A Complete Failure of Customer Focus

So, a company that over a decade ago had the sex game industry looking on enviously has shut down. And the reasons for it are clear: they did not listen to their community!

I speak of course about THRIXXX, providers of the 3D SexVilla games for over two decades. Now, I have been with the company since the early days and at some point they started a community consultation. Their Gamerotica site had a thriving community who posted new poses, textures, models and their images and videos created from within the game. And this community interacted big time!

The focus of the consultation was: what features would you like us to add to the 3DSV games going forward. So we all responded.

A year went by and then...

They shut down the gamerotica site and created a new Twitter type site. All the groups and forums on the old site were NOT moved over, nor was most of the content. NONE in the community had asked for this. Worse, the new site was unwieldy, the search function was a joke (and NEVER fixed) and community members started to dwindle...

They also made it so that the 3D games, which were single person and installed on everyone's computers, HAD to sign in and BE ONLINE before they could play the game. It was a nonsense. It meant that the game couldn't be played if you had a poor internet connection or an outage. And when Thrixxx also had an outage, which started to be more and more frequent. We BEGGED them to issue a patch so we could play off line but they refused, saying it was done to stop pirates!?!

BUT they did promise that should they decide to no longer run the 3DSV game platform they would issue that patch for all the users that had paid for the game in the first place.

THEN they announced a new game- a fully interactive room driven game called CHATHOUSE, an online only environment.

Which none of us had asked for.

Where is the 3dSV update we asked? It's coming soon was the initial response. And it never did arrive.

More people left the platform and the community.

Developments came a virtual stand-still on the 3dSV platform, and Chathouse failed to make a dent in the online market, though Thrixxx continued to pump money into it.

Ten years on, Thrixxx announced that they were selling the company. They didn't tell us the community of course. We had to find out on a bulletin board on another platform.

Finally, an announcement went up saying the servers would be shut down on May 21st until migration to the new company was complete.

And even here, at the last, THRIXXX broke every commitment and failed their remaining community. The announcement was made on the 16th of May and the servers were shut down THEN & THERE (not on the 21st so people couldn't even get their content saved). And, even worse, NO patch was issued for us standalone long suffering users of the standalone games.

At this stage we STILL have no contact details for the new owners, no updates on when, how or if the games that most of us use (ie the standalone games) will be back.

The message to the new owners is clear: take the community for granted at your peril. Listen to us and thrive, ignore us and lose money.

Now let's see what happens next.