Game development spam

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Original post by ToohrVyk I have received this morning the following e-mail, and I'm not sure if I should count it at spam or not:

You have got to be kidding me...

Yeah, looks like spam. Just flag it.

It is clearly a standard email, but that doesn't mean that a human hasn't actually done some physical research on you to find your email address, after having seen games on your site or resume or whatever.

It is interesting that they don't give details of exactly what proportion of the revenue you would recieve.

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Original post by ToohrVyk ... and earn money every month on a recurring basis...

reason enough to delete it.

Someone who knows nothing about you wants to give you money... What are you? Pinocchio? ;)

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Original post by EasilyConfused It is interesting that they don't give details of exactly what proportion of the revenue you would recieve.

The e-mail included a link (which I removed because it would allow the company to be identified, and thus advertised for), and that link detailed the terms of use and the ratio of revenue (around 33%).

Sounds a lot like SMS.ac. If it is, stay far away from them.

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Original post by kanzler Sounds a lot like SMS.ac. If it is, stay far away from them.

What I intend to do. Have you had any bad experiences with them?

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Original post by ToohrVyk Quote: Original post by kanzler Sounds a lot like SMS.ac. If it is, stay far away from them. What I intend to do. Have you had any bad experiences with them?

If you are curious to see about them, here is their BBB report. They don't get any gold stars.

I got this too, but the sender (one Hande Ozel, apparently) had clearly taken the time to check me out - got my name right, and used an address that only appears on my site's front page.

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Original post by superpig I got this too, but the sender (one Hande Ozel, apparently) had clearly taken the time to check me out - got my name right, and used an address that only appears on my site's front page.

Same here — and he got it from my Vitae, apparently.

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Original post by EasilyConfused It is clearly a standard email, but that doesn't mean that a human hasn't actually done some physical research on you to find your email address, after having seen games on your site or resume or whatever. It is interesting that they don't give details of exactly what proportion of the revenue you would recieve.

Then why did I get one?

I actually received a very similar email regarding this from Hande, and I actually followed up with it to test out its legitimacy. I responded to her and asked her what she was looking for from me, because I develop Flash animations in my free time. Hande then passed me off to Jason, who actually contacted me on the phone and spoke with me about the whole process. I asked him very straight-forwardly, what's the catch? Where do I pay membership fees, or who do I have to get to join to receive this bonus? I was told that there is no catch or exception to this, and that all I had to do was register, upload and set the price for my "pod" and that's it. This still sparked my curiosity and so I went ahead and created an email address just to use with the site. I then registered on their site and uploaded this simple Flash game I had made last year, nothing too grand and finished the process.

The next day, I was going to call Jason to be like, "Hey, where's my $100?!" but he had already contacted me via email telling me that my pod had gone live and that I made it in time for the $100. I called Jason after to get details about how I get paid, and he said that I'd be getting a check mailed out at the end of the month when all the billing was taken care of.

So far, it's been going well, I have no real complaints. The staff there is friendly and available to help me out, and I'm pretty confident that I will get the $100 check at the end of the month, and I've already had a couple users subscribe to my pod. I didn't pay any membership fees, I read the agreement, there's no hidden funny business about it. They are pretty damn straight forward.

The reason for me posting this is that it seems like most of you guys on here who are so quick to bash on them probably haven't gone though the process yourselves. Sure, a lot of companies are scam artists and worthless, but can you really say that about every company unless you give it a chance?

Nice astroturfing, PodStud25@yahoo.com. B&.

Maybe I'm just angry I didn't get one. [crying]

I got the same thing =)

I have pondered this, and there are annoying things which I consider catches.

To be paid, you have to give accurate personal information to SMS.ac, which they can give out to anyone in any way they wish. You also have to use their SDK (couldn't find serious documentation without registering) and update your game whenever they change the interface within 30 days or be kicked off. I couldn't find a mention of what happened to my game if my account was terminated — did they keep it?

In return for my work, I would get $100, plus whatever small amounts of money I could gather without paying for ads. Now, $100 is what I earn in about 90 minutes of work, and I don't feel quite able to develop a game that interests me using an unknown SDK in 90 minutes...

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From the BBB report Consumers who register with this service are not told that an invitation to join the program is automatically being sent to all contacts on the consumers phone.