![\"Image](\"http:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/dungeon-keeper.jpg\")
<\/a>Dungeon Keeper, released in October as what the company described as a “twisted take” on the 1997 game<\/a><\/span>, is a free-to-play app that has attracted a lot of negative attention. For those not familiar with the “free-to-play” (or Freemium) concept, it generally involves players being able to purchase extra levels and other content via micro-transactions.<\/p>\n The problem with Dungeon Keeper seems to be that EA have taken this idea too far. The game is almost unplayable without constantly spending money, and fans are angry not just that the app is “a money trap”, as one user on Metacritic called it, but that a much-loved franchise has been ruined.<\/p>\n To be fair to EA and games developers in general, the market has changed so much in recent years that mistakes are bound to be made. In the past, console and PC games dominated a market which was composed mostly of teenagers. Games were produced slowly and at considerable expense, and sold a predictable number of units, allowing the developers’ business model to adapt gradually.<\/p>\n Certain sectors of the games market, online casinos being an example, have found the changes in the market less problematic. Sites like CasinoSagaFans.com<\/a><\/span> haven’t had to change the way they make games – they’ve simply had to accommodate more players, as online gambling becomes more popular every year.<\/p>\n But the new breed of gamers, young and old, have become used to being able to download a new game in seconds, and pay either nothing or very little for the privilege. The Freemium model is an attempt to allow players to continue to access content in this way while still staying afloat.<\/p>\n EA comes in for particular criticism because it’s one of the biggest games companies in the world, controlling huge swathes of the sports game market including the FIFA series<\/a><\/span>; but also because, in the case of Dungeon Keeper, it’s taken the idea of free-to-play games too far. These days, Twitter and all the other myriad social media platforms allow gamers to share their discontent immediately. That’s going to be a problem for developers in the short term, but it’s easy to see that, over a longer period, the ability to monitor how customers are feeling about a product (practically in real time) could be a huge benefit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The ever-growing popularity of video gaming, online or not, is bringing a new set of problems for the big developers. Electronic Arts have recently come in for some heavy criticism from players, as the rise of social media brings disgruntled customers together in a way that was impossible a few years ago. It’s A Trap! … Continue reading “Shaking up the gaming industry”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,86],"tags":[9618,9619,9617],"class_list":["post-15069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-technology","tag-dungeon-keeper","tag-ea","tag-video-gaming"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15069"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15071,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15069\/revisions\/15071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Market Changes<\/h3>\n
A Step Too Far?<\/h3>\n