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Allakhazam- PotBS beta key promotion
RedwoodSap
Member Posts: 1,235
You gotta pay at least $10 to get premium member for a PotBS beta key. WTF? Pay to beta test? Who came up with this stupid idea FLS or SOE?
Comments
It's just a bonus that Allakhazam members are getting. If you are a premium member you get a beta key, or you can just wait to get picked ...
I've been waiting, for a couple years now. What's so special about Allakhazam members that they get a guaranteed spot?
I mean why would you not give keys to people who have been following the game on the PotBS forums first before selling them to promote Allakhazams. That's messed up.
Gamespy and alot of similar sites do the same thing, I got into WoW beta because I was a premium member of Gamespy. The companies cut a deal with one another somehow and you arent paying to get the beta but its something you get as a bonus from Allakhazam for being a premium member.
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actuallly from a business standpoint it makes perfect sense. Those that have followed the game and are loyal followers on the forum are pretty much a guarenteed customer. This allows them to pull in potentially new players. not saying its right - or wrong, but they are a business first.
The fact that I now have a Beta Key that might give me access to the POTBS beta (A game I've been waiting for for a LONG time) is just a bonus...
I don't think the OP gets around much, Fileplanet has had subscriber only beta keys for most of the major MMORPGs released lately, that or he just likes to whine.
I saw "98 keys left" and decided not to pay for the following reasons:
1) Key is not guaranteed. (You will get it later, maybe, at some unspecified date)
2) You automatically get subscribed to some magazine (your info is sold)
3) Allakhazam is owned by a gold farming company.
True. Allakhazam is owned by the same company that owns IGE. Can you imagine what happens to your information when they get a hold of it?
Allakhazam Sells Out to IGE. No, Really. And IGE Andraste is Savant.
Submitted by Mr. Rasputin on Thu, 05/04/2006 - 1:26pm.
The Internets trembled yesterday.
Allakhazam, he of the Lewts Database for a myriad of games, announced that he was forming a new network of lewtabase sites consisting of his site, Thottbot (a fully owned subsidiary of IGE), OGaming (a fully owned subsidiary of IGE), and L2Orphus, member of the OGaming network (as announced by their headerband). The network is to be called Zam.com, which stands for...
well, apparently nothing.
Which is much what Allakahazam himself stands for now, too.
Link to full article here: http://www.corpnews.com/node/133
Rock on. Personally, I never sign up for jack squat, especially from the likes of mega-advertisers like Fileplanet and their ilk.
Well, not unless I use a really creative spam email account. But I can't be bothered most of the time, even when something is free-ninety-free... damn if I'm going to pay them for anything. I'm still a little bitter that I got charged a monthly to play UO.
Some of y'all need to research your facts before posting.
At one time, yes, the company that owns Allakhazam was owned by IGE. However, they no longer own IGE, and so the companies are no longer indirectly associated.
Seriously, google it and find out for yourself if you want, but Alla's clean.
Now, whether or not you "pay for a beta key" is up to you. My FP subscription's been worth it.
Nice spin, but no proof. If anything it's just more corporate shuffling trying to hide the ownership trail.
Reports: IGE Has Been Sold
25 Jun
Posted by rmiller as Real Money Trading
Has real money trading (RMT) market leader IGE been sold? This became a hot topic with the news that World of Warcraft database Wowhead had been sold for a reported $1 million to Affinity Media (the ZAM Network), which already owns two other major WoW databases, Thottbot and Allakhazam. In early 2006, much was made of the fact that Allakhazam was being bought by Affinity, which owns IGE (note: the buyer was originally reported as RPG Holdings, but acknowledged to be IGE). Similar objections to RMT-friendly ownership were immediately raised by Wowhead users.
