Did they purchase a business using money and then sell advertising space on a per click reimbursement basis? Then it is an investment. It is clearly a commercial activity. I never said the investment had to make a lot of money. I never said it had to meet any benchmark. I said there were different ways of treating an asset you invest in. Clearly the developers have made choices with respect to this asset that do not involve spending lots of time or money on it. (No judgement as to the prudence of that choice).This is hardly a investment for them, they have no need for it to make "good money" or such. As long as it doesnt bleed them money will keep it up. So in the end its more of a favor to us rather than a investment. Cause lets face it, its a poor investment. :)
I have no idea what you mean by "good money". I would think that the developers would like to receive some form of return on their investment. If it is merely the gratitude of players, that is very kind of them. However, I think they would like to receive something more or else they would not have integrated commercial features into the game. I suspect that they had hoped to receive more passive income from the asset than they current receive and now that they do not meet those targets are not really serious about investing the time/money in improving the asset to see if it can improve returns (or, and lets me real about this, their wives/significant others are not, since often additional funds for development come from personal sources and I know few partners who would be willing to invest money in a game when it could otherwise go to things like a mortgage).
I did not imply that they might be thieves. I said that freezing the game without restoring credits to those that invested them would (or did i say could?) be theft (although it could also be a form of consumer fraud given that people actually pay for the credits. So something like $0.25 * # of individuals in the class impacted, max $1,000ish if EVERYONE invested a credit in sitting (which is impossible)). If they restored the credits, then no theft or fraud has occurred. I have not followed up on that though.You called them "completely negligent" and even implied that they might be "thieves", lol. Such warm and fuzzy sentiments of gratitude!
They were negligent. It is common knowledge that code is sensitive to small typographical errors. Not reviewing the changes that you make to coding prior to publishing and taking steps to ensure that the coding was correct is negligence. Of course, the damages for it are limited (given the aforementioned credit aspect and that no one else was financially impacted and I suspect you are unlikely to obtain any recovery related to non-economic damages in this case).
So telling the truth is I guess something other than warm and fuzzy, but I guess that can't be helped.