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

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

#81

Post by jpatokal »

thangsten wrote: post #48
kyrra wrote: post #14

I've been playing Clash of Clans for a few weeks now. I have to say, it's a pretty fun game. Most games that follow a similar layout and design are no where near as polished. The developer behind this game did a really good job making it fun to play. While I agree that the general formula laid out in the blog post, there are a lot of more subtle game mechanics that I feel help to balance the game (though I am no wher…

The way this article is written leads me to believe the writer has not played the game for long enough to make a fair assessment on the gems currency. I have been playing this game for roughly over a month, and put $10 into gems in the beginning. My roommate started a little over a month before me, and refuses to put money into the game. The amount of time to invest into buildings/resources/farming scales up with how…

I was at your stage not too long ago, and trust me, you simply haven't played long enough. Come back and revisit this when you're at Town Hall 8+ and building anything of interest requires 2M+ gold or elixir.

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

#82

Post by babuskov »

jholman wrote: post #76
babuskov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm creating a strategy game right now and I'm facing this dilemma. I'd like to get $20 from each customer during game lifetime, but it seems that it would be easier to make it free to play and then charge for something in the game. And it's hard to charge for anything that would not make you advance in the game, otherwise it's cosmetics and you're not charging for the game, but almost the same as asking for a donati…

Some thoughts about the economics (and ethics) of games: * if a game isn't fun (to me), I shouldn't have to pay for it * if a game is fun, I should pay for it * generally, "better" games deserve more money (non-linear) * ... but I'm skeptical that $500 is ever the right price (e.g. for every LoL champ) * "time spent playing" is a half-assed proxy for "better"... * ... but not if you rig your game mechanics around thi…

Thanks for this comment, it was really useful to me, at least, it gives a better perspective what players want. And it also confirms that people would not pay $20 in advance for a game. But roadblocks seem like a good idea. Maybe I'll try that.

And the last paragraph is hilarious ;) Well put.

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

#83

Post by shardling »

jamie_ca wrote: post #77
babuskov wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the KoL tip. My game is really rather simple card game strategy, with strict rules and requires skill to play, no luck involved. Players don't have "decks", they all share the same deck of cards. Basically, it plays like chess, all players are equal. So, there's no room for in-game economy between players. Currently I'm considering the following models: 1. pay for some additional units (cards) which would…

Avoid #2 at all costs. Nothing drives me away from games faster than "Please wait X time (or pay more money) before you can continue playing," whether it's a daily action limit, or some kind of "endurance" hack, or whatnot. You want people to invest themselves in your game, and being multiplayer having more players online at once is only ever a good thing. Turning away players is counter-productive.

Notably, the designers of KoL have also abided by that -- your actions per day are limited, but there's no way to directly turn real world money into more turns. (There are indirect ways, but you can almost always get them cheaply with in-game currency as well.)

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

#84

Post by kip_ »

jpatokal wrote: post #81
thangsten wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way this article is written leads me to believe the writer has not played the game for long enough to make a fair assessment on the gems currency. I have been playing this game for roughly over a month, and put $10 into gems in the beginning. My roommate started a little over a month before me, and refuses to put money into the game. The amount of time to invest into buildings/resources/farming scales up with how…

I was at your stage not too long ago, and trust me, you simply haven't played long enough. Come back and revisit this when you're at Town Hall 8+ and building anything of interest requires 2M+ gold or elixir.

Have to agree here. I managed to avoid gem purchases up to this point, but now trying to gather up 2M gold or elixir means I have to carefully pick other castles with more than 200K elixir to attack to make it worth my time and dedicate more than a solid hour to play at one time, otherwise I'll get attacked and lose too much of my stockpile in exchange for a paltry 12-15 hours immunity, during which I'll only generate 216-270K of resources.

