Opinion: Hey Spotify, 'Eat this Playlist' is cool & all for nostalgic Snake fans, but can you please restore the heart button?

For most people my age, Snake is possibly the first popular tech they encountered. This explains the flood of nostalgic memories after Spotify launched a Snake-like game dubbed ‘Eat this Playlist’ in a recent update.

These are people who either owned or interacted with a Nokia feature phone at some point in their lives — phones that came preloaded with the game from 1998.

I’m no gamer, but I have fond memories of passing time with Snake Xenzia on my Nokia 1110, though I’d easily get frustrated once the snake started bumping into itself forcing me to start again.

This is what Spotify is trying to emulate with the new ‘Eat this Playlist’ game whose gameplay adopts an interesting musical twist.

Unless you’re living under a rock, you must have at least heard of it. If not, well, you’ll be surprised to learn that Spotify has added a Snake game right inside the app, if you can find it.

Like Snake, Spotify’s Eat the Playlist involves feeding an ever-growing playlist while steering it in a way that avoids crashing into obstacles.

Rather than apples or eggs, you’ll be feeding on individual tracks. Once the snake devours a track, the next one appears as food and begins playing.

Unlike Snake Xenzia, Spotify has spiced up things to make Eat this Playlist much more fun, among them a changing background color to match the album art when in action.

What makes Spotify’s version better and less frustrating for yours truly is that when the snake dies, I don’t have to restart. Instead, I only have to hit ‘Try again’ and the game picks up from where I left off, meaning no progress lost.

No doubts that playing Eat this Playlist brought some nostalgic memories not just for me, but plenty of others out there too. But is it what I wanted first from Spotify at this point in time? What about you?

I certainly had other priorities in mind. And evidently, some of you share similar thoughts too.

https://twitter.com/antlerstrap/status/1670413756101165056

If given choice, I would have picked the return of the heart button for liked songs over some game that only serves to quench the thirst of nostalgic Snake fans and nothing more. And I’m pretty convinced many others would too.

spotify users: please bring back the heart 🙁

spotify: hehe snake game

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In fact, a recent tweet aimed a jibe at Spotify for switching from a heart button to a plus icon for liked songs, with most people agreeing that it was one of the biggest downgrades of all in recent times.

And despite the growing calls for Spotify to bring back the heart button, the company seems preoccupied with other ideas.

The time, money and effort spent on creating the ‘Eat this Playlist’ game could have been redirected to a more worthy course. Unfortunately, you and I don’t call the shots at Spotify.

“hearting” a song is way more meaningful than “liking” a song
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im gonna kill myself if spotify doesnt bring the heart back
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why does spotify keep changing the layout please just give the heart back
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can spotify please get the heart back for likes songs??! cause why even remove it in the first place?! the (+) isn’t working for me sorry
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Make no mistake, some people are really sold with the new Eat this Playlist addition, and I’m honestly happy for them. This is also not intended to trash Spotify’s efforts to add a fun side to the music app.

However, I think Spotify bringing back the heart button would have enjoyed a much better reception compared to the Snake game, especially given how long people have been asking the company to restore this function.

It was such a useful tool, and I’m glad I still have it on my Android phone. Whether Spotify will restore it or not remains unclear, but the company will for sure bring back ability to see previously liked songs in track listings.

It’s always great to bring back some good old memories, but I don’t think adding a ‘Eat the Playlist’ game to Spotify is more significant than restoring the heart button.

Not to sound cynical, but people will likely forget about the game soon. The heart button, on the other hand, is a feature that many people had gotten used to for years, and it would be more useful to them than a mere game is.

Maybe Spotify needs to listen more to its fanbase and grant them their wishes rather than trying so hard to impress them, at times to the extend of breaking what’s isn’t broken.

Do let us know what you think in the comments and poll below.

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Original featured image source: Spotify

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