Yo Yo, why go to the gym in reality when you get all the exercise you want with your virtual avatar.  This approach perfectly suits a massive couch potato such as myself. YoVille is the Sims meet Facebook. A virtual world on Facebook where you can do pretty much anything, go to the virtual casino, visit a virtual bank and even see a virtual florist. YoVille is one of the most popular applications on Facebook made by Zynga Games. The game itself is extremely well developed with a highly responsive virtual environment which makes the virtual world of YoVille very easy to navigate and to play the game.  Overall the application is very advanced in terms of visual interface compared to other games on Facebook.  Most games are textual and only a few utilize flash graphics and elements to the extent that YoVille does.  You can stroll around YoVille at will and chat to other players in the game.  You can invite them to participate in various activities and even throw snowballs at people.

However, not all is well in YoVille, the game has been under heavy criticism lately with some members even starting a petition against the use of the application.  The cause for this member backlash is the way Zynga has monetized the game.  Essentially there is 2 types of currencies: YoCoins and YoCash. The catch is that some ‘premium’ items such as pets, gadgets and others can only be bought with YoCash which can only be obtained by paying Zynga with real money using your credit card or paypal.  Although YoCoins can also be paid for you can earn them by playing the application.  YoCoins can be baught at 5,000 YoCoins for $10 and YoCash can be baught at 25 YoCash for $5.00.  Many members who saved up many coins by inviting others and participating in the gameplay since the application was launched were left out in the cold when Zynga introduced the new monetization procedures.  As a result many players have left the application and now feel betrayed.  There have been several groups who even called for a general YoVille blackout day on January 16th. Although I can understand Zynga’s point of view (it takes a lot of resources and investment to develop an application like YoVille) they simply wanted to monetize the application.  But if anywhere is there a case for how to totally botch the monetization process look no further than YoVille.  Zynga has taught many application developers an important lesson in how to NOT monetize your application properly and in the process alienate a large portion of your users.  In the monetization process Zynga has overlooked a key aspect of user retention and essentially certain aspects of the game are now pay only with no other recourse for non-paying users.   Regardless of the new monetization process the application has been steadily growing and according to appdata.com it currently holds 3.2 million active monthly users.  Although the game itself is simply fantastic I feel that the monetization of the application takes it down a notch.