When you play a browser based game a number of things are happening. The game itself is running in a big remote computer, all your machine is doing is displaying the game and recording your inputs. It is being what is called a thin client. However in order to be a thin client for a game your computer needs to have in it the client software. So when you play a browser game like Runescape or Habbo the first thing that happens is that this client software is loaded into your machine. This is very trusting of you because anything could be included with that client software. Obviously legitimate western games like Runescape and Habbo can be trusted. But what about games from Chinese gold farmers like Evony and Empire Craft?
Malware is software that lives in your computer without your consent. Trojan horses are malware that gets into your computer by being part of something else, say the client software for a browser game. Malware can allow someone else to make use of your computer as part of a botnet, which are widely used for sending spam and other illegal activities where the real sender doesn’t want to be traceable. Or it can be used to spy on everything in your computer and everything you do with your computer and so harvest things like credit card details.
With the above in mind it is very interesting to read the comment by jonnycake on the article More about Evony: “Now I am wondering if you have any insight into how much damage the game does to your browser, and your system in general. What I thought was very flaky software appears as though it may have malicious content. In Firefox, shortcuts have been re-targeted and attempting to fill in text fields gives mixed results.”
There is this forum post from an Evony user: “Something happened this morning. Just when i logged in my account to play Evony, my Anti-Virus detected 4 trojans horse in explorer.exe. They came right when i entered my server. I am no expert about virus so I don<t know what happened there. Any help on the forum would be great as i do not want to join that server again until some admin tells me its clean. Took me 3 hours to clean my computer.”
And another one: “Hello, i would like to inform ye that your site is infested with Adaware. http://www.pctools.com/mrc/infection…e.Mostofate.E/ Every time i log onto evony this comes as part of it. I have tried it several times, deleting it THEN just opening up evony and presto its back on my Computer. Its the “monitors the users browsing activity.” that im not paticulary fond of !”
Now I am not saying that Evony has a trojan in its client software. This would take proper technical investigation. What I am saying is that the possibility of this being so is such that I would not let Evony anywhere near my computer. These people have already spammed the internet like crazy and stolen most of their game content, with behaviour like this I would not put anything past them.
You have had some success on iPhone with a relatively small number of high priced titles and have recently set up 8Ib Gorilla for lower priced titles, which is highly commendable. However given the scale of what is happening on iPhone you are barely scratching the surface.
The AppStore has been open for a year, it has seen the biggest success of any new gaming platform in the whole history of video gaming. There are now about 65,000 apps published and there have been over one and a half billion downloads, how many of these are yours? Yet you are the world’s number two game publisher.
Electronic Arts is a publisher yet most App developers are not using publishers. I suggest that you find some very good reasons to change this, and quickly. Developers should think that it is better to come to you to publish their iPhone games than it is to go directly to Apple. Here is some of what you can do:
Provide tools and libraries to speed up development. Cross platform should be essential, for Android, possibly for nGage and for other upcoming mobile platforms such as Zune.
Commission Apps so people are writing the right things. Don’t overdo this as EA doesn’t necessarily know best.
Market the Apps you publish. Most Apps fail through a lack of marketing. You can use a wide variety of low cost methods to get global recognition of everything you publish
Finance as necessary. Most Apps are home written, so need no finance. But a few do. Also some developers may prefer a one off payment to waiting for royalties.
Your initial, very short term, target should be to publish an App a day. Very quickly you can gear up to what the market will bear. There are an infinite number of niches available for Apps, so there are lots of markets to go for.
The next step is to talk to Apple (and Google, for Android) and build a solid MMO business model. You think World of Warcraft is big, in a couple of years time there will be several iPhone MMOs that are bigger. Probably. One or more of them could be yours.
Unless you go for this full bore you are just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, and speed is of the essence.
Well, if the Chinese gold farmers can make one free MMO scam with Evony, then they can make another one. Or even a whole string of them.
Empire Craft looks very much like the next one out of the production line. Everything about it has the same look and feel. They have an identical Terms of Use agreement. And there is the same lack of transparency about who is behind it.
So brace yourself for a second torrent of spam and dubious advertising. As more of these games are published, and they will be, the internet will clog up with their activity.
It looks like the face of gaming has changed forever.
This is a massive story, so I thought that I would expand on the original article. If it was in the automobile industry or the banking industry it would be front page headlines. But the old people who are in charge of the media don’t understand games. So firstly I will do some explaining.
Gold farming I have written about before. It is the practice of playing games to generate valuable in game items which are then sold in the real world to lazy Western players who can’t be bothered playing the game properly themselves. It is a massive industry employing around 400,000 people in asia, mainly in China. Gold farmers are often on the edge of legality and they use every underhand internet technique to market themselves. They generate mountains of spam as they attack blogs and forums with their advertising. They are amongst the bad boys of the internet.
Free MMO (Massive, Multiplayer, Online) games are known as persistent world games because they are always running and provide an alternative reality. The big names are Runescape, Habbo, Club Pernguin, Maple Story and Free Realms. They have many millions of players each, all around the world. Whilst the game is free to play they have revenue models based on purchasing in game items, playing an enhanced version of the game, carrying advertising etc. They are a huge phenomenon of our times and many people you know play them.
Now it looks like Lam has decided to go first party with his own MMO, thus cutting out the middleman. That game is Evony. And its heritage shows. When you play the game, just about everything in the game can be obtained by paying instead of playing. A blatantly exploitative business model never seen before.
The game itself is so flaky and bugged that it is very easy for things you have paid good money for to just disappear. Lots of people are losing money this way. And, surprise, surprise, Evony never give a refund.
Something very devious is iEvony. This is an application that you download into your PC to invite your friends to join the game in exchange for in game rewards. This could very well be a Trojan designed to harvest email addresses messenger passwords and much else. Would you trust a Chinese gold farmer inside your computer? Many gullible people are.
This article just skims over what is going on here. There is enough to write a whole series of articles or even a book. What is for sure is that Evony is best avoided by everyone. Go and play Runescape, Habbo or Free Realms instead.
In August 2007, nearly two years ago, in this blog, I wrote an a article about the platform holders in which I said: “The video iPod looks like a gaming machine, it has the componentry to be a gaming machine. And yet Apple cannot be bothered with all that money they would make from putting games on it. So far. Within 6 months we have version 6 coming out. It is inevitable that sooner or later they will start to milk the gaming potential.”
Then a month later in September 2007 I wrote an article iPod=Gaming platform in which I made the prediction: “Of great interest from the presentation was the fact that 32% of music is now only available in downloadable form. This is bad news for the big traditional music publishers and might be a sign that computer games publishing will not go to the small number of global publishers model.” Which is exactly what happened with the AppStore.
And the AppStore is now a year old. In that short time one and a half billion Apps have been downloaded. An amazing achievement and by far the biggest first year success of any new platform holder in the history of gaming. And a lesson for everyone in the industry. Consumers do not need cardboard and paper distribution. And publishers need to reinvent themselves if they are to have a purpose in life.
