<story><title>How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases</title><url>http://gyrovague.com/2013/06/05/time-is-money-how-clash-of-clans-earns-500000-a-day-with-in-app-purchases/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>babuskov</author><text>I&apos;m creating a strategy game right now and I&apos;m facing this dilemma. I&apos;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&apos;s hard to charge for anything that would not make you advance in the game, otherwise it&apos;s cosmetics and you&apos;re not charging for the game, but almost the same as asking for a donation.&lt;p&gt;Most people would like to play for free. This model enables you to attract more users, which means a larger pool of potential customers. For example, would you pay $20 for my game (see link at the end), or would you rather play for free and then pay $1-$2 a month for some stuff that advances your gameplay?&lt;p&gt;BTW, in case you&apos;re interested the game should be out in a month. See gos.bigosaur.com/cards.html for more info.</text></item><item><author>simias</author><text>What really annoys me is when a game that might potentially interest me chooses to go the pay2win way.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;What annoys me the most is there&apos;s no way to do it &quot;the old way&quot; and pay a bigger sum of money &lt;i&gt;once&lt;/i&gt; and get the full game without having to upgrade for every single new weapon. That&apos;s where you realize that the microtransaction model is a scam, because if you want to buy all the upgrades at once it would cost you several hundreds of dollars.&lt;p&gt;I wish they&apos;d go back to the older model of freeware demo + one time buy full game. I remember buying Doom that way.</text></item><item><author>cageface</author><text>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&apos;re being manipulated and burn out en masse.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The overwhelming dominance of this kind of app in the app store has killed a lot of my enthusiasm for mobile, unfortunately. There are a lot of very interesting things you could do with a pocket computer that&apos;s always online and equipped with a bunch of sensors but nobody cares because if you&apos;re not playing these kinds of slimy games with the rest of the top 20 you might as well not exist in the store.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jholman</author><text>Some thoughts about the economics (and ethics) of games:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  * if a game isn&apos;t fun (to me), I shouldn&apos;t have to pay for it
  * if a game is fun, I should pay for it
  * generally, &quot;better&quot; games deserve more money (non-linear)
  * ... but I&apos;m skeptical that $500 is ever the right price (e.g. for every LoL champ)
  * &quot;time spent playing&quot; is a half-assed proxy for &quot;better&quot;...
  * ... but not if you rig your game mechanics around this proxy metric
  * pay-to-win games are &quot;bad&quot; (personal subjective perspective)
  * if I don&apos;t have to pay for a game, I probably won&apos;t (sorry!)
  * if I&apos;m paying per-month for the game, I feel artificial pressure to play it...
  * ... and if I stop playing, I&apos;ll cancel
  * ... so I can&apos;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
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
And a few observations derived from these:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  * 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&apos;ve got options
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
With all that in mind, here&apos;s what I would do (hopefully will do, one day):&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  * 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
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Be up-front about all of this: &quot;Early parts of the game are free!  To feed my family I&apos;ll be charging progressively for access to the later parts of the game, but I&apos;ll never charge a given player more than $25&quot; (or some other promise you are willing to keep)&lt;p&gt;---------&lt;p&gt;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 &quot;average price&quot; (unlocks all 11 games) is around $6.  So no, I will not pay $20 for your game, are you crazy?  Instead I&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;Yes, I&apos;m a cheapskate.  But this is the reality of the market at work.  I&apos;m not saying your game isn&apos;t &quot;worth&quot; $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.&lt;p&gt;Man, I just realized I sound like I&apos;m trying to talk you out of a career in game-dev, and that&apos;s not what I want (as a gamer).&lt;p&gt;---------&lt;p&gt;One more thought:&lt;p&gt;You said &quot;(not necessarily more powerful, but rather more diverse)&quot;.  Yeah, listen, when you play my Rock Paper Scissors online game, you get Rock for free, and pay for Paper and Scissors.  They&apos;re not necessarily more powerful, just more diverse.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases</title><url>http://gyrovague.com/2013/06/05/time-is-money-how-clash-of-clans-earns-500000-a-day-with-in-app-purchases/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>babuskov</author><text>I&apos;m creating a strategy game right now and I&apos;m facing this dilemma. I&apos;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&apos;s hard to charge for anything that would not make you advance in the game, otherwise it&apos;s cosmetics and you&apos;re not charging for the game, but almost the same as asking for a donation.&lt;p&gt;Most people would like to play for free. This model enables you to attract more users, which means a larger pool of potential customers. For example, would you pay $20 for my game (see link at the end), or would you rather play for free and then pay $1-$2 a month for some stuff that advances your gameplay?&lt;p&gt;BTW, in case you&apos;re interested the game should be out in a month. See gos.bigosaur.com/cards.html for more info.</text></item><item><author>simias</author><text>What really annoys me is when a game that might potentially interest me chooses to go the pay2win way.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;What annoys me the most is there&apos;s no way to do it &quot;the old way&quot; and pay a bigger sum of money &lt;i&gt;once&lt;/i&gt; and get the full game without having to upgrade for every single new weapon. That&apos;s where you realize that the microtransaction model is a scam, because if you want to buy all the upgrades at once it would cost you several hundreds of dollars.&lt;p&gt;I wish they&apos;d go back to the older model of freeware demo + one time buy full game. I remember buying Doom that way.</text></item><item><author>cageface</author><text>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&apos;re being manipulated and burn out en masse.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The overwhelming dominance of this kind of app in the app store has killed a lot of my enthusiasm for mobile, unfortunately. There are a lot of very interesting things you could do with a pocket computer that&apos;s always online and equipped with a bunch of sensors but nobody cares because if you&apos;re not playing these kinds of slimy games with the rest of the top 20 you might as well not exist in the store.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shardling</author><text>The Kingdom of Loathing&apos;s model seems to do pretty well.  (And they&apos;ve been at it for 10 years now, well before &quot;free to play&quot; was a thing.)  You can pay for in-game items, but you can also buy them with in-game currency[1].&lt;p&gt;So you could let players pay to get the special items/upgrades &lt;i&gt;instantly&lt;/i&gt;, but still let hardcore players get them without paying through some sort of grinding.  So long as you don&apos;t have to exchange &lt;i&gt;too&lt;/i&gt; much time to be maximally powerful without paying for the privilege, players don&apos;t seem to mind in practice.  (You will get people loudly bitching about things no matter what you do -- this is the internet.)  So: you make it so that players only have a few of the upgrades active at a time, then you can introduce new items in a regular stream without unbalancing things.&lt;p&gt;1. Well, in KoL you can only buy them from &lt;i&gt;other players&lt;/i&gt; with regular currency.  Unless your game plans to have a full fledged economy, I guess you&apos;d want to sell them directly.</text></comment>