But Affinity president John Maffei said that was no longer the case. “At one point, the company owned IGE but it was sold this spring,” Maffei said on the Wowhead announcement FAQ page. “It was a private transaction so we can’t reveal details.” It turns out that a number of forums reported the sale back in April, including F13 and an April 30 thread at the Allakhazam forums, in which site operator Allakhazam says that IGE had been sold a month earlier to John Yantis, an RMT veteran who built up MySuperSales and then sold the company to IGE in 2004.
But others are alleging that ties remain between Affinity and IGE. And if IGE was sold months ago, why was Affinity CEO Brock Media at the Virtual Goods Summit doing an interview with CNet about the eroding profitability of the RMT market?
“Affinity is finding it harder and harder to make the big profits it used to,” CNet’s Daniel Terdiman writes of his dicusssion with Brock. “And that’s because, he said, virtual assets are increasingly a commodity and, therefore, the margins on sales of WoW gold and other virtual goods are rapidly shrinking. In fact, he said, as Chinese competitors get more and more sophisticated, they are also willing to accept less and less profit margin. And that means, ‘they’re perfectly happy to accept $20,000 in profit on $2 million of revenue.’ ”
It’s interesting to see all this intrigue about the ownership status of a major RMT exchange emerge even as the Virtual Goods Summit is demonstrating the growing interest in virtual currency among investors and venture capitalists. Is a corporate-friendly discussion of “virtual goods” superseding the debate and controversy about “real money trading”? Is the entire undertaking being rebranded to appeal to the money crowd? Stay tuned.
So they might still be indirectly associated because the holding company is being purposely vague about who now owns IGE?
Wait a minute isn't Allakhazam owned by one of IGE's subsidiaries?
Isn't this just handing the gold farmers beta keys.
It's called a "promotion" and the concept wasn't invented by either FLS or SOE. And you don't "gotta pay" anything unless John Smedley broke into your house and is holding a gun to your head. You can CHOOSE to pay $10 in order to get a beta key or you can CHOOSE not to.
It's called a "promotion" and the concept wasn't invented by either FLS or SOE. And you don't "gotta pay" anything unless John Smedley broke into your house and is holding a gun to your head. You can CHOOSE to pay $10 in order to get a beta key or you can CHOOSE not to.
funny how every time some company has a beta and offers keys to a service thats subscription based, everyone is shocked.. yet its been like that for years, for all sorts of games, mmo or not.
A prime example is fileplanet subscribers, who occasionally get a free key that non-subscribers don't get... The beta has nothing to do with fileplanet except that they gave them a batch, and fileplanet can distribute those as they see fit. In fact they get access to all sorts of demos and files that others dont get.. they are paying for that access, not for any specific game beta/file
Some of you are missing the point that the OP is making.
Why is FLS or SOE, giving beta keys to Allakhazams over long time loyal PotBS forum members? Most likely it's SOE's influence over FLS now because SOE is the one with ties to IGE, but these kind of poor judgements go along with crawling in bed with SOE.
Would be nice to hear from Rick about whose idea this promotion was and how he defends giving beta keys to unknown persons over long time loyal PotBS forum members.
the Allakhazam promotion was in existance before the FLS/SOE deal.
It's honestly not worth pointing out to you SOE haters that all your "facts" and "most likely's" are nothing more than "guesses" and "personal view points" anymore. You make it even funnier by having a tag line that reads "banned for having an opinion". That's all you have, an opinion. The problem is that as soon as someone has a different point of view and in some places states clear and simple FACTS they are "in bed with SOE". Utterly pointless conversations, it's like arguing with a fanatic, you just can't accept that while a small vocal minority of people don't want to give SOE money, others are happy to.
Like a previous poster stated, the whole beta key deal was done before SOE's involvement.
Additionally, as someone who knows a few key people in the network of Allakhazam sites, Yantis acquired the sites back from IGE right before they were bought out.
Yantis and IGE are in bed together. They are both gold farming companies and have an ongoing business relationship. Neither one is better or worse than the other, any site affiliated with either is tainted. For realistic purposes they are one and the same. They seem to shuffle ownership of sites around just to cloud the issue.