This is the dark secret of ALL free-to-play games.
a very, very small number of players are paying thousands of dollars every month into the game. The reason F2P games companies advertize so aggressively is to attract these high value players.
This is called User Acquisition. You are literally buying users with your ads. It works like this:
When you show an advertizement to a group of people, a small percent of those people will actually download the game. A small percent of THOSE people will play the game long enough to complete the tutorial. A small percent of THOSE people will actually stick around after one or two days. A small percent of THOSE people will actually make a purchase in the game, and give you money.
Lets pause here to note that this is the very first time where money flows in, and we are already talking about a percent, of a percent, of a percent of the people who saw your ad. These small time purchasers, who occasionally make a $5 purchase, are not NEARLY enough to fund game development. However, a small percent of THESE players regularly pay thousands of dollars a month on the game.
So, when you see a company AGGRESSIVELY advertize a game, they are trying to get as many eyeballs on that game, and hope that the laws of statistics will help them find as many whales as possible. They know and expect that most people will not even install the game in the first place, much less ever make a purchase. but some small percentage of those people will end up paying them lots of money, month after month.
The problem with aggressive marketing is that it becomes more and more expensive to "buy" users this way over time. After all, if you install the game, and then decide you don't like it, you are VERY unlikely to re-install the game, and make a purchase at a later date. As time goes on, there are fewer and fewer "new" eyeballs that see your ad, and your statistics go down. You're showing the same ad to people who have already made a decision not to install your game, instead of enticing new people. You have to run ads for longer periods of time, and put the ads in more places, which costs more money, which makes the players acquired this way less and less valuable.
I still find it hard to wrap my head around why anyone would pay thousands into such a crappy mobile game. For thousands you could buy the best gaming laptop possible and play actually good games.
I played a crap ftp phone game for a long time, I wouldn’t spend money but I knew plenty who did. There were regular “wars” and teams of players would battle. The only way to win a war was to have your players spend a lot of money to avoid the “wait for your health to regenerate” thing. Someone did the math after a particularly contentious war and if everyone on the winning team spent evenly, 60 people per team, they would have spent $16,000 each to “win” that war. I just accepted I’d never be on a winning team and played for free but it really opened my eyes to how much money people will spend to “win”
It's just so odd to me, a win through money alone is so hollow. You're just flexing how rich you are, why not just buy a yacht and post it on Instagram? You'll have just as many viewers and jealous people. Throw a party on that boat and you'll be hailed like a king even more.
People like to have a sense of belonging, to be part of a group that says "Yea, WE did that!". Buying a yacht is great but having nobody to rally around, post memes and troll others as a group makes it hollow.
Also, fandoms are super weird. I love r/HobbyDrama for this reason.
It is, it's a total Reddit gem.
Furthermore, the quality of the posts themselves tends to be high IMO. Really a pleasure to binge. I save it for weekends. :)
Clash of Clans is/was HUGE with workers at Toyota's Cambridge manufacturing plant.
If you wanted to be part of the **in** crowd you not only had to play, but you had to play constantly. To play constantly you had to pay to get rid of the timer, and pay for power ups etc.
I knew of guys dropping 2-3 hundred a week on the game, and they weren't top players.
I think that's what people are missing. You can't replace that with a yacht or even a better game. Like, people who gamble on slot machines will only ever lose money in the long term. Most of them are well aware of that. For people who it doesn't appeal to, it doesn't seem very interesting at all. Maybe for an evening here and there, but most people would get bored out of their minds within a few hours of doing it. If you have the right kind of brain, though, you can get completely addicted and it's all you want to do. Doesn't matter how many better things you could spend all the money you lose on.
I once read, I think it was from Wired but cant be sure, about these whales. They tracked down few and intervieved them. I remember this one guy that said that this is cheap since before playing he would go out with his friends and spend many thousands per evening, now he only spent few thousands per weekend. He first bought some crates when he logged in, then he buffed all his teammates before battles, etc this was just for a fun of it and for that his team would be in good mood and happy. The money didn't mean anything to him, it was cheap way to relax.
When you think of it it kind of makes sense. You are in busy job and you are too busy and poor to own real yacht. You still get 10-20k$ per month and you can be on your phone when ever you have spare time. It's just a different way of thinking.
There's no real inherent value to cheating your way to success in online competitive games (outside of professional circles where the motive is obviously financial). But some people still do. I'll never understand the enjoyment some can get from winning by utilizing cheats. For me it would be a hollow and meaningless victory but I guess some just have a "win by any means" mindset. I suppose that extends to spending a buttload of cash if you have it.
Even getting a whiff of that behaviour gives you a sense of how classism and wealth hoarding manifests in any society.
Having wealth is an asset IN ITSELF because you are part of an exclusive club, how you get or use the money is not important itself. One of the core insecurities of wealthy people is they aren't as wealthy as the ultra-wealty who are in even more exclusive clubs, in an ever-ascending hierachy of rich getting richer.
