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Comment by deservingend | Hacker News Reader

I've been in the social games industry for a couple of years now. Zynga may have gotten more attention for some of its negative tactics, but Lolapps takes the cake for shady social gaming.

They consistently provided grossly inflated (by an order of magnitude) numbers for their user counts and revenue. I honestly would not be surprised if they had lied to 6Waves in order get a merger in the first place.

They were almost banned from Facebook for selling user data to third parties.

Recently, they were contracted to help publish a game developed by an indie. As publishers, they got to see a game that hadn't yet been released. They stalled the indie shop in publishing the game while rushing to create a blatant clone. They then ditched the indie shop and released their own clone.

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Perhaps not surprising, but I think those are drastic mischaracterizations of the company. I was there for the merger and the almost-Facebook-ban From anything I saw, numbers weren't cooked.

The Facebook ban was due to one of many small ad tests (<<1% of users each IIRC) we did with third parties, and had already stopped. Turns out one of them was later banned from Facebook, as was anyone who did business with them, regardless of how small or how short. IIRC we weren't even working with them when we got the punishment. But once accused, this kind of thing tends to stick with public perception.

Can't speak to the indie dev thing as I wasn't there at the time and haven't followed it. I will say that the studio that shut down wasn't the same studio as this controversy, but another in the "6L" umbrella.

The fact remains that the people there were some of the best I've worked with, and no one I knew wanted to screw anyone over or copy games. If anything, we had to scale back our vision at times. They were mostly engineers/artists/etc just incredibly happy to be getting paid to make original games after trying to 'break in' to the industry for so long. And the many people who played our games & our competitors' - even other game designers - thought that ours were pushing the boundaries of the industry forward.

So you agree that you had 150 million users when Facebook banned you? LOL

And hey, I'm not saying you didn't have good engineers or artists. I think Ravenwood looked great and creating something like that is no joke.

Do you have a reference for the 150M number? Disclaimer: This would've been over a year ago, and I don't remember specifics. I was an engineer, so my main focus was elsewhere.

1) We had a TON of users across many apps and not just our games (many thousands of apps when you include our user-generated ones).

2) These types of numbers were often "sum(MAU-app1 + MAU-app2 + ... + MAU-appN)". This point was always communicated clearly, but may not have been in the press, or could be a source of confusion? Even if communicated clearly, this may still seem like bloating the numbers: but my understanding is it more accurately represents the amount of impressions one would expect (from say a cross-promo with other games, or ad sales) than if you were to de-dupe them by Facebook ID. In other words, say you have 2 games with 10M MAU each, and 2M users play both: it's preferable to make decisions based on 20M as opposed to 18.

3) All apps' MAU/DAU numbers are public anyway, so there's not much to hide.

Thanks for complementing Ravenwood, btw. I really appreciate that. (I was a pre-alpha engineer)

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