I’ve tried some of scopely’s games. They’re following this playbook to the letter.
You’ll be getting freebies when your friends spend cash. You’ll get time limited offers. You’ll be paying to “try again”, against other players.
Who wins when a wall street broker and an oil sheikh use their wallets to fight over a Pokémon gym? Scopely wins.
Scopely games are just a bunch of mixed dark patterns reskinned with some popular IP
Saudi Arabia? I remember about 10 or so years ago that Saudi Arabia had banned Pokemon because “it promotes materialism”.
What changed?
Money.
After MBS became the de-facto leader (after some purges, to centralize all the power to himself) he started “liberalizing” and giving us more freedoms. It’s all bullshit.
Women weren’t even allowed to drive four years ago. That was probably the only good thing he gave us.
Haven’t played the game in years, and wasn’t aware of any of this. People discussing “What’s worse, Saudi Arabia or Niantic?” feels positively dystopian.
Saudi Arabia isn’t a person. I hate it when news titles aren’t specific enough. Is it the government that bought them? A private company? Just a dude that happens to be Saudi? The implications can change drastically based on who bought it.
Also the article link isn’t working for me so all i got is the title. And as most people that’d see it, they’d also only read the title, this type of simplification can lead to a lot of misinformation. Or worse, racism, as you combine a whole country and its people to one entity which is dehumanizing. I’m speaking from experience as a Saudi person who’s always grouped with the “saudi” or "Arabic " or “brown” groups instead of another human being.
In short, news should stop generalizing and be more specific, especially in the titles, the part that most people will interact with.
Saudi Arabia isn’t a person.
Yes, it is. In an autocratic monarchy, in a dictatorship, everything belongs to the king. The house of Saud is treating the country as their personal property and let’s not pretend that anything would prevent the guy who killed a journalist in his embassy from accessing that data.
unpaywalled: https://archive.is/7yc9S
A Saudi Arabian company that was created by the Saudi Arabian government just purchased Pokémon Go
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Investment_Fund
If you can’t see the article i will paste it for you.
I’m speaking from experience as a Saudi person who’s always grouped with the “saudi” or "Arabic " or “brown” groups instead of another human being.
So am i, and i’m also sick of it and the people who use this to fuel discrimination. I see this article as more of a reason to hate the sauds, not saudi people.
Anyone that groups individuals with their government is a bigot advertising their bigotry.
Edit: looks like I upset some bigots.
there are cases where this is more or less true. I think the less democratic/representative and more oppressive a government, the less fair it is to group a people with their regime. the saudis have an absolute monarchy that bone-saws journalists in foreign countries.
which probably fucks up their culture something awful, but not in the same ways their government is monstrous.
I guess I’m pretty suspicious of all states and the control they exert over the average person to use that metric. It’s my opinion that if democracy worked, it’d be illegal (or subverted by a CIA-backed coup).
well, yes. I don’t think a government can completely align with the values of the people it dominates, they are inherently shitty, but shittiness is a spectrum.
and yes, that is what the CIA is for. that, and cocaine trafficking.
I guess I’m going back to not walking.
StreetComplete helps improve OpenStreetMap.
Great app, I recommend everyone give it a try
Yay, capitalism.
Really feeling that free market…
https://media.tenor.com/0BkvWV1SdzEAAAAM/dyinginside-suffering.gif
And what’s so wrong in this particular case?
The sauds are the last people you want to own anything you use.
I don’t get how that’s capitalism’s fault though
Because it allows people’s data to be sold off. In other words, we’re the product.
Then the “yay capitalism” phrase can be applied to any digital product, and not just to this one then
Not any, but you’re right, it can be applied to quite a few products unfortunately.
Capitalism is the fault.
Oh no, not only the very ethical American companies get my data?
What a disaster.Lol everyone owns your data except for you
Wait until you find out that Saudi Arabia have a big stake in Disney, Facebook and OpenAI.
Time to never use any of their products again
Tell me again how tik tok is a Chinese spy network? When they can just BUY our information like this?
Probably they are all spy networks… Not to pee in your cereal or anything.
If everything is a spy network, then nothing is
Yeah this is a pretty dumb take. If all social media is stealing your info, then they are still all stealing your info. This is not “if everyone has superpowers nobody does,” it’s just a dipshit thing to say.
Just curious what they end up doing with any of the location data?
Ask Jamal Khashoogshi
*Khashoggi
I’d assume same thing they did with the data from Xitter. Track down arab dissidents and
butcher them, then dissolve their remains in acid so no one can find their corpse.Probably throw planes at you.
I am a level 47 player, altho havent played the game for several months now due to its downfall. Guess, wont be going back
But you were fine with Niantic? Why? They were an awful and evil company. Did you never look them up?
I don’t think anyone playing a game in which the main mechanic is tracking your location is the type of person to look anything up.
Lol if anyone looked at my pokemon go data, they’d think I was some playboy with a private jet that visits Jakarta one day, and Tokyo the next. They also think I have insomnia and wander around in half mile circles all night. They think I have some insane government access when I visit chernobyl or tour the entirety of Italy right in the middle of their worst covid lockdowns.
I disassembled one of my phones and physically detached the extra antenna bits for the GPS, making it extremely unreliable, and a little aluminum foil on top can start to throw my location 500ft in a random direction.
Pokemon go provides direct feedback for gps spoofing in a way I haven’t seen available anywhere else. The game isn’t too fun, but learning where I can break GPS is a pretty fun game. The game of cat and mouse with Niantic detecting spoofers has been interesting to say the least.
Unpaywalled link is convenient but so do consider subscribing if you want to support this kind of journalism :
“404 Media is an independent website whose work is written, reported, and owned by human journalists and whose intended audience is real people, not AI scrapers, bots, or a search algorithm. Become a paid subscriber here for access to all of our articles ad-free and bonus content.”
A country that investing in any successful product doesn’t mean they want your data. If they are interested they can buy it directly from any large organization and if must they can use spy ware or other means of intelligence.
If you have privacy concern, you have bigger issue than a game that is for all we know is dying game.
