Edit: Candy Crush
In: 3
Candy Crush* is built to be addictive. And you can only lose so many times in a row before you have reached your limit for the day and can’t play anymore unless you pay $0.99. SO a lot of people do that, because its cheap. And their payment is already linked their phone so they don’t have to think about it. And its addictive.
There may also be higher tiers that cost more that allow for more unlimited play.
$0.99 does not sound like a lot, but with millions of people playing, it adds up. In 2012, they made $604 million. Its gone down considerably, to a measly $10 million a year.
When you hear the term “micro-transactions,” this is what people are talking about.
I’m going to assume you mean candy crush.
Gameplay that’s easy to get into, but highly addictive. Life system makes it so that once you’re hooked, you’re more likely to buy lives, especially if you’ve been stuck on a level for too long and are just so close to beating it but always just a couple moves away.
they have advertisements, usually advertisers pay the dev or publisher to put ads in the app/game and then they pay the dev/publisher a certain amount of money for a certain amount of views. For example $1 per 1000 views, may not seem like much, but Candy Crush has 36 million downloads in android alone, if each downloader watch a single ad once, it’s already $36,000. The price can be more or less according to agreement.
so they put ad maybe once every two-three levels.
another way is the in-app purchase, where they sell “power ups” or “bonus” to make it easier to clear a level, then the devs will make on some kind of an impossible level or two, that’s nigh impossible to solve unless you buy a power up.
these are the two main methods for free games to make money.
Freemium games usually have a very very small percentage of players that end up spending a shit load of money on micro transactions in those games. Like an insane amount. Beyond that there’s advertising.
Whales and Small transactions, if you’ve got a player population of let’s say 10 million then a portion of them might buy a micro transaction such as extra lives which might cost let’s say, $1, well even if only 1% of players buy a micro transaction that’s still $100,000, but on average a player is going to take that offer a few times so multiply that by 5 – 10. Then there’s whales, people with more money than sense, who’ll spend tons of money because they can which can easily be $10,000 per whale. Mobile games are designed to draw in as many people as possible just long enough to buy a few MTX and their design basically guarantees a reasonable amount of transactions, so it scales quickly and gets through a lot of people, doubly so if the game gets popular like candy crush, clash of clans, cut the rope.
For the best explanation watch South Park S18 Episode 6 “Freemium isn’t free”. Sums it all up
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