#webkinz (not free but you only had to pay for a stuffed animal to get an account- still alive too- but anywyas)

[dinitride-art]

was anyone going to tell me that flash was owned and killed by adobe or was I just supposed to learn that adobe is responsible for that (amongst other things) by going into the Unity trending tab on tumblr.com and seeing the situations compared myself.

[mothyconscience]

I’mma jump on my soapbox here real fast because I am apart of that generation, and I keenly felt that sting (and am now an avid ad-blocker), but I personally like to call this The Webkinz Effect, and here’s why.

For those that don’t remember Webkinz, it was essentially an online game that was only accessible by purchasing real life stuffed animals. The stuffed animals were about $15, and you had access to a fun online world where you could build your webkinz a house, play games with them, teach them how to eat, etc. Lots of mini-games. In a lot of ways, it was a narrow-focused Neopets in that you had a pixel pet to take care of, a small world to explore, and a bunch of mini-games for money earning purposes. Broadly appealing because it didn’t matter the gender. Anyways, from the moment you signed up your stuffed animal’s online registration code, you had free and unlimited access to all that fun stuff I was talking about before.

Then, after a couple of years, Webkinz released the signature collection! Basically fancier stuffed animals for $25 dollars. I should also mention that you could only keep your account if you registered a new code.... once a year I think? 

But whatever, new stuffed animals are neat. Aside from the fact that Webkinz just priced out an entire population with its expensive new stuffed animals... whatever.

Then.... Then Webkinz did something interesting.  They launched a Deluxe Membership. For the low low price of $99 a year, you could get unlimited access to Webkinz stuff!

But wait, I hear you saying... Everything was already fully accessible? And you’re right. It was!

So what did Webkinz do?

They took stuff away. 

Minigames were suddenly no longer accessible. Entire sections of the store were locked behind a paywall. Content that was previously free to access was suddenly no longer free. And this membership wasn’t cheap either! Not for what was essentially a buying-back of previously accessible items.

Of course, Webkinz had to launch new stuff to really make the membership worthwhile. And they did. But as far as I’m aware, Ganz never really recovered from that, because Webkinz started disappearing off of all the shelves at the local stores from what I saw.

Webkinz did this, Youtube did this, and every time a corporation realizes it can offer an exclusive membership, they do it too. But the thing is, if you really want to make these memberships desireable, you can’t take away what was already freely given. That’s just frankly insulting. All you can do is offer new things behind the paywall. Otherwise, you’re gonna get the Webkinz situation, where people just... leave. Or you’re gonna get the Youtube situation, where people are going to start designing programs for the exclusive purpose of avoiding paying that price. 

Plus it’s just scummy. Lotta people left Webkinz because there were other options, and now I know a lot of people in my age category that spit out the word “Webkinz” like it’s cursed or dirty because they remember getting locked out by those paywalls. 

hate being the generation that remembers no ads on YouTube & the annoyance when we first saw 1 ad every 10 videos, then 1 every 5 videos, then on every video, then multiple ads within a single video, only for YouTube to market paying for Premium™️ to ‘get rid of ads!’ which weren’t even there at the start