer you free samples of so and so product in exchange for doing a survey. It was cool for a while but then it got to the point where you had these dudes staking out pretty much every high traffic mall, and even multiple groups operating in the biggest ones. Leading to the whole "want to take a survey" joke from Animaniacs because it became hateful and annoying.
The current situation seems a lot like that where Zynga seems cool because they are the first ones doing it. They will consult and sell "Expertise" until the market is saturated
and we'll doubtlessly see companies who invest in this now collapsing as the market becomes divided and the novelty wears out. We're looking at what amounts to a fad, that like all fads seems "massive" and like it will go on forever. I don't object to Zynga and these "social media" games getting some coverage, but I think it's being taken waaay too seriously.
Besides, we've more or less been here before. Back before the internet became what it is now, we had these things called "Bulletin Board Systems" or BBSes. People used to run them out of their houses, and there were these things called "Echos" which were the social networking sites of their day where BBS systems would share message boards by periodically uploading and downloading information to people running "hub" systems.
On BBS systems you had these "Door Games" which were very simple games where while logged in you could do stuff have your progress saved, and then other people logging into the same BBS could do the same thing, and at the end of the day it would process results. Some games would work off of hubs and send packets out so people on multiple boards could play together and such. Less advanced and "purdy", but pretty much the same exact thing that you see here. A few people got the idea that this was the way of the future because of all the people that could be reached, and a few lucky fellows made apparently a small fortune through registration fees with some of the first successful games. Tons of people jumped on the bandwagon for these games used by "casual" BBS users and in the end it simply went nowhere except for the first few guys. Interestingly some of you might remember a game called "Double Daggers" by "Prince Desty", in the credits it has "Additional Ideas and Concepts by Therumancer" (that is me). Never went anywhere, but when I was a kid I was pretty into the whole BBS thing and thought Door Games were da bomb.
This is on a larger scale, but fundementally the same thing, and will doubtlessly end the same way. I find it somewhat ironic because it seems that while time goes on, the same basic events re-occur. Right now we have this Zynga thing, and at the same time we've got people trying to bring back Interactive movies of the sort that were tried around the advent of CD RoM tech for PCs.
I'm probably not explaining/articulating myself well, but basically I doubt think this is a big deal. Indeed I think it's only become one because of all the hype surrounding it.
I could be wrong, but in a few years I'll imagine some fortunes will be squandered by people trying to emulate Zyga. You'll have dozens if not hundreds of "social network games" for casual people, many of which will become ghost towns, constantly fighting to get someone to buy advertising space.
Ironically I also suspect that there will be a couple of fairly successful games but they will succeed by using the online social platforms, while not being all that "casual". I look at things like say "Trade Wars" and other similar games for the BBS systems which seemed to be the most enduring of the crop once the mad rush died out, and people finally realized they weren't going to make money by programming ANSI graphics.
It is a bit irrational, but not fully, i believe. Of course, it wouldn't happen suddenly, but it could happen naturally and progressively, over the course of a few years. First a small team is assigned to transfer a AAA ip to the platform (that's already happening, actually, Civ and The Witcher are stepping in). If this works out, more resources and manpower can be diverted as a following step. The result would be AAA titles dropping in quality and frequency, as more developers also step in. Of course, this is speculation, and a myriad of scenarios can limit this: the one i mentioned above (saturation), indie developers evolving to fill in the gaps left in the traditional market, some developers failing step 1 and shifting back to the status quo, etc. But i believe it's only natural (and a bit justifiable) for some traditional gamers to fear the following years as a turbulent, paradigm-shifting period. PC fps's for instance, never recovered from the Halo blow. And while if that's a good or a bad thing is a matter of opinion, it is true that some gamers (myself included) have a hard time finding a likable fps nowadays. "So?", some could ask? Well, it's true, there's no denying certain facts, but one has the right to oppose change one does not like, does one not?Gaias said:
This theory could work out, if it wasn't for a few pesky but relevant little details: first, the gap is too big. Social games are extremely simple for accessibility, even when compared to Runescape, Dofus, browers MMO's, the Wii, etc. The gap is still a bit large to bridge easily. During the course of MM, i even tried to politely tell a few Zynga fans to try kongregate, armor games, etc, and they simply didn't want to. Second, they won't do anything to bridge that gap, or at least not much in a foreseeable future. Why? Because metrics take precedence in game design decisions, and every bit of complexity they put in has to be carefully weighed not to become an entrance barrier. Plus, they have a much more effective mechanism to generate user numbers than actually making the games interesting: your friends list, their respective friends lists, and so forth, ad infinitum. Well, actually not infinitum, six steps at an ideal setting, if you consider the Six degrees of separation [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation] theory. So you see, this aspect provides a much much bigger potential for growth than the actual quality of the game and advertisement.Delock said:
As for your final paragraph, (although this is a tad off-topic), it stops once people see their privacy threatened. It's already happening with people suing Google and stuff of the sort. And it will only get worse: Google is a behemoth with a lot of information on a lot of people, Facebook is following closely, and spreading rapidly with fconnect, and the trend of stateless and cloud computing (like Chrome OS and OnLive). It's not hard to imagine a Big Brother-esque future where large groups control a lot of valuable info, and the average joe has little control over his own data, having only terminals with web access. It's not like this is being imposed, but it's pretty much mandatory for the sake of competitiveness (a lot of professional have to be on facebook, twitter, blogger and linkedin to remain competitive). Again, speculation, and a lot of factors can limit this, but it's not out of the equation.