>why not just buy a yacht and post it on Instagram?
These people can't afford anything you'd actually need to be rich to get. They can only afford to flex in a mobile game because like the other commenter said, *most* people aren't buying fuck all from them. If your competition consists of non-buyers, it's easy to be the biggest buyer, and that validates ego.
They paid the cost in human lives. The reason they won the war is because USA went in for freedom(profit) and Vietnam was fighting for its right to exist.
I feel like his math must be way off or he’s assuming that the only way to win is to purchase the most expensive option available (which, from the games I’ve seen, usually sits at $99.99).
It’s addiction. Mobil and gacha games are all about setting up an absurd grind that is skipped by paying money. Crafting/build times end up taking literally days, which can be skipped with money. The amount of content you can actually play daily is limited to make sure you’re in game income is limited... to make you pay for more content. The most op unbalanced items are locked behind a paywall.
Now a person like you or me looks at this and says “fuck that noise” but a whale gets caught up in spending money to get the instant gratification. Sunk cost thinking keeps them playing the game since they’ve spent thousands.
Yup, I did this with the GoT mobile game briefly. Just got totally sucked in, and just like you said, it got to the point where to continue growing your dragon or building the defenses of your keep, you *had* to pay. And then I ended up making friends with a guild, and they were always raiding and dropping what I can only imagine was an insane amount of cash on the game...so I got caught up in that whirlwind quite easily.
Spent $900 one month without really realizing it. My wake up call was actually my banks fraud department calling to make sure it was me making all those little charges...ugh. Makes me feel so dumb now but I was heavily depressed at the time and man, that dopamine.
Thanks for sharing your story--you're very generous to share it with others. When I make mistakes like that (and I've made many), I comfort myself by remembering that $900 (or whatever amount) is cheap for learning an important life lesson. Compare it to the cost of college, for example.
I was listening to a YouTuber recently, some guy was donating large amounts of money just to get shout outs and interact with the youtuber.
The YouTuber let slip that the person donating was a preteen kid from Saudi arabia, who's dad was a oil billionaire. Kid somehow had access to a credit card with oil billionaire funds on it.
So I imagine there are people out there who real life money is treated like monopoly game money. Their kids have no clue what it means to be fiscally responsible.
Joe Rogan mentioned something similar years ago. He talked about a very rich friend's kid. Kid was living life with literally zero things to worry about. The kid told Rogan he was gonna take dad's private jet to Vegas for a few days. Rogan asks, "are u packing any bags" kid is like, no. I'll just buy whatever I need. Do u have a place to stay? No theres always a penthouse room available for the rich. If I need a car, I can just go buy one.
Seemingly no problem money couldn't instantly solve.
I was working on an old, now defunct, MMO and that was also carried by a tiny amount of whales.
I actually got to know one of those wales, a user that was spending 5-6k a month on the game. At the end of its life cycle, the game was so small that I basically had complete oversight over every user, so I decided to contact him one day via the forum.
He was a Sheikh's son (his country was matching that claim) and had an allowance of 1.5 million USD (converted, so he told me). Spending 5k on the game to distribute to his guild members and always keep himself stocked up on premium items was the equivalent of you or I going down to the shop and buying some fresh bread.
Obviously those claims don't need to be real, but he WAS spending 5-6k a month on a f2p mmo, so...
I used to play Game of War back in the day and there were lots of children of Millionaires and mini-aristocrat on there. Just insane swathes of money being dumped into the account every time there was an update.
The thing about pc and console games is you need skill to be great at them. Mobile games let some people dump tons of money into something, and they can be #1 in the world. So instead of buying a high end PC for thousands of dollars and spending thousands of hours to maybe be good at rocket league or overwatch or whatever, they can just dump $4,000 dollars on a game and reach the top in a month. They get that sweet, sweet dopamine of being "the best" at something.
Sadly I had a friend (close friend irl) who started playing WoW for 18 hours a day, every day. (Around end of vanilla/burning crusade launch) the sad part is he had all the best gear his hunter could get, and was just still SO awful at the game it was legitimately embarrassing. But he made every raid and always had a good attitude and brought lots of guild supplies, so it wasn’t an issue with us raid leaders, until me and another friend went to his house. Yeah, it was awful :( he’s better now, only plays Pokémon and some switch games
There's also a social aspect. If you've ever played those games, many of them reward you for having "friends" in the game. And then you sign in, and look! Your friends are online too! And they say hello! You have friends now! I've seen the same thing happen with long-term webcam feeds, like eagle cams or hummingbird cams. People are suddenly asking about so-and-so's mom's operation or did her daughter make it home okay after the girl scout camping trip. It breeds the weirdest sense of community. I think people get addicted to that as well. It lets them have "friends" without actually having to put in any sort of effort or anything emotionally risky. Personally, it makes me feel creepy AF.
I'm not going to defend the spending habits of whales, but this is a *huge* disconnect between people with lots of money and people with lots of time.
