Early end to current promotions & a sale

[matthewkohlman]

Hi. I hope this is the right place. I just found the forums now after being puzzled by some app behavior I thought was a bug. Instead, two reading events & a "long-running hits sale" all ended at the end of August 31st.

Any ideas about why? I hope everything is ok with Tapas... My daughter and I became addicted over the last year or two (and invested a ton in stories...). We've never seen something like this before.

[luvsbooks]

Also curious about this sudden shut down of all promotions and gifts.
Regarding ending the promotions early - it creates a “bait and switch” problem for tapas so I’m concerned that they willingly took that step.

[lazyyyy]

Not only that, the gift passes and Monday fortune cookie have also disappeared.
Can’t help but wonder if they just decided to stop those events and gifts without prior notice, after all the announcements didn’t say anything about anything coming back.
One reading event talks about the fact that because claimed inks have being reached faster than they expected they choose to cancel it
The announcement for the “long-run hits sale” just talks about “unforeseen circumstances”, what does that even mean ?

[matthewkohlman]

Hi Lazyyyy. I missed that the Fortune Cookie is gone. I was up at midnight so I managed to get the (last? ) fortune cookie a few minutes after on one account. (I created my own account after my daughter always used up all of our "shared" ink.) I checked the other just now and it's not offered.

My collected but unused gift passes seem to all be there, showing up on Free Episodes.

I hope this is a momentary hiccup. All of the events and new series promos kept me active and finding (too many) series, but maybe there are financial issues. My biggest worry is that it will fail like Pocket.

[evalynn50]

This is sheer speculation on my part, but I’m worried that Tapas might be contemplating bankruptcy or restructuring. In the US, companies pending bankruptcy are not allowed to have sales, honor coupons or discounts, or do anything that might seem like they’re selling assets below value. This disappearance of all promotions is giving me the shivers..

Hopefully I’m wrong!

[matthewkohlman]

I don't really know.much about business or bankruptcy, but I had searched before and found that "Tapas is owned by Kakao Entertainment, a subsidiary of the South Korean tech giant Kakao." So, hopefully that would keep it from going bankrupt,being part of a much larger whole ...?

It also seems they paid so much for it ($810) pretty recently (2021), so hopefully they were looking at the long game.

On the other hand, my feeds have had a lot of stories about major, major shocks to the Korean stock market, particularly to other parts of the tech industry. So, who knows?

[lazyyyy]

For information, there seems to be people speculating on Reddit (I found 2 topics talking about the current issue, I looked for “tapas webtoon” on the website) don’t know if it can be helpful

[Elenariel]

I tried to contact Tapas on Ig, regarding the events.

My message: Hello, are the reading events coming back as well? Can you post an official update on those, please? So we know what to expect and we can work on our budgets... Otherwise there's no point in starting new series and new seasons...

Their reply: Hello, we’re grateful for your continued support of the Tapas community and its creators. At this time, there are no plans to discontinue the platform. Sales and events are currently paused while we review and optimize across the platform. Further details will follow as we finalize updates.

It makes little sense, for me, that they didn't warn us in advance, let's just hope this "optimization" works fast...

[aqueousErbium]

Thought I was having bugs in my app for over two weeks. I guess I'm glad that I'm not, but it really sucks to see the Fortune Cookie go without any notice that I can find.