Beware of sinking money into online social games

I've now seen two Facebook games close after an arbitrary period of time. Plants Vs Aliens and Lucky Train. The first was a rip-off of Plants vs Zombies which is fair enough, but the other game was still making money and was otherwise being casually used by thousands of people. What's common in both is that neither bothered to inform their userbase in advance of the closure, and neither offered to refund customers.

While it's all well and good paying for virtual services, be aware that when the service ends then you end up losing out.

It's different when you buy games from things like Steam and Origin because supposedly you own those forever. Virtual goods are different though, once that online world shuts down, you have no access to them.

I'm a little guilty of this in terms of Rock Band 3 songs and the occasional DLC, and in general, companies do a good job of making sure customers don't get a raw deal in terms of online purchases.

What worries me most is when companies drop support of online games, or make matchmaking so significantly bad that a certain section of the community are physically unable to play online multiplayer. If this keeps going it will reach a stage where people play a game for about a month and then suddenly everyone drops it and moves on to the next thing.

To quote Ferris Bueller: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."