Heads up on Avengers Academy: the game is made by TinyCo, who will put out a fun game for about 6 months then completely try to bleed their customers dry. More and more things become premium only, and they’ll leave freemium players hanging with nothing to do for months on end. Lots of things and no land to put them on. I’m not saying you shouldn’t play and have fun, just be careful; there are balanced freemium games out there and based on my experience with their other games, TinyCo’s aren’t.

copperbadge:

Yeah, I figured there’d be a point where you’d have to pay or gtfo. Loki’s Frost Giant outfit costs more shards than I will ever see 😀 I do appreciate the warning.

On the other hand, that’s the nice thing about the game being set in a canon that we (as the canon’s fandom) are familiar with – when the game gets too expensive we’ll just run off and toy with gifs and fics forever. The game is just foundation for us. I mean, none of us are playing because we love the game mechanics or the challenges, because it’s really just time management and point-and-click. I feel pretty confident saying that most fans playing this game are either in it to unlock a favorite character or for the weird, freaky worldbuilding it’s doing. 

I mean I want to know what’s going on with the timefog as much as the next person, but it’s not like this game is high narrative quality or something; if I don’t find out via the game, someone’ll put it on a wiki sooner or later, which will almost amount to the same thing. And in the meantime I can always write fanfic about it for free.

Fandom is the great leveler of capitalism: whatever your product, whatever your narrative, whatever price you’re charging, we will find a way to surround it with vast, enticing fields of free content. (And porn.)