And here is a Grauniad piece about Evony. It seems that their dodginess goes well beyond patronisingly pornographic ad campaigns, and extends its slimy tentacles into everything from spamming blog comments to gold-farming and gouging their clientele (the "suckers", as I believe the technical term is) to lifting text and graphics from existing games. These people, it seems, have more contempt for their user base than MySpace.
And as if bad advertising and tenuous intellectual property were not enough, the game is also under fire for its business model – a system that seems intent on getting players to spend as much money as possible. Players are encouraged to buy in-game extras to speed their progress – but the confusing way the game prices its add-ons means that many users may not realise that a simple action, such as sending a message to another player, can cost 15p a time.
It turns out that the site's backers are equally unpopular. Evony is the product of Universal Multiplayer Game Entertainment (UMGE), a developer linked to a Chinese gold-farming operation called WoWMine. That site has also come in for regular criticism, but the real kicker comes with the news that the company's owners are being sued by Microsoft over allegations of click fraud.
"The seeds of ... Evonymus are nauseous, and said to be purgative and emetic; sheep are said to be poisoned by them." from The Vegetable Kingdom by John Lindley, 1853, p.587
Greg: isn't there an extra dimension of cynicism involved in Evony? Judging by the coverage, the company doesn't have anyone in a decision-making position who is passionate about gaming or playability, but is entirely a cynical operation to produce a game-like object optimised for fleecing suckers at the lowest possible cost (including ripping off artwork and text wholesale from other games), without any thought being given to the user experience and long-term staying power. In contrast, I imagine that there'd be quite a few people at the World of Warcraft company who would be interested in gaming and game design.
Evony does look like a scam, but I must say that the practice of putting unrelated models on game boxes is quite common in among Chinese game developers (example here: http://www.iplayer.com.tw/3k/2008-08-07-11-46-36/2008-08-22-08-52-51/80-saleproduct/1257-online.html ). It's idiotic, but it works reasonably well, and some of the models end up becoming minor celebrities.
I've been seeing those ads and thought they were so horrendous they must be a send-up. That medieval wench character with her top half off saying "Play now, my lord" or whatever, made me think: how stupid do they think gamers are? And their other clumsily-concealed acts of dodginess listed above: really, how lossy do they consider their target audience? But now I wonder if what they are doing is merely a more extreme form of the practices that most online games, and especially MMORPGs, engage in. I mean, this is basically a genre of entertainment, quite blatantly aimed at young males without a sex/social life, which takes their time and money in return for a flimsy power fantasy. (Of course most forms of entertainment do something like this.) Is the rest of the industry coming down on Evony's heads because the clumsiness of their efforts focuses attention on what the rest of them are up to?