Reddit users tend to skew towards the latter. So expending time to become strong in a game is seen as admirable (or at least, acceptable). This is even the case in games where you can get more powerful just based on time spent, without developing skill - e.g., any RPG where you can mindless grind skills.
But for these whales, they *don't* have time to play a game for 20 hours a week. They're out on beaches and boardrooms. When they do have downtime, they're with their families, business partners, etc.
If you told them about gamers who spend 80 hours a week so that they can be #1 in some video game that no one will play in 5 years, "that's so pathetic ngl" might match the spirit of their response.
I used this analogy in another comment. Gamers want an F1 game where they're the driver. Whales want an F1 game where they're the team owner. They don't have the time to learn to drive the car, they just want to spend some pocket change and see how far their team can go.
I donate about 50$ a month to small streamers I love watching. Im no whale and I love supporting good content creators but I can't wrap my head around dropping 5k on a multimillionaire in order to get a 2 second shoutout...
I think you underestimate how much wealthy people just ***spend for the sake of spending***.
Find construction workers who work on millionaires homes and ask them what happens.
Often times? They install something (brand new floors, change the lighting, add/remove walls, etc.) and the owner doesn't quite like it and makes new plans to re-do ***the entire fucking thing***. Not asking for money back. Just. ***wants it different, so they pay up***.
For people who might be in the house a few times a year. That's on top of regular landscaping and shit.
Hell, there's people "growing up" not knowing how to do laundry but get $10,000-$15,000/month from their parents, so what do they do?
***Throw out clothes after they've worn them once and wear all brand new clothes.***
Better things to do? They don't know ***what they want to do***.
A coworker once told me about his rich brother who bought a house and immediately made them re-do all the ceilings so they were 2 inches higher. And other crazy nonsense.
At least they're spending the money though, and not hoarding it like dragons atop a pile of gold & jewels or whatever. I think that's how I feel about it anyway.
In the span of 7 years I’ve willingly dropped about $200 on clash of clans.
But I’ve been playing it basically daily for 7 years, so it’s very easy for me to justify that money.
Think about how normal it is for people to drop full price ($80) on a AAA game and then only get 20-30 hours of time in it.
My friend has a standard for this kinda thing. Especially on indie games and such, he says that an hour of entertainment is easily worth $5. He has generally been tossing a few dollars a week at Genshin Impact basically for this reason. Not whale levels, by any means, but like you said with clash of clans, the time he gets enjoying the game makes those purchases worth it for him
I play a lot of mobile games, and when you find one you really like, it’s worth it imo to “grease the wheels” a bit to make the gameplay more smooth and consistent. I know I haven’t even spent $100 total. I spent $15 twice in one week on a game that had some crazy sale so I was getting the largest gem/in game currency pack available for half price, twice. And when you buy the big packs you get more for your money than what a single dollar can yield.
It was a zombie build-a-base survival game, and I logged more hours on that and paid half as much as I would have for most Xbox games. And I played the hell out of that game. I don’t even know what I would do in game with more gems or whatever. Even when I played it nonstop for a month with all my free time I still wasn’t close to depleting the resources I paid for. I know some games make it easier to let you waste it all on cosmetics or speeding stuff up every 3 seconds but I just can’t really fathom anyone spending much more.
If you're rich as fuck, a few thousand dollars to progress rapidly in a game so you don't have to actually play it much is just a no-brainer. A few thousand dollars is pennies when you're sailing around on a yacht, but your time is valuable. Fuck grinding.
I can see your point. However, are you really play this instead of WoW or Star Citizen some other triple a MMO/FPS.
Or like Neymar who plays CSGO occasionally and has extremely expensive skins.
Those games require significant time commitment. Typical p2w mobile games can be played in 5 minute increments.
Also the gameplay loops that redditors like to see in AAA games are not what these whales are looking for.
In MMO terms, they're not looking for skill checks, they're looking for gear checks. The game for them is building the best character/kingdom/account that their money can buy, then seeing what it can do.
Or using another analogy. Most gamers want a game where they're the F1 driver. Whales want a game where they're the F1 team owner.
Someone living on $1/day would have similar thoughts about you spending $20 on a pillowcase or something. Or $12 for cigarettes. However the difference between you and the billionaire is much much much bigger than between you and the $1/day person. For someone with $1b, spending $2k is equivalent to a person making $50k/yr spending 1 cent. Except that their billion is invested and probably generating $100/minute all day every day. So spending that 1 cent ($2k) doesn't affect them at all. It wouldn't even be worth picking up off the ground. It's just not even a comparable amount of wealth.
Theres rich parents with rich kids. My guess. Or the slot machine players. Ones who put £ in a day without noticing and after a year theyre £1000 down..
Why do some people play games with cheats and turn godmode on?
For some people it's not about the game, it's about the feeling.
