The biggest mistake a company can make is treating its customers like they are criminals. While "The Soup Nazi" was a fun bit on "Seinfeld", and there are some instances where you can adapt a 'take it or leave it' approach to how you treat people, that is not where the IPOs are.

Scopely is the developer of a number of games, including Star Trek Fleet Command, a phone game which, like most, allows you to buy your way ahead of people who play for free. Nothing at all wrong with that, developers and marketing people need to eat too, but they did something bold; they charge a fortune. And if they cheat you or make a mistake or change the packages you buy without telling anyone, and you don't like it, you are gone. So is all your money, for some hundreds of thousands of dollars. You read that right.

Reading their discord, or in-game chat on their various servers, it is hard to imagine a more successful company that is so widely reviled, Reviled like early 1990s Microsoft level hatred, when their reputation was so bad people thought Steve Jobs was a good guy by comparison.


Would you pay $100 to have prettier phasers for a ship? People do.

Their history of success was checkered before they got the Star Trek property - they could only afford the rebooted Star Trek, what fans call the Kelvin Universe as opposed to the original series - and it is sometimes the case that suddenly getting money thrown at you turns you into a different person. So it may be the case with an entire company. Despite knowing how important users are (one of the co-founders came from MySpace) the company itself seems to have contempt for the people paying to be there.

Customer service is often indicative of the corporate culture and if that is the case here, institutional investors should be taking a hard look at the management structure of Scopely before committing their mutual fund customers to this. You can sometimes be awful after you are successful, especially if government regulations block out competitors (like Xfinity, thanks to cable rules they lobby aggressively to keep in place) but for a game company it can be a disaster.

Scopely has far more sensitivity to user risk, primarily because they charge such a premium. In most games $20 will get you quite a lot while in a game like Star Trek Fleet Command $100 will get you very little. A decent ship will cost you $4,000. The model has worked, but that is largely due to a Star Trek fan base that skews older and wealthier. Yet what do older, wealthier people really dislike? Being treated like they are beneath customer support at a company simultaneously claiming it is too poor to hire real help while touting nearly a billion dollars in revenue.

And customer support is their crippling problem. Some customers will go a year without an issue so they don't realize how bad it is. When they do have an issue, and a customer service rep with a made-up name talks down to them,  rich people are going to walk - at right around the time when the company wants to charge them big money.

Did the game glitch when you purchased something? You'll eventually get what you bought, but not before you request it multiple times using receipts to show that you bought it and they triple check you never got it due to the glitch so well known it is on their Discord page. Other stories on their Discord page are entire alliances being deleted without any reason given. No fraud, no abuse, no misuse of any kind, you just hadn't logged in for a few days. Tens of thousands of dollars gone and customer support automatically closing support tickets because you can't understand why they just do something to show you are unimportant. Their own social media flaks recommend you put in three separate support tickets, because most of their staff seem to delight in making users suffer but with three you might get one willing to help. And those are people paid to promote the company telling users the support is terrible.

Class-action lawsuits don't mean much, you are not a successful company in America if someone isn't suing you, but the company has already been forced to concede they need to change some of their less ethical behavior.

Scopely gets around that by putting in the terms of service (that they know no one reads) that you cannot sue them as a class, regardless of fraud, breach of contract, or unjust enrichment as Ackies v. Scopely, Inc. contended. You must go into arbitration, on their schedule, after you have exhausted their informal process.

So how many times will customer service close a ticket without response as part of their "informal" process? They don't tell you. 

You're not going to win a lawsuit when you signed away all rights to sue by booting up the game, unless you are rich and on a vendetta to get them. 

However, if more people start demanding refunds in the Apple and Android stores and customer service deletes their accounts because there is no one managing the user base who doesn't hate their users, multiple individual lawsuits will cripple the opportunity for growth, even if the judge forces you into arbitration (they will - you agreed to it in their terms.) 

But if the company doesn't want that to happen, they need to hire a C-level customer experience executive as soon as possible. There are cases where companies hated by the people paying them succeeded, but those are few and created clear dominance. Scopely is not in that rarefied air yet.