Gamevance - Gamer Beware

Today I spent some time searching for more free-to-play sites. I'll add them to the Game Sites list and review them when I have a chance.

But during my search I came across a site called Gamevance. On that site you win prizes for having the highest daily or monthly score for a game. It looks quite nice and professional. BUT, in order to play at all, you have to download a program from them that will allow them to put pop-ups and pop-unders on your screen.

They are not secretive about this. It's very clear that if you want to play, you *must* download the program and that it will put ads on your screen.

So I searched for "Gamevance scam" to see what would come up. Low and behold, quite a few things appeared! Several people claim to have had issues with the pop-ups and problems with removing the program. One person said that one of the ads he saw somehow latched onto his facebook page and spammed his friends with the same ad. Quite a few sites list the gamevance program as a virus. And a few pages provided detailed instructions on how to remove the program, which was nice.

On the other hand, several people also said that they got their prize(s) and that they had no trouble with removing the program. They claim that it's a completely legit site.

Maybe it's perfectly safe. Maybe it isn't. But I tend to think that if there's that much smoke about, then something is probably burning. And since there are several free-to-play sites that don't require you to download anything, why take the risk?

I'm not going to play Gamevance. But I wanted to bring this up since you may find it listed if you search for more free-to-win games.

Be safe.