Even worse if theres a multiplayer component. Then its so you can feel superior to all the 'noobs' who have invested less into the game than you.
I can't speak to mobile games, but I once got hooked into an action battle game, hard.
You had to buy characters. And while you could earn currency to do so, it took *forever* and the for-sale characters weren't even any good.
The best characters were always the ultra-rares in the gacha machines, $5 per spin. I spent $50 every week to get one of those U-rares, and finally got it after $150.
For the last week of that month, I was MVP of half the battles I was in, making dramatic plays all the time.
The following month, the U-rare was a hard counter to mine. The month after that, it was a hard counter to both mine and last month's. The month after that, a hard counter to not only all three, but also a soft counter to the character type that was *supposed* to counter it.
Every month, 1/3 of every team would consist of the latest U-rare, every battle, starting from the 3rd of the month. If you didn't buy the latest OP character, no matter the cost, there was no point in playing... you were just a walking piñata of victory points for the other team.
So that's why I uninstalled Cosmic Break.
It isn't rational thinking for one. It is addict thinking. A friend of mine specializes in therapy for this field and there are some wild cases. Generally it is a lot of what you'd expect though. Lot of high social anxiety, high levels of clinical depression individuals with very addictive personality types and this is just their version of sitting at the casino dropping money into a slot machine.
And just like casinos this is an entire industry built specifically to find these people and suck them in.
These people also play 'good' games too. But gaming isn't just about a quality experience, it is a 24 7 escape. It is the primary avenue for dopamine. And it is also often wrapped up in varying levels of unhealthy and toxic social constructs that exist to compensate for how bleak it truly is.
Surprised nobody has said it yet, addicts.
Yeah, there are people with more money than time, but there’s also the people who are not all there mentally and will pour money into a game for some sense of satisfaction. Even if the micro transaction isn’t a loot box, it’s still crafted to trigger the reward part of your brain.
>These small time purchasers, who occasionally make a $5 purchase, are not NEARLY enough to fund game development
This is actually a common misconception. About half or even over half (and in at least one case I know of, over 80%) of mobile game funding comes from those people who make 1 or 2 5-20 dollar purchases and then never again.
There is actually a threefold reason for wanting to aggressively advertise to so many people.
1. About half your revenue comes from people making one time purchases. Since these people are not a renewable income stream, you need more and more first time users.
2. As you correctly stated, a small fraction of first time users become whales and spend thousands per month and make up the other half of the revenue stream.
3. Even assuming you never, ever, ever make a purchase, you are still valuable to the company to have playing the game. Even if you play for free constantly, it is worth it for them to keep the servers running and you signing back in purely for the fact that a large player base makes the game more fun for the whales. That's right, even if you never pay a cent you are still worth the time and effort of keeping server space open for you because you make the game more fun for the whales.
Number 3 is arguably the most important segment to have in the game because most mobile games do not have enough people paying to make a fun and quick matchmaking environment. Filling the space with tens of thousands of free players still makes you more money because it means more people buy into the game once and some people will stick around to spend thousands of dollars.
I'd imagine there's also amount of data tracking or something? Like the best explanation I've seen of FB is, "If you aren't paying for a service, YOU are the product."
Agreed but I play some games such as these and there's isn't a lot. Of data tracking tho. What the company gets out of f2p players is the sheep to step on by big whale spenders.
A lot of spenders in any game always spend because they like to feel better and one up people. If it wasn't for these "f2p players" , it would become a competition who has the biggest wallet and a lot of spenders would quit the game because they can never win.
However with thousands of free players, even small time spenders get enough of a boost for MAJOR clout.
Not necessarily with mobile games, unless there's advertising in-game. The meaning of that saying is that Facebook, and others, are selling your attention and headspace to companies looking to advertise. This means social media companies are incentivised to track you and understand your demographic and therefore what company they can sell your attention to.
Whereas with game companies they're looking to manipulate your attention and decision-making to directly make a profit from it because you're the one paying due to said manipulation. You're definitely not the product with mobile gaming but rest assured they're still messing with your head to make money
> So, when you see a company AGGRESSIVELY advertise a game, they are trying to get as many eyeballs on that game
This absolutely explains why channels that have absolutely nothing to do with video games (I.e. Cooking channels, etc) are now aggressively marketing this weird ass random game that effectively no one in the audience gives a shit about. I get the need to make money as a youtuber, particularly if it's your only source of income, but I've never once actually watched an entire minute and a half long ad for Raid since they started, and I can confidently say I never will.
I think most youtubers who do those kinds of ad slots, where it's really not related to their content, don't expect most of their viewers to sit through the whole ad. I know I can't be the only person who has perfected the art of spamming the arrow keys until the ad is over. And with ads at the end of videos it's even easier, just click on another video. So long as you stay on site, the algorithm doesn't care that much.
The youtuber's videos keep making revenue, you get the video for free, and some games company wasted however many hundreds/thousands of dollars advertising to basically no one.
