A Place for Pet Society Addicts
Hurry! Playfish is giving out this Curious Pet Society Kitten for free. Click here to get the kitten: http://bit.ly/aDtgRs. This freebie lasts for about another 18 hours. It’s about midnight Greenwich Mean Time right now, so this means the freebies will last until July 30, 6 p.m. or 18:00 GMT.
The kitten comes in a pink box. Looks like my other kitty is jealous of the newcomer!
Click here to get the kitten: http://bit.ly/aDtgRs.
Note: This article has been modified from its original form to protect the artists from being spammed. In true Pet Society Anonymous form, names have been discarded.
It was a real treat for me to meet the people behind the best game on Facebook. Here are some of the impressions I got of the artists and the Playfish London office in general.
Pictures of Playfish London
Note: This article has been modified from the original version to protect the Playfish staff from SPAM. Please be respectful of people’s privacy.
During my visit to the Playfish headquarters, I had a chance to talk with the Product Manager of Pet Society, or better known as the Banker of Pet Society. With a background in finance, this PM is relatively new to London (she’s lived there about a year) and even newer to the gaming world (she joined Playfish about two months ago).
What does the Product Manager do, exactly? She replied that she’s “looking after the coordination process between the development and the art, and making sure that everything goes smoothly. But a big part of the job is like being ‘the central banker’ for the game. It’s doing pricing, making sure that the exchange rates are right, and making sure that ‘the taps and the sinks,’ or the ways to earn money and the ways to spend money are in reasonable balance.”
She admitted that sometimes, her team’s predictions are off the mark, as in the case of the Limited Edition Peter Pan statue, which was pulled out of the shops due to lagging sales.
During our interview, the PM also talked quite a bit about how the company relies on crowdsourcing and feedback from players to develop new features in the game. In the video below, she tells us about the Volcano Mask that was released after the Icelandic eruption.
Playfish seems to have a slightly skewed idea of the term “limited edition.” Things that are in limited edition, such as a Leroy Neiman print, or a Bentley Brooklands, are pretty rare with under 500 copies. But there are 250,000 Peter Pan Statues in Pet Society.
More surprising than this high quantity is that so many people have already snapped these up. The picture above was taken less than two hours after the statue’s release. Let’s do the math:
250,000 – 241,407 = 8593 statues sold
Given the astronomical price tag of this statue (16,000 coins), we can assume that most of these statues were bought with the help of the Bank, where you can get 18,000 coins instantly for $20 U.S.
Let’s do the math again. Let’s assume that out of the 8593 statues sold, half of these were bought with the cash coins. (A very conservative estimate; I suspect that the actual number is closer to 8000.)
8593 / 2 = 4296 bought the $20 bag of coins
4296 x $20 = $85,920
$85,920 in less than two hours! And this is a low estimate. If 8000 people went to the bank to purchase this “limited edition” statue, Playfish made $160,000 in that same time frame.
If every statue is bought through the bank, Playfish will make $5 million off this item. The theme this week may be “never grow up,” complete with Tinkerbell outfits and Neverland scenes, but some of us have clearly grown up and grown shrewd.
Last week, I asked a Playfish staffer what was behind the company’s decision to open the diary to everyone in your Pet Society friends’ list. “Nelson” was a sport about being featured on the blog, and spoke with the game’s product manager. This is the manager’s reply: “The diary was introduced because the team wanted to give players a bit more info because some stats were taken away during the game’s redesign.”
Nelson also said that if I had more questions, the manager would be happy to address them. So I asked why the feature is called a diary if everyone can see it, and if it’s possible to get an option to keep it private. I haven’t gotten a follow-up response yet. In the meantime, I made this comic about the consequences of peering into someone else’s diary.
Note: I do NOT think the open Pet Society Diary is going to breed mistrust between players. I mean, come on, it’s just a game. A very cute game. However, like many others, I think we should have an option to keep the diary private. I would be really embarrassed if someone in my office—my boss for example, who’s connected with me on Facebook but sees a very limited view of my account—decides to go on Pet Society and sees how many times I’ve logged into the game.
A few weeks ago, Pet Society introduced a diary feature that told us all sorts of information about our pets. Today, those diaries became public, open to anyone in your Pet Society network.
This latest development strikes me as being a real violation of privacy, moreso than anything that Facebook has ever done. For all the criticism that Facebook receives, the site does allow users to control how much or how little of their information to display. Among the many options, there are ways to keep photos private, prevent random people from adding you as friends, hide your activities on the site and keep your game playing to yourself. But the new Pet Society diary totally blows that cover by showing how many times you’ve logged into the game.
