Moyo Go Studio DevBlog

I mentioned before that Google offered me a job.
Well, I am not so sure about that. In fact I think they were spamming.

See, Google has no problem harvesting email addy’s of potentially interesting programmers. They sent me this:

This screams “SPAM!”, for a plethora of reasons.
It’s obviously a pastejob, with lost whitespace and a premature newline. A typo to make it look like a casual email. And zero details, totally generic. Could have been sent to any coder.
So I told them that I thought it was SPAM, but that since I wasn’t 100% sure, I just wanted to say I wasn’t interested.

As one of my coding colleagues put it: “I hope you told them to shove a fork up their ass?”.

This came back (I don’t include the rest, which was pretty uninteresting, more generic stuff about whom I should contact at Google for further “potential opportunities”).

So now we know for sure, Google is indeed spamming for coders.
Note the premature newline, just like the initial message.
So they get a lot of complaints about SPAM, and they have a canned response to that as well, LOL.

I’m continuing Moyo Go’s development.

Since I haven’t been working on it for almost a year I had emotionally distantiated myself from the project, and having found other employments, I thought it was better to let the project bleed to death, seen the comprehensive censorship on Sensei’s Library (from the same country as Hitler) and the AGA/BGA crusader duo (from the countries that brought us WW III). Let’s not mention GoBase, as GoBase is a direct competitor and has trivialized itself anyway. But a very positive thing is that GoDiscussions does not censor the product, even though some moderators like to block threads where the boycots are discussed. *

When I announced to stop selling Moyo Go, I was astonished to receive a dozen of emails in my support - amazingly, many were still visiting this site after almost a year of inactivity.

Even better, I received a handful of purchase requests (I denied them all because I had used my development PC for my new PC-repair business as a data-salvage station, and my main computer is a laptop now because it doesn’t make as much noise as that enormous quad Opteron server I used for data-crunching).

So I will continue - with a new business model:

- Instant download of the product after purchase
- Purchase price of the core product (with just pro games) about half of what it was before (well, in Euro’s because the USD suffered a terrible inflation over the past year)
- No weekly pro games by email any more
- No free updates any more
- Yearly releases of major new versions
- Existing customers pay the same for new versions

I regret I won’t be able to provide my existing customers with weekly emails with new pro games and free software updates any more. With the sales figures I have now (due to the boycots), I had the choice of folding or doing it this way.

At least I have reverted my decision to abandon the product, meaning that one will be able to get future updates for a modest price, instead of owning a “dead” product. I think it is a good compromise, especially now I know that at least the Western Go community is a bunch of cowardly sheeple with an unhealty respect for the wrong authorities. I have been sorely disappointed by them - my bad for imagining that they would somehow be more ethical, intelligent or brave than the average human being.

* The boycotters say they censor Moyo Go Studio because it contains a few thousand games that others offered first and that this is an unforgivable breech of ethics, I say they organized boycots because Moyo Go forms a threat to their financial interests of monopolizing the world’s Go games and profiting indefinately from them. Some (Arno Hollosi) admit that they boycot me because they just don’t like me - making it petty power-politics of personal preference - even more pathetic.