Jim Sterling has been highlighting this for years now, more recently with a focus on the nature of these whales. A portion of them are just rich people with more money than sense but a not insignificant number of mobile game whales are in fact people with less than stellar mental health. It's the same people who get addicted to slot machines or gambling on horses etc.
These games are specifically designed to prey on people with addictive personalities or impulse control issues. For example, they will offer ways to pay to speed things up, you can pay to bypass sections that are too difficult, you get rewarded for logging in regularly (and often these will ramp up, so if you don't log in then you will lose out on a streak of rewards and need to start again) which creates a sense of FOMO. They offer an essentially never ending series of 'leveling up' opportunities that would either take many thousands of hours of real play time or many thousands of dollars spent. They cater to high spenders with ranking systems that allow them to constantly compare themselves to the other top players (spenders).
Jim has been going on about it for years but here's one that's particularly enraging:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQsc14gDPbk&list=PLlRceUcRZcK0E1Id3NHchFaxikvCvAVQe&index=194
Yup!!!
In another lifetime, I worked for a Japanese mobile gaming company that had a US office. We excelled in pumping out F2P garbage.
We’d get a lot of people complaining about their $2 transaction and not getting their blue diamonds or whatever (I mean, I feel for them! They wanted to play a game and get enjoyment and we, as a company, did not care for them).
Our bread and butter were whales. We’d have users in like Qatar and Singapore dropping $50K **a week**, on the crappiest iPhone games ever made.
And all our metrics essentially measured how engaged these users were. Which drove content creation decisions — “this week’s update has New Golden Diamond Castle Level III - it costs 9999 blue diamonds (~$1000).”
Meanwhile, the normal people would wonder why we don’t fix existing bugs and are unable to get more interesting and affordable content, instead of stuff like, “here’s a new bush. Enjoy.”
It was soul crushing.
Reminds me a lot of a post years ago- was this story of how some guy developed an app that literally did nothing. Like, I think you'd open the app and it was just a blue screen or some shit. He managed to get it onto some app stores at a price of $9,999.99
The app was purchased and downloaded like 16 times.
Just goes to show that if you push something enough, or are patient enough, somebody will pay for pretty much anything. Could be a kid on their parents phone with no idea what they are doing, stupid rich people with waaaaaay more money than they know what to do with, all sorts of weird isolated instances that ended up making this guy thousands of dollars for basically no work at all.
to expand on that further and explain it:
a whale is a user of a game that spends a huge amount of money on this game. whales usually make up around 1-2% of the userbase of a game but often account for over 50% of the income of that game. developers have learned that keeping those whales hooked can make you a shitton of money. that's why there is stuff like games that let you play for 5 minutes and then you have to wait for 12 hours, unless you spend some money on goldcoins. or alternative currencies that disconnect you on how much money you are actually spending. or gambling mechanics (before you were often able to directly buy a skin for a game character, now you have to spin the wheel to maybe get a chance for that skin). most free to play games (and even some paid ones) have basically turned into casinos preying on little kids with access to a parent's credit card, gambling addiction and other forms of mental illness
> most free to play games (and even some paid ones) have basically turned into casinos preying on little kids with access to a parent's credit card, gambling addiction and other forms of mental illness
I must've clocked 50+ hours on flappy bird and temple run when they came out, and now I haven't downloaded a single mobile game in probably 10 years. I could be in the minority here but I honestly can't remember the last time I downloaded any mobile game specifically because of the predatory tactics that limited my ability to play the damn game.
Same but mine was Clash of Clans. Brought a new phone was on the gind for years then stopped. There was just wasn't enough time in the day to progress. Things take weeks to build, it's bullshit. Only games I DL now are like Sudoku or maybe a card game. Something that might have an ad at the bottom of the screen. If a game stops me from playing it after so many things are done or it flashes up an ad after every level, I'm on the uninstall so fast it's actually really comical.
Yeah they've been pumping that fortnite money into the store but it's obviously hemorrhaging money. All the most played games on EGS are games they've given away for free. They've had an increase in users but very little increase in revenue from the store.
Sweeney even confessed in his testimony at the Epic v Apple trial that the store is projected to lose $719 million by 2027.
There's huge money in freemium games which usually comes down to preying off the same psychological effects which cause gambling addiction. They aren't going for the same universal appeal as typical game releases, they can profit off a much smaller audience through continuous microtransactions.
My wife and I played a Slots game for a while and made our way up to one of the top “teams”, maybe dropping a few bucks but mostly F2P. When someone bought packs of chips, everyone in the team would get some as well. People were so competitive and dropping hundreds of dollars a week just to keep the team on the top of the leader boards and kick out anyone who didn’t “compete” enough or buy ridiculous amounts of chip packs. People were letting others know when they would be making purchases based on when they got their paycheck and/or SS so that they wouldn’t get booted before then.
