Apparently. It's an in-game pop-up.

More info at Gamasutra.

This is reaching epic levels of... obscene.

hehe

and when you click the 1-4 star button, you do not rate the game but get this:
https://twitter.com/mike_robbo/status/431381007393357824

EA CEO: Let's make a new Dungeon Keeper game!

Devil: Good idea, I can provide a sequel if you sign this little contract.

EA CEO: Done!

Devil: Thank you, here is your game.

I shall name this monstrosity Greedius

EA CEO: Thank you so much, it's even better than we had been able to think of by ourselves!

Devil: Ok now it's time to honor your part of the deal, "HAND OVER YOUR SOUL!"

EA CEO: Haha, I don't have any.

Devil: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

EA is the new zynga

I'm waiting for EA to trademark the words "dungeon" and "keeper".

What amazes me the most is, that a giant company like EA is acting like a very shady, crooked letterbox company. Not that I expected anything remotely altruistic from them, but that is sooo low, I'm almost speechless. Yet another EA title to skip, meh. I'll just wait for War for the Overworld.
If they keep this up, even the devil will bend over for EA rather sooner than later.

Well in all honesty, EA has done a lot of good things, gog has a large part of their catalog and we got most of the expansions that go with it free (if you already owned the game), you can get games like BF1942 for free of them etc.
They only seem to be hell bent on grinding the last $ out of gamers who want to buy their new stuff, which makes me wonder.

*vomits*

Ok so I tried the game myself now, on Android tablet.

In the tutorial levels, it quite often teaches you how to spend those gems to proceed, I think in the tutorials you have to use at least a few of them in order to proceed. Just so that you learn how to use them.

In one tutorial mission I had to summon 5 trolls. Hmmm, have to wait 4 minutes in the menu screen for them to arrive, unless I pay my way out with the gems. So I decided to wait. Dum-dee-dum.

Finally I am done with the tutorial levels, and the first proper level apparently starts. Ok, at first it doesn't seem too bad, albeit the game itself seems quite dumbed down from the original, like that you can mark only that many blocks to be mined that you have imps (two at a time, as I had two imps). Not too bad, takes a few seconds to mine one block.

But then I suddenly get to a block that takes 4 hours to mine. At that point I stopped playing. Even without the micro-transactions, I was actually getting bored with the game.

The thing that is not clear to me, can I exit the game, and even shut down my tablet completely, and still the time will decrease there? Or should I have the game running and eating battery, just in order to get the block mined away? I presume, and hope, it is the former. I didn't log in to Google+ though for the game, I hope that is not needed.

The funny thing is that quite often I got bored waiting also in the original Dungeon Keeper game. Like, say, I got a couple of level 1 vampires from the graveyard. Too bad that training them to be 10th level uberlords takes like 40 minutes in real time. So in a sense, even the original game had too much waiting, but it didn't offer any way out. And maybe there was a reason why it would take that long time, like that you had to keep your gold balance ok during that time too, and make sure enemies were walled out and couldn't attack in the meantime.

But still, waiting was quite often the name of the game in the original game too. But nowhere near these levels of "wait 4-25 hours, just in order to mine one freaking block".

I guess I'm done with that game. Back to the original Dungeon Keeper, now I am in the second last level of Deeper Dungeons (which I hate by the way, as in that level you have to control a freaking spider manually, with no way of summoning more monsters).

Oh you didn't actually have to wait most of the time. Well you did have to do so to play the game optimally, but really, getting your minions to level 10 is an overkill

Yes, the first Dragon Age was really good...