Image courtesy of CreStock
A couple of weeks ago I posted about the Gameloft Advent Calendar, which planned to offer all sorts of deals throughout the month. I have frankly not paid that much attention since the first couple of days, but Joel recently pointed me towards a post at phandroid that caused me concern: it talks about someone getting charged FOUR TIMES while trying to buy a game from Gameloft.
There are three reasons this is a concern:
- I don’t ever want to recommend something that results in someone getting cheated out of money.
- Gear Diary folks saw first-hand the issues with the crappy Gameloft store when many of us failed to get the free Dungeon Hunter game … or at least needed several attempts!
- Gameloft’s spotty use of the Android Market certainly causes confusion over availability and having to deal with yet another potential security compromise to buy stuff is never desirable.
There are some folks who are getting very upset (even those who have had no issues with Gameloft), and throwing around words like like Fraud. Just to be clear, even if the issues as reported were more widespread they would simply be ‘multiple charge’ issues needing to be disputed and cleared up. Most folks who have made credit card purchases through the years have seen a double-charge … but usually the other party clears it up immediately. Seeing four charges for the same thing? No wonder the bank flagged the activity!
Even folks who support Gameloft note significant issues with their store, which is in line with my experiences as well as others on the Gear Diary team. I couldn’t help but think that the single-source ‘walled garden’ of the iTunes App Store makes all of this so much easier … Gameloft’s solution reminds me way too much of the bad-old-days of multiple PalmOS and PocketPC storefronts.
Having some games on the Android market and others only on their store is confusing and adds a layer of complexity to what should be a simple process – and can definitely result in problems when you need to download via an indirect link after your purchase has gone through. It took a significant time for the SMS for Dungeon Hunter to arrive on my phone for me to download, but I didn’t worry much as it was free and I’d heard about the issues they were having that day.
What is your experience with Gameloft? Have you been checking out the Twitter deals? Have you had any problems? Let us know!