14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is cleaning up shop and intends to ban game developers from incentivizing users to like their pages. According to the new Platform Policies under games and proper use, developers have until November 5, 2014, to comply with the new rules.
The new policy indicates that developers must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a page by offering them rewards or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has clicked the famous thumbs-up.
“It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, checkin at a place or enter a promotion on your app’s Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike,” Facebook writes.
Basically, Facebook is putting a stop to game developers getting page likes just because they offer boosts or unique equipment, as it happens for many apps, including those from Zynga, the famous gaming platform that has managed to skyrocket in popularity thanks to the social network.
This entire mechanism puts a big amount of pressure on users who may not want to like a certain developer’s page just so they can avoid getting updates they do not want only for the sake of a bag of goodies, or an item they may like.
The company also wants to make sure that games which include mandatory or optional in-app charges will from now on disclose this in their app description, either on Facebook itself, or other platforms it supports in order to give people the right idea about the type of gameplay they should expect.
This falls in line with the general attitude about apps that’s starting to spread on the Internet, including from the likes of Google. Apps that offer in-app purchases are no longer under the “free” category and they are obligated to mention exactly if they offer or require in-app purchases in order to not fool users.
Developers often used this trick, saying the app was free to play, when in fact, only a few levels were free of charge, or said this about apps where it was impossible to move on without buying some kind of boosters.