I e-mailed a high-level Playfish staff member earlier today and asked him what was behind the company’s decision. I haven’t heard a response yet. In the meantime, I visited the guy’s pet to take a peek at his diary (pictured above). I was going to publish Nelson’s diary, just so Playfish would get a taste of its own medicine, but I’m going to play nice. After all, this is Pet Society Anonymous. Unless people indicate they want their names blasted into the cloud, I keep everyone to first names only or assign pseudonyms.
So instead of showing Nelson’s diary without the owner’s permission, I’ll show you Sushi’s diary. When the diary was first released three weeks ago, I had crossed out all the embarrassing parts. But most of my network has seen my diary today, and hell, I feel naked. So here it is…Ta-da!!!
1418 log-ins! Is this pathetic or what? No matter how bubbly or smart I may try to appear on the Internet, the truth is out: I am a game addict and I have no social life except for visiting imaginary animals.
As for Sushi and Nelson… well, after reading each other’s diaries, they felt a bit closer to each other and decided to take the next step in their relationship.
Yet more proof that my pet has a better social life than I do.
Ha ha, Playfish, you got me. I totally fell for your April Fool’s gag. I was so excited to see the new 3-D icon at the bottom of my screen that I started getting visions of Sushi as a 10-foot blue creature à là Avatar. I waited with anticipation as the game told me that it was filling my balloons with helium and making other updates to the interface. In the end, I was really disappointed to see that it was all a joke. It made me think of how “serious” gamers criticize the flatness and simplicity of Facebook games. It’s true that while Pet Society is adorable, the artwork isn’t as complex as say, Halo, and definitely not anywhere near 3-D. So for me, this joke was only a reminder of that difference.
If you can tear yourself away from your pet, Hotel City, Playfish’s latest game which was released on March 17, is worth checking out. The new game, which is centered around building and designing a hotel, is a delight for someone who enjoys the decorating aspects of Pet Society.
The game’s straightforward tutorial will get you started right away. However, I’m including a couple of screenshots here for additional tips. Get a load of these yummy wallpaper patterns! I sure hope Playfish brings them into Pet Society.
As a Pet Societyholic, I haven’t been very engaged by other social games, but Hotel City just might become my next addiction. The only thing that may be a drawback is that there is no avatar that feels personal to me. One of the biggest allures of Pet Society is that the pet feels like an extension of the player. But here, it’s all about the hotel. Is that enough to keep one’s interest? I’ll let you know in a few weeks if I’m still playing.
Not everyone is embracing the new changes in Pet Society. Judging from the many comments left on Facebook and on my last post, people seem to appreciate the improved camera and organized chests, but not the changes in game play.
Typical Complaints about the New Pet Society
I used to have a million paw points. Now I only have 4,000. What happened?
The official Pet Society blog explains it like this: “It may be a little confusing at first, but each level the paw points number goes back to zero and counts up to the amount needed to reach the next level. For example, if you were a Level 43 pet with 337,300 paw points previously, your pet will now show as a Level 43 pet with 5,300 paw points towards the next level (as 332,000 paw points were those required to reach Level 43).”
Um, yeah, that is confusing, especially since nobody knows how many points it takes to get to each level. We also can’t see the paw points of other pets. Some players say that this was a source of fun competition, to try to top friends’ points.
There are more flies now. I saw one pet with eight flies.
I’m not sure if eight is an exaggeration. My pet Sushi visited someone with five flies today. He got 80 coins for soaping him up, and 4 paw points. So cleaning is still a good source of income.
The brush is useless now. And there’s no happiness bar.
Here’s the official Pet Society comment: “Well, happiness no longer affects your game in any way, so feel free to brush your pet, but don’t be surprised when nothing much happens!”
I’m surprised that Playfish removed the happiness bar, especially when the company claims their games are about friendship, love, self-expression, blah, blah, blah. Isn’t happiness key to this feel-good social games experience?
You can’t see who’s active and inactive any more.
No, you can’t. But now, you get more coins for each visit, whether or not you were active. You get 35 coins for your first 50 visits each day, 20 coins for the next 25, and 15 coins thereafter.
My Secret Garden has gone all horrible!
Players have reported that their Secret Gardens and the Magic Room in their Tree Houses are now bigger, but the trees in their Secret Gardens are out of place. Hopefully, this is an easy thing for the company to fix.
As I said in my previous post, I personally like most of the new changes. But the game has never been about paw points for me. The thing I most appreciate about Pet Society is the visuals, and the tools the game gives us to create cute, comic scenes. So the cleaner layout, along with the improved camera make this aspect of the game even richer.
I still would like one more change: the ability for two pets to sit or lie down together on a chair or bed. That used to be possible, and it was incredibly cute. It was one of the reasons I started blogging about this game in the first place! Sadly, the pets can’t do this any more. Let us be together for crying out loud! What good is a 3000-coin Stella Bed if your only companion is a reindeer plushie?!
Wine-O-Cards
AAPrincess.com
Subscribe to this Blog
