How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases • Hacker News Board

Re: How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases

#61

Post by dlhavema » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 6:17 PM UTC

Osiris wrote: post #42

dlhavema wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i very much agree, i played an old web-game back in college called OGame that came out before the "pay to win" model, but the basic premise was the same, the more you login the better you do. and what's best was you had to protect your stuff ( planets/fleets ) 24/7 from people from all different time zones.. it very much became an addiction...

I played a web game for a while that was free to play but had a subscription model that gave you features that made management of a large number of assets (villages) easier to do than in the free version. I played for free for a long time until I ended up with so many resources to manage that I couldn't do it well anymore. I had to pony up the $6/mn to get the advanced features. The problem with these small transacti…

funny, the game i played had the same thing, it was a bit cheaper though, 9$ for three months.. same effect..

i'm seeing similarities with the clash of clans model to the idea of putting a frog(player) in a pot of water(game) and slowly turning up the temperature(tiny payments), until its boiling and they don't notice the total sum of the payments along the way...

Re: How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases

#62

Post by dlhavema » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 6:20 PM UTC

ebbv wrote: post #59

andypants wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the game will be won/dominated by the people willing to sink the most money into it, rather than the player who invests the most time/thought/skill/etc. What is wrong with that? Some people have more money to invest than time, and others the opposite. Find a game that suits you.

Because it's not really a game then, it's a store where you buy a thing that says "Winner" on it.

and you have to keep buying the items or the "Winner status" goes away..

Re: How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases

#63

Post by chc » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 6:45 PM UTC

anonymoushn wrote: post #49

Pxtl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, you can't really blame Riot for needing to grab more money than Valve. Valve has deep pockets and is willing to take a small profit if it means they survive in the long run. Also, Valve's brand is strong-enough that they have players beating a path to their door no matter what they publish. Riot has none of these options. Every player they earn on the strength and reputation of the game alone. They…

S2 apparently does not need to sell HoN heroes to stay in business, though they did sell the game for a while.

> S2 apparently does not need to sell HoN heroes to stay in business

That remains to be seen. Do we even know if HoN is profitable? My impression is that League of Legends is the only MOBA to turn a profit so far, but I could be mistaken. Based on how drastically they've altered the game and the changing business models, I certainly didn't get the impression that S2 was satisfied with HoN's returns.

Re: How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases

#64

Post by chc » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 6:48 PM UTC

sardonicbryan wrote: post #35

Pxtl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, you can't really blame Riot for needing to grab more money than Valve. Valve has deep pockets and is willing to take a small profit if it means they survive in the long run. Also, Valve's brand is strong-enough that they have players beating a path to their door no matter what they publish. Riot has none of these options. Every player they earn on the strength and reputation of the game alone. They…

Riot is now part of Tencent, which has a market cap of about $90B. http://allthingsd.com/20110204/chinas-tencent-buys-riot-game... http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=0700.HK

I'm not sure what you mean for us to infer from this. Riot is owned by Tencent, but that doesn't mean Tencent is willing to take a temporary loss on Riot like Valve is willing to do with Dota 2.

Re: How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases

#65

Post by jkkorn » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 7:01 PM UTC

I read somewhere, a while ago that games like Clash of Clans are really just payment apps disguised as entertainment.

On a somewhat related note, I tried playing Clash of Clans for a month and once the time to complete a building took too unbearingly long, i just became disinterested in the game and opened it less often.

Feels like there some variation of the law of diminishing returns, or at least a system suggested by the post that weeds out the patient and stimulates instant gratification.

Glad I didn't get addicted :)

Re: How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases

#66

Post by not_that_noob » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 7:05 PM UTC

Can I buy HN karma points like this? PG could clean out :)

I feel like I am addicted to increasing my karma points sometimes. I submit so many things and so few of them get up there on the main page. The one thing that made it to the main page got me addicted to trying, but sadly the ones subsequent to them haven't had the same effect.

And imagine - instead of flame wars, we could deploy little hacker-warrior-bots!

Re: How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases

#67

Post by jmyc » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 7:13 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #21

trin_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LoL is horrible compared to Dota2 in this regard. You cant play every hero and with added points you get addex abilities. Dota2 micro-transactions only pay for cosmetic items that you can (mostly) also get via trading with other players or as a drop after each finished game.

On the other hand, you can't really blame Riot for needing to grab more money than Valve. Valve has deep pockets and is willing to take a small profit if it means they survive in the long run. Also, Valve's brand is strong-enough that they have players beating a path to their door no matter what they publish. Riot has none of these options. Every player they earn on the strength and reputation of the game alone. They…

> On the other hand, you can't really blame Riot...

Of course not, they are free to employ whichever model they want. I think his reply was more directed at the statement: "I think League of Legends or maybe Team Fortress 2 are about as good as it gets..."

LoL is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of "purely cosmetic" and "pay to win" while Dota 2 is on the "purely cosmetic" end. So in the category of Dota-like games, Dota 2 is perhaps as good at it gets, in terms of its free-to-play model.

Re: How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases

#68

Post by War_Machine » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 7:15 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #21

trin_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LoL is horrible compared to Dota2 in this regard. You cant play every hero and with added points you get addex abilities. Dota2 micro-transactions only pay for cosmetic items that you can (mostly) also get via trading with other players or as a drop after each finished game.

On the other hand, you can't really blame Riot for needing to grab more money than Valve. Valve has deep pockets and is willing to take a small profit if it means they survive in the long run. Also, Valve's brand is strong-enough that they have players beating a path to their door no matter what they publish. Riot has none of these options. Every player they earn on the strength and reputation of the game alone. They…

Who says Valve doesn't make a lot of profit from Dota 2?

My guess is that Riot simply didn't bother changing the model they went for in the first place for LoL, but I think Dota 2 has proved to be a great business model for Valve.

I'll be fair, I haven't seen any numbers from Valve, but if you pay any attention to the selling and trading of TF2 and Dota 2 items on Steam and many other places, you'd notice that people are outright making a living out of the whole Steam ecosystem.

Re: How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases

#69

Post by andypants » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 7:27 PM UTC

ebbv wrote: post #59

andypants wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the game will be won/dominated by the people willing to sink the most money into it, rather than the player who invests the most time/thought/skill/etc. What is wrong with that? Some people have more money to invest than time, and others the opposite. Find a game that suits you.

Because it's not really a game then, it's a store where you buy a thing that says "Winner" on it.

If the developers put themselves in a non-game category of the app store, it would be alright?

Whether something is a game or not isn't defined by how much money you need to spend to play it (or to win it).

Plenty of games and hobbies require purchases to play, and plenty give better chances of winning if you spend more.

Re: How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases

#70

Post by ChikkaChiChi » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 7:56 PM UTC

Plague Inc. is a great example of a pay model I think works wonderfully.

If you want cheats or you want to skip content, you can pay. If you want advanced expansion packs, you can pay. But you don't have to.

The concept of a "free" game has been completely destroyed by garbage like this.