Intrusive Advertisement + Harmful Marketing Schemes
Membership ads, in the manner they were introduced, were always a problem with Prodigy. The frequent ads have gotten Prodigy banned from school districts. Now, you may wonder, all games have pop-up ads, what's the problem with that being the case in Prodigy?

Prodigy is an Educational App

Frequent ads are what will typically turn off a teacher from incorporating a learning tool in their classroom. Most school internet will block ads, images, etc, as much as possible to curtail a learning environment.

Bombarding a child with 15-second advertisements after every battle (that's 1/3rd of your time spent in a rift run!) is not what a teacher would be happy to see.

Prodigy has to advertise its memberships as they are a for-profit company and the money is needed for it to not only keep the servers up, but afford its artists, programmers, and so forth to continue maintaining and updating games.

However, the way they've been incorporating advertisements is...not only excessive, but even more deceptive than they've used to be.

Like before, Prodigy makes use of "School Mode" to change what ads are displayed and how often, to appeal to teachers.
Even when playing from Home, if a child plays during school hours, the "School Mode" ad plan is applied instead.
The actual ads (seen from Home Mode) are deceptive, putting member-locked pets in situations to appear to be one-shotting bosses. This demonstrates "powerful pets" to convince non-members that they are at a disadvantage.

If you "play from school," you see a helpful little reminder to write down your password so you can play from home. Children are forgetful, the reminder seems innocent enough, and saves from the annoyance of being re-added to a class every time a child forgets their password.

But as soon as you play at home, as the game encourages you, the little videos don't go away. Instead, they are bombarded at the same frequency as the play at home videos...except this time telling you to purchase a membership. In fact, Prodigy has notes in the source detailing improving the purchase screen to make it even more convenient for parents to buy their child a membership with a seamless transition back in-game.

This is a psychological technique used to market Gacha games.

By making it easier and easier to buy subscriptions and micro-transactions (for magicoin), the game aims to desensitise children and their parents to spending. Many games also take advantage of this, but in my not-so-humble opinion, as a low-income adult, this should not be in a game my (theoretical) child plays to do their math homework.

These videos are currently in beta (and frustratingly on my account), but it's not a good direction for the game.

Furthermore, items purchased with magicoin have the price hidden from the player, even when not member-locked, to convince players they need a membership to purchase them.

From an editor standpoint, it's annoying to have such information hidden.

From a player's standpoint, it's deceptive and prevents them from knowing if it's worth saving for.

Then magicoins were removed from the treasure track to increase pressure on nonmembers to at least purchase magicoin.

Okay Delta, you're complaining but do YOU know any better way of funding Prodigy?
...yes, actually.

Revert to pop-ups that are only triggered upon trying to use/interact with member-locked items.
This would be more acceptable to schools and less intrusive.

• Rework the battle pass (treasure track) to only have two tiers (normal players/members) and instead, offer additional benefits for having a membership + completing the battle pass.
  This is done in several other games and is more effective than several tiers, as it leads to the tiring cycle of "I'm not paying enough for XYZ???"
  For example, hoyoverse games offer an additional reward of currency, a special weapon, or a cosmetic item for completing every 10 ranks of their battle pass as a subscriber. Nonsubscribers still get something nice every 10, so they aren't treated poorly.
• Instead of having two tiers for daily rewards, have scaling rewards for members.
  This is similar to when they had streaks + increased charges for charged levels. Members got what non-members did, but more, which seemed more appealing than without.
• Incorporate cosmetic features that are appealing, but do not actually provide an advantage in gameplay.
  For example, allowing a player to equip an item cosmetically, allowing them to dress up their wizard without the worry of decreased stats. Although it would be nice for a nonmember to have, it's not crucial/unfair.
• Bringing back physical merch.
  Do I really need to elaborate?

And I can honestly think of several other things. Although my marketing certification is for marketing across social media, I am still educated in this regard. Even if I wasn't, it doesn't take people long to pick up common marketing strategies, even if they don't know the psychology behind them.

Frankly, Prodigy with an actual gacha is a better marketing strategy than what we currently see in-game, and that's just as predatory, if not more. At least with a gacha marketing strategy, non-subscribers can still navigate the game just fine enough, while the company makes substantial enough profit to not have to constantly beg their players for money.

The current strategy is not just detrimental, but makes Prodigy look desperate.

... Engagement.
Prodigy is infamous at this point for making drastic, unnecessary changes to the game as soon as player engagement decreases. Honestly, being worried about their investment not being worth the return cost is valid; however, spending hundreds making and hyping things like Harmony Island, Crystal Caverns, the Ice Tower, etc, only to completely remove them out of nowhere...

That's an absurd waste of money, time, and resources.

You're losing more money from scrapping something you already spent the money on releasing and marketing than getting fewer membership sales than you expected. The main point of Harmony Island wasn't even to sell memberships; it was to expand upon the storyline so they didn't have to end the game so soon.

Now, they ended the game, regretted it, and incorporated a very minimally fleshed-out storyline with Dragon Isle.

They're losing player engagement. Older players who played for nostalgia don't even play anymore. So now they have a new beta feature—Prodigy Game Islands—which offers you bland mobile game rip-offs with math haphazardly thrown in every few minutes to be able to just barely pass them off as educational.

🤨

Honestly, minigames are not too bad of an idea as they encourage puzzle-solving skills and give players something to do when they're bored and still have to do Prodigy for their homework. However, they're low effort, most assets are AI-generated—hell, many of the leaked assets for the main games are also AI.

I am genuinely convinced Prodigy might actually be losing a significant amount of money with how desperate and last-ditch effort-ish their marketing strategy is. This isn't even an act of greed; this is just sloppy, careless, and a last word put in before they crumble under the weight of the economy.

So...what now?
Honestly. I understand why they stuck to an online game all these years. It's accessible and makes sense for an Educational setting. This much was expressed in the last rant.

[The last rant is not included in this update, but it covered shortcomings of the game design.]

However, Prodigy's response, and what I mostly focused on in the last rant, makes it painstakingly clear that Prodigy is limited by its model.

At this point, I am suprised that they haven't made a second, non-educational game as their primary cash cow while continuing support for Prodigy Math/English. Making a downloaded game that's either purchased or has an improved marketing model game, as a competitor to things like... Wizarding World, which is subject to controversy and several individuals are looking for an alternative to it, creating a game set in the Prodigy world for older players would earn them...a lot of money without this whole mess.

The issue is that they're trying to make education their main source of income, when education-based games have, and usually are always non-profit, and when they're not (like Collegeboard), their harmful practices hurt or disadvantage students more than they help.

(Not so fun fact! The SAT exam was originally designed to disadvantage POC students so they wouldn't go to college. :/)

Prodigy really needs to step away from making Prodigy Math their profit, and explore alternative ventures, as a very capable game company. If they started taking a better direction and opened hiring for a new game, I would...honestly gladly apply to work for the company and playtest, because as a Prodigy player since the 2010s, I want to see this game thrive.