This, i commend you for this post, really. Behavioral conditioning, coupled with a viral progression of users that functions like a pyramid scheme or multi-level marketing. It's behavioral Psychology at it's most profitably refined formula.Gildan Bladeborn said:
________________________________________________
Original post: we know they are relevant to the industry, and we know they're here to stay. We know social networking is progressing rapidly, and social gaming trailing along with it. We know the complexity and monetary entry barrier is lower (that's the point, isn't it?). We know Nintendo is making a huge success with some similar points, but like i explained alreay, it's a different beast altogether. Yes, the numbers Zynga pull are staggering, but they're not surprising and are explained by all the points made previously by yourself. And yes, we know that traditional developers are watching this phenomenon closely, that's precisely one of the aspects we don't like. And yes, we know that facebook and farmville are replaceable by something similar. And finally yes, there are relevant things happening in the social media space, and we don't think they're irrelevant, we simply think they're not positive and would prefer them not to be relevant.
tldr version: We know. We just don't like it. And we have the right not to like, and the right to be vocal about it, for we are trying to preserve not only our gaming status quo, but the enlightenment of humanity as a whole!
Gaaaah... *gasps for air*
There, it's done
Haven't I read this article before? Seriously, it seems every time I glance down at the articles section, it's something about Zynga and/or the rise of casual gaming. Maybe it's just me.
Yes, I know FarmVille isn't going away, and I don't mind because I never had a problem with its existence to begin with. I don't know anybody who still cares about that sort of thing.
Yes, I know FarmVille isn't going away, and I don't mind because I never had a problem with its existence to begin with. I don't know anybody who still cares about that sort of thing.
I still think Zynga's numbers are grossly inflated - and that the hours invested in it are minimal compared to the time invested in "core" and "casual" games that have some element of skill or challenge to them (Bejewelled counts). It's a rapid series of clicks and then closed for the majority of users, and once-off idle dabbling for others. The numbers add up for Zynga's ad revenue, but who is actually then acting on those ads? How far does the long tail of a few blinking animations reach?
Facebook and other social media platforms for games do have a purpose and will last, but ungames like Farmville (where there is no challenge, no skill, no objective and nowhere to go but up) will gradually lose popularity over time and be superseded by new, generations of shiny toys with minimal time and monetary investment, just as Farmville shoved aside its many, many predecessors.
TL;DR: A lot of people play FarmVille, but Farmville itself doesn't matter. The trend does, but its direct value is questionable and its indirect value is even MORE questionable.
Facebook and other social media platforms for games do have a purpose and will last, but ungames like Farmville (where there is no challenge, no skill, no objective and nowhere to go but up) will gradually lose popularity over time and be superseded by new, generations of shiny toys with minimal time and monetary investment, just as Farmville shoved aside its many, many predecessors.
TL;DR: A lot of people play FarmVille, but Farmville itself doesn't matter. The trend does, but its direct value is questionable and its indirect value is even MORE questionable.
John's right, folks. Gaming IS a hard hobby to get into.
Doesn't anyone here recall when they played their first game? How they had to first learn all the buttons, then what the buttons did, then the way in which these interacted with the movements on screen? Then finally, learn to know the buttons by touch, so that they could play without looking down at the controller and finally getting to work?
And that was back when controllers had as few as 6 buttons. Now they can have 15, or in the case of PC gaming, a Hell of a lot more. Now that might sound like an easy task because many of you have had ten years or more to get into gaming (like I have) and started on the NES or SNES or Genesis when there was only 10 or less buttons to learn, with many games using just one button plus the D pad. People starting out today don't have that luxury. Many are thrown straight into 3D landscapes and control without first learning how to not die immediately in Mario Bros.
Non-gamers aren't stupid, they simply haven't had it as easy as most of us core gamers. It's like any situation where you have knowledge and another person does not - they aren't stupid just because they don't know. They have different skills to you and deserve your respect and patience. Zynga provided a single button interface that can be played without even using a keyboard, and potentially for free. Looking down on what they have achieved by doing so is folly.
Doesn't anyone here recall when they played their first game? How they had to first learn all the buttons, then what the buttons did, then the way in which these interacted with the movements on screen? Then finally, learn to know the buttons by touch, so that they could play without looking down at the controller and finally getting to work?
And that was back when controllers had as few as 6 buttons. Now they can have 15, or in the case of PC gaming, a Hell of a lot more. Now that might sound like an easy task because many of you have had ten years or more to get into gaming (like I have) and started on the NES or SNES or Genesis when there was only 10 or less buttons to learn, with many games using just one button plus the D pad. People starting out today don't have that luxury. Many are thrown straight into 3D landscapes and control without first learning how to not die immediately in Mario Bros.
Non-gamers aren't stupid, they simply haven't had it as easy as most of us core gamers. It's like any situation where you have knowledge and another person does not - they aren't stupid just because they don't know. They have different skills to you and deserve your respect and patience. Zynga provided a single button interface that can be played without even using a keyboard, and potentially for free. Looking down on what they have achieved by doing so is folly.