Online Games.

After seeing many of the online games that people are playing now, whether on Facebook or Myspace or where ever I start to wonder why people play these games. Almost all of these "free" Facebook and Myspace games have a gimmick to get you to pay more for these games than you would to buy multiple new console games for your home gaming machine. Whether it be for gems, mushrooms, karma, gaming money,  or whatever the in game currency is for each particular game it is often very expensive and very cleverly marketed to you.

One of the games I checked out it comes something like here lets build your city oh wait you can only go to level 9 without having gems to buy the level 10 upgrade, oh gems they are only ten cents each and you only need 50 gems to get the item to make your castle a level 10 and oh you only need one of those items for each thing that you want to make a level 10. So lets do some math 50gems x .10 = $5.00, now you have say 10 things to level to 10 if you want to have 1 of each leveled up so 5.00 x 10 = $50.00 and that is for 1 city... But wait you can have up to 6 cities!!!! $50.00 x 6= $300.00... Now to get the 2nd city you have to get 10 friends playing this game.. You send out say 100 invites pestering your friends to play and get enough to join you, so now you have 2 cities to spend money on (real money if you want to have all the build abilities opened up) and you could be up to $100 or more at this point depending on how far you want to build.. Now to get the 3rd through the 6th cities you can either spend many many hours online attacking wilds to hunt for the crests to get the city deeds or you can just spend gems!!! For your 3rd city you can buy these chests for only 90 gems ($9.00) that may or may not contain all of the crests to get your city and you may have to buy more than one chest. Same for the 4th city you can buy the chest for only 150 gems ($15.00) and you may have to buy more than one to get the needed crests... Now the 5th city is easier you can just cough up 1250 gems ($125.00) to buy the 5th city package, and same with the 6th city only 1080 gems ($108.00) to get your 6th city!!!!

Now somebody please tell me why people are actually DUMB enough to play these TEXT based games and ACTUALLY PAY these prices to get the stuff in game. Just from what I listed about the one game I checked out you could spend upwards of $500 on a text based game that really does nothing!! And I have spoken to some of the people in the game who have purchased the gems to play the game and they act like its COOL!! WTF Really??? for that price I could go buy a PS3, 360, or a Wii and a stack of games to play! Some of the people I talked to spend hours on end on these games, my Facebook wall is usually full of game request from the different games from my friends and it gets quite annoying deleting or blocking all of them just so you can see the other stuff. Maybe I am just mad because I am not quite smart enough, or maybe mean enough to profit from mass ignorance with something like that.

Either way it really makes me wonder what people are thinking when they send money into these games to get that next level or buy that new weapon, and how many of those people can actually afford to be spending the money they are using to send these game makers instead of paying off a credit card or an old doctor bill that has been hanging over their heads..

Oh well, I just hope whomever reads this realizes what a crock those games are if they play them and use that money elsewhere..