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

#85

Post by grayrest »

jholman wrote: post #76
babuskov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm creating a strategy game right now and I'm facing this dilemma. I'd like to get $20 from each customer during game lifetime, but it seems that it would be easier to make it free to play and then charge for something in the game. And it's hard to charge for anything that would not make you advance in the game, otherwise it's cosmetics and you're not charging for the game, but almost the same as asking for a donati…

Some thoughts about the economics (and ethics) of games: * if a game isn't fun (to me), I shouldn't have to pay for it * if a game is fun, I should pay for it * generally, "better" games deserve more money (non-linear) * ... but I'm skeptical that $500 is ever the right price (e.g. for every LoL champ) * "time spent playing" is a half-assed proxy for "better"... * ... but not if you rig your game mechanics around thi…

Pay gated content has been tried in the MMO space to varying degrees of success. The main problem with it is that the gates split your community, effectively reducing the userbase of your game. As a non-pay example, take WoW (I did Vanilla->WotLK) where Blizzard continuously reduced barriers to entry for content so that a larger portion of the playerbase could experience it. I honestly haven't seen a gated solution where everybody is happy but I haven't surveyed every game out there and gating works well for single player games.

The other issue is that studios generally feel a need to put a carrot on the other side of the gate. At the moment, I'm tracking Warframe and the current update has (essentially) pay gated zones with a reagent drop that drives both additional character progression and player housing. Neither is necessary to complete any of the other content in the game–the game has a mechanics problem where weapon damage scaling is excessive, the relative ease of content clearing is one–and the playerbase is whining about P2W.

My inclination would be something like:

    * Subscription based
    * Sub payment produces in-game tradeable item, time added on use
    * Subscription use suspends X days after not logging in
    * Payment auto-renewal only triggers when 2 days left
    * You start off with X weeks of playtime
This covers revenue, pay to win, real money trading, free players and (IMO) is both transparent and fair to players. It's basically a F2Pish variant of EVE's PLEX system. The challenge then becomes maintaining engagement and having the economy under control meaning that currency remains useful and inflation remains reasonable.

I haven't actually seen it done, probably because it's not a reliable recurring revenue stream like traditional subscriptions and isn't that strong of an impulse buy. I have seen somewhat similar ideas in a game with limited moves per day but from memory (been a while, blanking on the name) they also used the time item as a catalyst for weapon upgrades which for me veered too far into P2W so I dropped.

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

#86

Post by cageface »

swivelmaster wrote: post #79
cageface wrote: post #25

I really hope this game model suffers the same kind of crash that felled the arcade business in the 80s. At some point I think people are going to collectively realize that they're being manipulated and burn out en masse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash... The overwhelming dominance of this kind of app in the app store has killed a lot of my enthusiasm for mobile, unfortunately. There are…

There won't be a similar "crash" because there's no "race to the bottom" in prices. There could be a shakeout where there are a lot of low-quality games that fail and take their companies down with them, but that shouldn't affect the existing games that are already making money. Also, if you think these games are all that's available, you're missing out. There are plenty of great games for free and purchase. Some of…

The 85 crash wasn't triggered by a race to the bottom in prices. It was triggered by a glut of games that just weren't much fun to play.

Sound familiar?

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

#87

Post by Osiris »

will_work4tears wrote: post #73
Osiris wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds like Tribal Wars. Fun game, but after the first couple villages requires quite the increasing time commitment.

Hit the nail on the head. That's what it was. Fun but I ended up giving up my account to another player to manage and haven't looked back.

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

#88

Post by giulianob »

simias wrote: post #34
cageface wrote: post #25

I really hope this game model suffers the same kind of crash that felled the arcade business in the 80s. At some point I think people are going to collectively realize that they're being manipulated and burn out en masse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash... The overwhelming dominance of this kind of app in the app store has killed a lot of my enthusiasm for mobile, unfortunately. There are…

What really annoys me is when a game that might potentially interest me chooses to go the pay2win way. For instance, tribes:ascend. I wanted to get into it but forums were full of people saying each time they released a paid upgrade the balance went FUBAR. What annoys me the most is there's no way to do it "the old way" and pay a bigger sum of money once and get the full game without having to upgrade for every singl…

I'm an indie game dev working on Tribal Hero ( http://tribalhero.com ). I've actually been getting a lot of players because they played similar games which are pay to win and we aren't and never will be. We'll have paid graphical customizations you can purchase but nothing that you can get an advantage in the game.
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