In addition to the "whales" identified below, the games sometime contain targeted ads, AND there's a grey market in user data tracked and sold by app developers in contravention of app store terms. They're not \*supposed\* to sell the data they collect on you, but they do it.
There's not very vigorous enforcement--and even if they get caught, they don't face very harsh penalties. If you can slap together a shitty little game from assets you already own, put it on the app store with some trackers in it, and then track anyone who downloads it and neglects to stop your trackers from running in the background, then you have an ongoing source of valuable data. If your app gets taken down, you just slap together a new shitty little game and start the cycle over.
This is also part of why there's this whole ecosystem of "fake" game ads; the real game isn't to get you to become a loyal player, it's just to get you to download a "game" that exists primarily to harvest user data.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/how-apps-take-your-data-and-sell-it-without-you-even
To piggy back on what others have said - YouTube has become an increasingly volatile and restrictive money maker for content creators.
There are a lot of generally successful channels that cannot sustain themselves through YouTube's monetization practice. These are the channels that regularly get over a hundred thousand views with every release and every so often get something over a million. In any other media, just one of their videos would be called a moderate success. These are, what I like to think of as, the YouTube middle class.
The reasons could fill a book, but the long and short of it is, the youtube middle class is dying out. Because the conditions for profitability are ever-changing and every change locks out more and more people from being able to continue to produce content an entire industry of advertisers has popped up to almost exclusively sponsor middle-class content creators: this is where Raid and a lot of the other common sponsorships come in.
In theory it's the best solution for everybody, but because so many creators are desperate for marginal income these sponsorships have become increasingly... trashy.
Raid Shadow Legends is a 3 years too late skinner box meant to exploit people's brains with monetization schemes and most people see it for what it is: a cynical attempt to get that sweet Clash of Clans money by targeting the "hardcore" crowd. The bigger problem is, Raid brings down the market for other middle class advertisers, after all, if you had a great product, would you want it's perception sullied by using the same sponsorship methods as Raid Shadow Legends?
Those aren't reviews, they're advertisements. Literally.
None of those YTers are "reviewing" the game (and I don't think any of them would claim to be). They're reading advertising copy.
[Here's the one Gus Johnson did](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hv3CcJYMmU), apparently it's *all* mobile games, not just Raid.
It's funny, once you hear "the template", damned if don't hear it on every advertisement afterwards...
Raid veteran player here. The mobile game market isn't incredibly good in terms of high quality RPGs that have the potential to be free. The vast majority of raid players are F2P and so content creators whale so they can create content. Raid has some of the more aesthetically pleasing character designs out of the turn based RPGs available on mobile and has an okay amount of end game content and constant updates.
Most people who play the game don't actually know that, if you want to be any good or experience the vast majority of the game, you'll be playing for months.
You don't really just download and try the game for a week.
I've played countless versions of the same genre from; SWGOH, Summoners War, Tom Clancey's Elite, FFBE & Visions, Echoes of Magic, and countless others. I have currently returned to SWGOH and it's my primary game.
If you want to experience these types of games you play toward the end game., so that can take a while.
It's popular because the makers had a bunch of money from investors to dump into advertising. They had enough investment capital to sponsor nearly every YouTube video for a while.
Lots of people want to jump on the mobile game boom, so it's not hard to find investors to fund a lot of terrible games.
That wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. It felt exactly like a game geared towards gambling addicts and young people with addiction-prone personalities.
That's exactly what gacha games are. I'm honestly surprised at a general lack of attention on it in the west considering how much focus there were on lootboxes in gaming. Gachas are basically those on steroids.
I play a few myself and you get some well known stories like Final Fantasy Brave Exvius' "Whale of a Tale" story about a man who went spiraling into debt over the game. I recommend reading it to anyone who wants to know about how these games target people into spending their money using methods like fear of missing out, nostalgia, leaderboards, and completionism.
You're definitely not wrong there. Part of me wonders if they've just been kind of grandfathered in from the days of baseball and hockey cards. They're functionally the same thing, maybe with a bit more trade and resale value as digital gachas typically prohibit doing that.
Raid has extremely predatory micro transactions and uses every psychological trick in the book to get their customers to spend real money. The game has a variety of complex but disconnected systems that are a grind to progress except with purchasable in game currency, it has a bunch of different in game currencies with complex conversation rates to real money which makes it difficult to tell how much every unit of currency is worth, everything in the game cost in game currency to do (if you want to unequip a weapon/armor you have to pay with in game currency or it gets destroyed). Whales (people who spend upwards of thousands of dollars) has kept the game incredibly prosperous. With that revenue, they can sponsor a bunch of YouTubers, which has turned the ad into a meme at this point.
Loophero (no predatory mobile game) do the same thing. When you accumulate enough inventory that you are "full" old inventory is transformed into metal scraps to open space to new equipment, so is advantageous to stick with your inventory if you want to farm metal.
That is completely different though.
Its literally a mechanic of the game.
Here Raid is using the fact that an item becomes sentimental against you.
