I thought to create a bit of a duo topic post being as there are two things I would like to talk about. First one being the arrival of membership on Weevil World:
Turning off the lights can reveal patterns emitted from new 'glow in the dark' nest items which I find rather ironic being as around 2012 or 2013, I in fact commented on the old What's New Blog under some idea related post about creating glow in the dark nest items as an idea submission and it's quite amazing to see that they coincidentally came up with the same concept themselves several years later! But, unlike them, I didn't once think that it was an idea cool enough that it should require real money to have! I mean, why should it require a membership just to see something virtually glow? Where is the satisfaction from this? How is this getting your moneys worth? 55Pixels, what were you thinking!? Weevil World was going so well but rest assured, it's luckily not a feature which will kill the game entirely like the sorts of features you've brought on Bin Weevils in the past *cough* sky in the bin *cough*. But, other than that, I think it's a rather decent introduction to membership and it's good to see that you aren't being entirely greedy by charging individual membership for both games (but I wouldn't be surprised to see that one day happen once Weevil World contains a suitable amount of member-only features) and the changing of the Dosh salary being now 5 dosh a day will overall payout more dosh per month so that's quite generous of you and it's in fact made a slight tiny update onto Bin Weevils itself!
In terms of implementing the idea of membership itself, I think it's not a good idea and before you go "How are you supposed to earn money then?", allow me to explain. Games that follow subscription based payments are simply a thing of the past. Nowadays, several exclusive features tend to be charged as some form of DLC-based purchase where you buy access to these individual sections of a game. So rather than making monthly or yearly purchases to access certain features on Weevil World, you would instead obtain certain clothes via separately paying for some form of clothing pack and in terms of the member-only areas in the treasure hunt game, you can simply pay somewhat a price of £1.49 to access where you can simply pay and have access to forever! The whole idea of a DLC-based approach to transactions will also keep the player satisfied with the game because hey ho, isn't it rather annoying when you pay for a subscription and then losing access to all the great content you enjoyed after it runs out where you are pretty much told to 'give me more money and I'll return those features to you'? The use of it being add-on only would also make them a lot less greedy when it comes to the Dosh top-up option they have put in place which encourages players to need a reasonable amount of Dosh in order to improve game play on certain games. Membership is simply old fashioned and more unfair for the player and I don't just speak for Weevil World as it's also modern games like Club Penguin Island that have also decided to go through the 'give me more money to get it back' route.
With that story now closed, I would now like to move onto how certain Bin Weevils related content has suddenly just vanished behind the curtain. These things are in fact certain videos that were on the Bin Weevils YouTube channel as well as the removal of Bin Weevils related apps which I was recently talking to someone within the community about.
I have absolutely no idea how long these things have been gone for but it certainly suggests a further downfall in Bin Weevils and how keeping it on life support is simply stupid. I mean, even the recently added 'Bin Weevils Connect' app has been removed and it's hasn't even been available for 2 years! Why have you done this if you find potential for the game? In fact, the only way you can still access these apps is to simply search for them on Google rather than the official Google Play Store and in terms of the AppStore, I have absolutely no idea whether they are still accessible since there is virtually 0% of Apple products in my household so feel free to comment if you happen to have access to an Apple device of some sort.
Moving onto the videos, it appears that all videos containing Bin Weevils staff members have simply been removed and I originally had theorised that it was all due to the landslide of dislikes that the videos got until someone on Twitter had pointed out the more likely scenario of it being based around the staff themselves. Now, why did they remove them exactly? Well of course, the videos themselves were insanely cringe-worthy (especially the mudlarking video they made) but on a more likely scenario, this is likely due to the videos containing staff members that no longer work there e.g. unicron7022, drewbian, Swathe and tombalol or it could simply be due to a possible change of company view where staff members may no longer be allowed to reveal themselves to their audience and appear as some sort of freaking celebrity. Either way, it simply shows further decline in Bin Weevils and yet again, it bares the question of whether it's still worth trying to carry it on with a tiny community that is too small to generate a suitable profit for the company.
Bin Weevils is sure taking it's toll whilst Weevil World continues to thrive and boom in potential and opportunity (and of course light switches for buyers only). You know, maybe it's time for Weevil World to finally have it's own website and media. It has it's own marketplace now and what is the point of posting it's news on a dying website based on a dead game? It's your call after all...
That's it for this post!