This week we learn that you may want to rethink about applying to GameStop, Facebook is being deceptive with its apps and eBay is not that fond of voodoo type stuff.
Gamestop Makes the Worst to Work For List
The worst job ever story; everyone’s got one, and far too many of them are inspired by people’s experiences in retail. The business news site 24/7 Wall St – a Delaware-based internet news company financed by institutions like MSNBC and The Huffington Post – has collected employee review data and, from that data, extracted a list of the worst employers in America. Gamestop made the list at #10. 24/7 Wall St only considered those companies with 300 or more negative Glassdoor reviews, looking specifically for the bottom 10% of the total pool. (Link)
FTC Slams Facebook for “Deceptive” App Scheme
As well as providing a platform for the products of Zynga and its corporation-sized ilk, Facebook has spent the past few years offering its services to small, less conspicuous app developers. To help these smaller devs stand out and make users feel more comfortable with them, Facebook offered to verify their apps for a fee of $375 ($175 for student or non-profit projects) and provide them with badges intended to let users know that their apps were trustworthy. Nice as this sounds, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has now revealed that Facebook never actually investigated or scrutinized any of the apps paying the verification fee. (Link)
Larian Offers $5000 Reward For Stolen PCs
On the list of “crappy ways to kick off your big, hometown-ish videogame convention,” this has to be close to the top: Larian, the small Belgian studio behind the Divinity RPG franchise, had two PCs stolen from its booth in the Gamescom business hall. The missing PCs contained early builds of Divinity: Dragon Commander and Divinity: Original Sin. This obviously isn’t up there with, say, the Half-Life 2 source code theft, and Larian is going about its business at Gamescom with backup systems, but it’s the principle of the thing that’s at stake. (Link)
EA: “There Is No Feud With Valve”
When EA launched its Origin digital distribution platform in June 2011, it caused quite a stir in the PC gaming crowd.EA titles vanished from Steam’s store, retroactively making them Origin exclusives. As Origin grew, EA continued to widen the gap by criticizing some of Steam’s business practices – EA’s David DeMartini has said that Steam’s frequent sales “cheapen intellectual property” that developers work hard to create. However, the atmosphere of bitter competition between the two digital giants may be exaggerated, according to EA COO Peter Moore. (Link)
eBay Bans Spells, Potions, and Curses
These are hard times for wizards. With the economy tanked and unemployment soaring, it’s always the incidental commodities that seem to lose consumer interest first. Whether that means passing on the day’s second latte, saving gas by biking to the office once a week, or forgoing a monthly spell of virility, people are making hard cuts everywhere they can. For wizards, witches, warlocks, voodoo-meisters, curse-casters, and general hex-doers, things are about to get even worse; eBay is closing down one of their few, precious means of peddling potions, granting wishes, and forcing magical love via the internet to deserving Muggles everywhere. (Link)