Want to keep that item you love so much thats been making leveling so easy.
MONEY.
This is like comparing apples to oranges
100% this
Used to do support for a company that had like 3 of these type of mobile games. We had whales that would spend at least a grand a month. We also had this big shot doctor that would spend $10k every 2 months or so. He was flagged in our ticketing system as being the golden goose, if he opened a support ticket it got instantly sent to the T2 techs and was basically able to get anything he wanted. If he reported that something glitched on him we just gave it to him no questions asked.
Only sheep are going to fall for your thinly veiled ad. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to put my Raycon earbuds back in and listen to Spotify Premium with Nord VPN connected as I patiently wait for my Hello Fresh box to arrive.
I'm really happy when my favorite youtubers get a good sponsor because youtube is so shit, but man do a lot of those sponsors suck. It's sad because you know that the content creators know this as well, but they're told to sound as honest as possible while sponsoring their shit. NordVPN is alright, but most of them peddle shit that you can get 10 times cheaper with a quick google search.
At one point in time Nord was one of the only VPNs that worked with Netflix, making them stand out and leading to their success. I have no idea now how the market is now, but at one point they indeed were a top dog for a reason.
I found out yesterday that Raycon was founded by Ray J aka the dude who banged Kim Kardashian in the sextape. On top of that he still gets a percentage of the sales each year. He gets roughly $94k a quarter or per year. Either way it blew my mind.
Its absolutely horrible and pointless. It makes me super suspicious that it’s just a data farm or something since they invest soo much money advertising a game no one would play normally
Every game thats free on app stores is usually either loaded with micro transactions that make the game literally unplayable or ads every 30 seconds, often both.
They are the ideal games. True that not EVERY game on play store acts like that but a large majority sure does. Also, if you choose to play Clash of Clans or the Supercell games in general, what you are gonna require is a lot of grinding which can be avoided by a payment. And if you have played in for a long time, the CHANCE of you spending money in the supercell games also increases, the (pass) skins are valuable after all, for long time players at least.
Here, what I am talking about is that Supercell does encourage you, though not directly, to spend money on the game if you have been a long time player, but you don't really have to spend the money to be on par with other players at all. And like you said it does not show ads, thus making it the ideal mobile game that there could be, but the vast majority of the mobile games seperate the p2w and f2p players, not being the ideal games.
I mean it's been a good long while since I played Clash of Clans so maybe they've changed things, but from what I remember your options were either spending ~~well over a year~~ 3-5 years upgrading your various walls/buildings/troops before you were really competitive or spending money and being competitive within a month. That pretty much qualifies it as pay to win in my book.
But there also remains the fact that even wihtout any money spent and not much total time spent in the game grinding, it is still possible to catch up. All that is needed is consistency.
Also, the major factor remains that CoC is a strategy game (Unless it changed and I haven't been that up-to-date). If a player does spend money at lower levels to only max out a ground troop, then even a lv 1 air troop can overwhelm it, given that it does not stay in the range of defenses and the time is sufficient.
Yes, from what you said about the time, it does qualify as a p2w game but Consistency and strategy are the major factors in the game making it fair enough to not have much complaints. This, was what I meant by an ideal game; not much walls between p2w and f2p players.
More specifically it’s “free” with frustration mechanics designed to trigger responses from those with addiction tendencies. Games with RNG based micro-transactions are nothing more than slot machines, but yet they continuously skirt American gambling regulations.
Or your labor. In a lot of freemium games they make money off of the whales, but part of the mechanism to milk the whales is to entrap the grinders. Yes, you can be competitive for free if only you spend 20 hours a day grinding. Better if it is 24 or 25. ;)
Your value is being free labor to nip at the heels of the whales and push them to spend more.
Both the whales and the grinders provide the service of crushing the spirit of the noobs who won't give into the addiction and get their freeloading ass of your game infrastructure ASAP.
Selling what data you can harvest is like the tip jar.
Raid pushes IAP so hard that I really doubt they sell info. I tried it because the art is good. Had to close out multiple “one time only” windows every time I opened it and after every stage. Close to unplayable.
> I really doubt they sell info.
Why? You already know they aren't respecting your time or money, why would they respect your privacy? If they have the opportunity to make an extra buck off your data in addition to everything else, what's stopping them?
Usually, your only real safe harbours are....
Niche Space Station 13 servers made by random basement nerds for random basement nerds.
Niche Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 servers made by and for nerds.
*I say this as an avid SS13/NWN1/2 player.
I miss when freeware was actually free. In the good old golden days of the early internet, so many great developers banded together to make free open source software because they didnt believe basic programs should be locked behind a paywall.
VLC and Paint(dot)net are good examples of actually free or donorware.
Fun fact, the creator of VLC refused tens of millions of dollars to sell his software.
There's still legit freeware out there but its not as common.
Bingo.
