Facebook games and the companies behind them... such blatant ripoffs

[Armakuni]

You can try to argue it away as much as you like, in my opinion it's indisputable that Facebook generally (with the exception of games with actual gameplay, like Tetris and such) lack any kind of challenge (making sure you show up every so often to do your clicks isn't something I count as a challenge), they lack any depth, they lack originality (nearly all FB games are copies of some other games), and they're also in many cases really buggy.

They don't present you with any kind of storyline (maybe some lines here or there but nearly none) and no exciting gameplay objectives.

Really, the vast majority of these games consist of little but repeating the same tasks over and over, basically just grinding, and they are dependent on having constant updates with new items and all of that... since there really is no fun gameplay and as such, if the developer stopped continuously adding new things to buy and all of that, and instead just left the game as it is... then the game in question would very quickly drop in popularity and get pulled.

EDIT - another issue I have with these kinds of games is the 'freemium' model they're built on.
Logically, what follows from using a model where people can play for free and money is only made from having people voluntarily pay for advantages in the games, is that they will introduce as many annoying 'gameplay features' as possible that require you to pay real money to speed up or skip entirely... obviously they want to have people start playing the games in the first place so they need to strike some sort of balance.
One way I've understood this is often done, by the big name developers anyway, is simply to include very few of these annoying elements when a game is launched, causing the game to gain popularity quickly.
The way games on FB work, it's very much a system of popularity causing more popularity, and once a game has reached a certain userbase, they gradually start introducing annoying elements.
At this point, when the game has reached a certain size, its existing popularity alone will keep it afloat and there's no longer the same need to restrict the use of various annoying elements.

There's little doubt this is part of the design behind these games. If actually doing everything 'manually', without paying any real money, was a lot of fun... then people wouldn't be very likely to pay to speed it up or skip it entirely.

This is something that doesn't have to be a factor in 'normal' retail games, where you pay a price up-front and then that's it.
If anything it's the other way around... they want to try and make sure you have as much of a good time as possible while reducing whatever might feel annoying... giving you as good an impression of the developer as possible and making you more likely to buy their future games.

It seems to me Facebook developers are much less concerned with long time customer satisfaction, something I suspect is due to how they have such awesome access to so many people... it seems just bringing new people in, have them spend some money and then leave... rinse and repeat... is a model that actually makes some sense under such circumstances.