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

#71

Post by danielweber » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 8:24 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…

That sounds almost exactly like the LoU model.

One good thing there is that they explicitly limit how many items you can use, and you can earn the items in game. Still, anyone trying to rush the start of the game probably wants to use them. Sometimes I fantasize about blowing forty bucks on that. I think I've been skinner boxed.

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

#72

Post by Ologn » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 8:25 PM UTC

vittore wrote: post #4

There is one quote that explains everything: >> Jorge Yao, the game’s undisputed champion, figures he has spent north of $2500 in real money >> on buying gems, and according to back-of-the-envelope calculations, the cost of fully fitting out your virtual >> village is on the order of $5000 when you include walls. It’s little wonder the top clans leaderboard is full of >> players like “> >> ruling House of Khalifa). S…

From 1998 to 2000 I worked at a startup where the IT staff all obsessively played Age of Empires. There were two ways of playing - RM (random map, regular match) which most people played and DM (death match) which is what we usually played.

We got to be pretty good as a team, but were never consistently as good as the masters of AOE DM, Team Sudden Death ( http://web.archive.org/web/20000816002743/http://www.laseref... ). In a 2-on-2 or 3-on-3 against them, they would almost always beat us.

One of the rumours that we heard at the time was that some of the children of one of the emirs in the UAE were crazy about Age of Empires, particularly DM mode. We heard a story that they had flown one or more SD members to the UAE for a week or so to teach them how to be master DM players. We heard that SD got very well paid for this tutorial.

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

#73

Post by will_work4tears » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 8:27 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…

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

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

#74

Post by danielweber » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 8:35 PM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #17

simias wrote: post #13

So it's the very definition of "pay2win". What I don't understand is how they get people to keep playing once they realize they don't need skill to win, but rather a valid credit card number. Certainly it must feel like using cheatcodes? The victories must feel empty and you'd get bored pretty quickly, at least I think I would.

I haven't played this particular games, but I played a few that sounded similar. Sometimes people seem to get motivated not so much by winning but by extracting vengeance on people who pissed them off. Even games without an explicit pay2win mechanic often end up that way due to black markets that pop up outside of the game for trading accounts etc.

Sometimes people seem to get motivated not so much by winning but by extracting vengeance on people who pissed them off.

We're still primates who engage in petty status games. And, dammit, we're the best at it.

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

#75

Post by danielweber » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 8:38 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.

A game that rewards who can spend the most time in it isn't really a game, then, either.

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

#76

Post by jholman » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 8:52 PM UTC

babuskov wrote: post #38

simias wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 this proxy metric
  * pay-to-win games are "bad" (personal subjective perspective)
  * if I don't have to pay for a game, I probably won't (sorry!)
  * if I'm paying per-month for the game, I feel artificial pressure to play it...
  * ... and if I stop playing, I'll cancel
  * ... so I can't casually pick it up 3 months later
  * ... and I think maybe most people have a limited monthly-subscription budget
  * games that have free options have better word-of-mouth marketing

And a few observations derived from these:

  * gotta have a demo
  * the demo needs to demonstrate the actual gameplay
  * getting demo-length right is really hard
  * if you have the infrastructure to charge $2/month, you've got options

With all that in mind, here's what I would do (hopefully will do, one day):

  * lots of gameplay should be free
  * where it makes sense, put roadblocks that players will hit after a while
  * .... and then some more after some more while
  * charge say $5 to get past each roadblock
  * have say 5 total roadblocks
  * to assuage cheapskates (5-years-ago me!), give alternatives to paying real money
  * maybe crazy grinding?
  * even better would be if you could find a way to give players credit-towards-roadblocks if they are helpful to the game community, or to game development

Be up-front about all of this: "Early parts of the game are free! To feed my family I'll be charging progressively for access to the later parts of the game, but I'll never charge a given player more than $25" (or some other promise you are willing to keep)

---------

By the way, $20 is a lot for an indie game, especially up-front. The humblebundle this week includes ELEVEN games, including several great ones, and the "average price" (unlocks all 11 games) is around $6. So no, I will not pay $20 for your game, are you crazy? Instead I'll go buy the humblebundle for $10, give half of that to charity so I feel like a social justice crusader, throw away 54% of the games in the bundle, and STILL have dozens of hours of gameplay, and $10 in my pocket for the next humblebundle.

Yes, I'm a cheapskate. But this is the reality of the market at work. I'm not saying your game isn't "worth" $20. I bet your game is more fun than a movie-plus-snacks, and people pay $20 for that, right? But your game will be compared to games selling for $10 or less.

Man, I just realized I sound like I'm trying to talk you out of a career in game-dev, and that's not what I want (as a gamer).

---------

One more thought:

You said "(not necessarily more powerful, but rather more diverse)". Yeah, listen, when you play my Rock Paper Scissors online game, you get Rock for free, and pay for Paper and Scissors. They're not necessarily more powerful, just more diverse.

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

#77

Post by jamie_ca » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 8:56 PM UTC

babuskov wrote: post #47

shardling wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Kingdom of Loathing's model seems to do pretty well. (And they've been at it for 10 years now, well before "free to play" was a thing.) You can pay for in-game items, but you can also buy them with in-game currency[1]. So you could let players pay to get the special items/upgrades instantly , but still let hardcore players get them without paying through some sort of grinding. So long as you don't have to exchang…

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.

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

#78

Post by swivelmaster » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 9:04 PM UTC

babuskov wrote: post #38

simias wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

Hey, I've worked on some similar games and can give you some tips - contact me if you're interested.

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

#79

Post by swivelmaster » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 9:13 PM UTC

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 my personal favorites: Fieldrunners 1 & 2, the Angry Birds games, 10000000, Doom, Wolf3D, the Doom and Wolf3D RPG games, and my personal favorites, I Dig It and I Dig It: Expeditions.

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

#80

Post by jpatokal » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 9:30 PM UTC

jamieb wrote: post #41

"... I can’t really complain about the hours of entertainment I’ve gotten in exchange." "Yet I still can’t help but cringe as I run into all the ways the game is intentionally crippled to get you to pay up, and the way its Pavlovian triggers to come back for more operate on fear." So, sir, you like war games. You observe that this game makes you cringe, and is designed entirely to make you pay up through the experien…

OP here. I paid the $4.99 quite early on, when I was still at the "joy" stage and before I realized the full extent of manipulation going. But I don't regret it: CoC is a good game, and I enjoyed playing it earlier on. I've now just reached the stage where it's pretty much impossible to keep playing without paying.

And for what it's worth, I paid for Master of Orion back in the day when it was still shiny and new, and was quite happy to fork out $15 for the full version of Minecraft, the most "joyful" game I've seen in a long time.