Poll: Would you pay a subscription fee to boost your Tetris game?

EA seems to have done the impossible: make Tetris, one of the most iconic, beautifully simple games of all time, better. It's true--at least according to some news outlets, like TouchArcade--but could the publisher have just taken two steps back? The brand new Tetris is available now on the App Store, and despite costing players a buck, EA wants to milk Tetris for all it's worth.

Within the game, players will find the option to subscribe to a service known as "T-Club". For either a silly $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year, players will earn 15 percent more T-Coins to buy power-ups with when they play and gain access to vague "exclusive discounts and content," according to EA. Of course, players can also buy more T-Coins directly for $.99 to $99.99.

This type of money-making scheme is common in free-to-play iPhone and Android games, but for a game that already costs money to download it's a little more bold rare. TouchArcade seems to have a problem with the mere fact that things like "T-Coins" and "leveling up" exist in this take on the classic game.

While that seems a bit "get off my lawn," it's easy to see the point. Our only question is: How could a game as beautifully simple as Tetris benefit from a subscription service? Would even the most hardcore of Tetris fan benefit from such a thing? Well, tell us what you think:

Would you subscribe to boost your Tetris game?
If it means more Tetris stuff, then count me in!What could this possibly bring to the table? Never!It depends on what that "content" is exactly.I'm still baffled by the thought of "T-Coins".
VoteView ResultsShare ThisPolldaddy.com

Have something unique to add to the discussion?

Will copycats run the Facebook games industry into the ground?

We sure as hell hope not. (We like having a job, thank you very much.) It's a common complaint lobbed at the social games industry: It's all the same games. If you ask this writer, the complaint isn't entirely unfounded, but does it spell the end of what would be a short-lived genre? Gamasutra posed that question to a few notables in the social games world recently.

"Part of why we're not attracting the hearts and minds of the core gamer on Facebook is that a lot of these games are kind of the same," Kixeye founder and CEO Will Harbin told Gamasutra. "There are a ton of strategy games, there are a lot of city building games, there are now a ton of mafia games again. It's just kind of more and more of the same."

Harbin recently defended his company from accusations by new studio Rumble Games that all of Kixeye's games are the same as well as Kabam and Zynga's. "You criticize us for that, then you can criticize EA, Blizzard, Activision and all of the guys for the same thing," Harbin told us. "There are only so many genres that have proven to work time and time again, and it's based on what consumers want."

Other executives echoed Harbin's sentiments, like Pocket Gems COO Ben Liu, but said that there's only one way to prevent copycatting from effectively destroying the industry. "Emotionally it bothers us [when we see copycats] but we feel like our best defense is to continue to be innovative," Liu said to Gamasutra.

A number of start-ups have promised a new era, a renaissance of Facebook games in 2012 that will not only bring new types of games to the social network, but new types of gamers, to boot. The question is, however, when the most guilty culprits are those with the most pull, how much good will that do? Check out the in-depth feature in full right here.

Are you tired of seeing copycat social games on Facebook and elsewhere? Do you think, if it continues, that it could mean the end for the industry?

The Sims Social: EA, Tencent will make a Littlehaven in China

The Sims Social China
Playfish's number one social game on Facebook, The Sims Social, is headed east ... far east. Lame jokes aside, EA has signed an agreement with Chinese social network Tencent to release The Sims Social to Chinese audiences. Tencent is the leading social network in China, and The Sims Social will be known as Mo Ni Shi Guang on the network.

The Sims Social is currently the sixth most popular Facebook game, trailing behind five Zynga games with just under 21 million monthly players, according to AppData. EA's idea with this move is obviously increasing the game's overall audience, and thus revenue. And what better place than one of the most densely-populated countries in the world? That could do the trick.

This news follows The Sims Social receiving the 2011 Interactive Achievement Award for Best Social Game amidst steep declines in player numbers since its release in August. This move will certainly help its audience grow, but The Sims Social could be improved upon a lot, if you ask COO Peter Moore.

[Via All Things D]

Are you surprised that EA would launch in China in such a big way? What do you think the game needs domestically, so to speak, to survive?