MiniGames: A Review of Sina Weibo’s WeiCity

In a bid to monetize its user-friendly but financially dragging giant, Sina recently imbued its Weibo microblogging platform with its own currency — the weibi — and games. But are these games actually any good? I dove into a few of them to find out. This is the first in what will be a series of reviews of Sina Weibo games.

WeiCity

WeiCity - cute, but ultimately evil

First on my list was WeiCity, a city-building quasi-social game that reminded me of my youth, which was mostly spent building cities in SimCity and then destroying them with various disasters. It’s worth noting now that as a child I saw no real reason to play the game as a “game”; I was not interested in a challenge, I just wanted to build cool cities. I used the cheat codes so often that I still remember some of them — SimCity 2000 players out there, type “buddamus” and you’ll get $500,000 instantly! — and I have no regrets. I promise all this will be relevant soon.

So I booted up WeiCity with high hopes that it might be more of the same, albeit with a Chinese twist. In many ways, it is similar: you pay gold coins to build buildings, roads, etc., and then citizens and businesses pay you taxes that you can use to build more buildings. Makes sense, right? Yeah, and if it stopped there, it might have been a simple, fun timewaster, even without a cheat code. But no, someone decided to monetize it.

See, the way WeiCity works is that some things can be bought with gold coins, but other things must be purchased with weichengbi, another in-game currency that can only be purchased using Sina’s weibi. That’s right: you spend real money to buy fake money (weibi), then use that fake money (weibi) to buy another kind of fake money (weichengbi) to use in a game that includes a third kind of fake money (gold coins). Does that seem overly complex to anyone else?

Oh, you wanted your police station to function? Break out your checkbook, sucker.

I can’t blame Sina for monetizing its services, and micro-transactions, much as I detest them, are becoming an acceptable part of any game’s business model. But in this case, they cripple the game. You can play for about ten minutes before you absolutely need them, but your city can’t grow any bigger than mine did — see the pictures above — because all of the public services you need to attract citizens (police, library, etc.) require you to hire public workers using weichengbi, the in-game currency you buy using the weibi that you paid real money for.

Technically, if you don’t want to spend weibi on weichengbi, you can spam your friends instead to fill public positions in the game. Being too cheap to shell out for weichengbi, I spammed my wife and a former coworker to work in my library. So far, I haven’t heard back, though. I guess they’re not interested in Library Management positions in my tiny, fake city. This, along with a rather meaningless feature that lets you look at and help out friends’ cities, seem to constitute the game’s social aspect. Well, that and that every minor accomplishment is accompanied by a popup window asking if you’d like to send out a microblog post about it.

The micro-transaction game model can be done well, but for it to work, players need to be able to experience and enjoy the game without buying anything — at least for a while. After all, players need to get hooked on the game before they’re going to be willing to shell out their hard-earned money. It might seem counter-intuitive, but you can actually make a remarkable amount of money even if your micro-transactions just allow players access to non-essential items and the core game is free to everyone. See, if the core experience of your game is good and accessible to all, this can happen:

Even the folks at Blizzard seem to have figured this out; their monster hit World of Warcraft is now free-to-play until characters hit level 20. By that point, players have been playing for days and they are already hooked. But WeiCity is trying to dig in your pockets pretty much as soon as you boot it up, classlessly begging you to spend real money to buy fake money to buy other fake money to hire fake people to work in your police station. No one is going to spend money on a game they’re not sure they enjoy yet, and WeiCity never gives you a chance to dive in and enjoy things without reminding you that unless you pay, you’re getting a second-class experience.