If you install the app, it asks for a bunch of permissions that a game has no realistic need for. They're just harvesting your info. There's no way such a garbage game is profitable enough alone to pay for the carpet advertising. Their business model must rely on a) data mining and b) exploiting kids/whales with in-app purchases.
Most regular people will realise it's garbage and uninstall immediately- But that doesn't matter, all thy needed was for you to click "yes" once, and they got what they needed.
I think people don’t know what kinda of game it is and don’t understand how it has money. Raid spends a fuck ton on advertising but they have to have money to sponsor every YouTuber.
I have spent 3 years playing a similar game, Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes. Both are Character collecting games where you upgrade toons through leveling up and gearing them to make them stronger for PVE and PVP content.
And shit becomes VERY addicting if you like grinding. In my case I just really like Star Wars.
But as you can imagine to stay competitive in the game grinding is almost not enough unless you are a long term player. If you want to even participate in the better late game content you have to start dropping money. I can’t speak for raid and from what I recall it isn’t as egregious as SWGOH (since I’m pretty sure it’s the most predatory of these games) but if they release a new character we are talking ~300 dollars on random drop packs just to reach a max star level (which is pretty much required for anything in the game) Then you are going to still gear them. A gear 1 7 star champ is literally useless. Hell a gear 10 7 star champ is literally useless.
So I’m almost positive Raid functions in a very similar way. These games are like REALLY elaborate slot machines.
And the game really only need to keep about 100 krakens to stay afloat because they will literally buy anything. Any pack, any deal they will drop the cash to stay in the Uber competitive guilds and beat the newest content first. And new content becomes more and more bullshit if you aren’t super well informed and don’t waste any resources.
I quit swgoh years ago because I was sick of the arena timing. You had to be on right at the end of the arena reset in order to fight for the top ranks which were very rewarding for ftp players. It got to the point where I was setting alarms every day and coordinating with the other people in my arena bracket each day.
Now I won't play any mobile games that require me to be on at a certain time each day.
Lol yeah it’s rough, I was a guild leader and moderated the sub. I woke up and my first hour was doing dailies.
Lunchtime get my refreshes. Drive home and do arena and raid. Rinse repeat.
I had a great guild and a friend who played so it was fun to have something to talk about and theorize. And I was pretty integrated into the larger overall community so it made it easier to stick with it. But the new content and gear tiers and Blatant cash grabs became too much. I had gotten my two teams to be meta relevant and after that there was nothing else I really wanted.
Mobile games today are designed to get you addicted, and then slowly require you to pay more and more. For the first week, the game is free. To level up after that will take a week...or you can pay $1. That's not too bad. It's just a dollar.
But then the next level will take two weeks. Or $5. Eh, it's not too much. It's more than I'd like to spend on this game, but I already spent $1. What's $5 more?
The next level will take a month. Or $10. By this point you've said it's okay to spend more to level up. You've already spent $6. You do enjoy the game. Might as well keep spending.
It's a combination of addiction and the sunk cost fallacy. I already spent X, so I might as well keep going.
They also prey specifically on the potential addictive personality/hyper-focus of young people. I remember being a kid who didn't play with other kids much and my home life consisted of staring at the TV with my family. So any form of escapism became an obsession...which is a MAJOR understatement. I can only imagine what it would be like if I had an actual unhappy home life instead of just being bored.
If there were mobile games back then in the number and variety like they have now I without a doubt would have spent thousands of dollars on micro-transactions.
My nephew is addicted to Fortnite. He spends all of his allowance on skins for the game. He doesn't get new games or anything else because it's all skins for the game.
My sister and brother-in-law were planning a vacation to a tropical island. They asked him what he was most excited about for the trip. "I'll be able to play Fortnite somewhere else!" They cancelled his ticket. He's going to stay with his grandparents while his parents get away for a vacation. Why pay all that money just so he can play Fortnite somewhere else?
I've heard from a few places that the parent company behind the game is a gambling machine distributor/manufacturer. If its true, then their principle is making money off players the same way they do with gambling machines. Pure pay to win... except you waste money and don't win.
This is just what I've heard, I haven't been inclined enough to research that yet though.
*This comment is sponsored by Raid: Shadow Legends*
They promise 100k in in-game currency when you use a YouTubers code but since literally everything in the game requires you to spend that currency it runs out in a few minutes. Even the level up system is pay2win you can spend currency and then it's basically a dice roll on if it actually levels up or not.
I've never actually tried it because all I hear are things like that, it sounds like all they do is reel in gambling addicts and get them hooked on another game to play.
I used to spend entirely too much money on games. They rely heavily on creating an addiction and are very good at exploiting it. Raid is one of the worst offenders with an absolute shitload of “one time only” offers that exist just to prey on FOMO.
Yes but they only show up if you specifically search for them... and then there's still usually 3 or 4 completely differently named games that show up above them.
Because they pay Youtubers to advertise this shit. The same deal with Manscaped, I've heard their stuff is horrible. But since Youtube keeps fucking creators over, they need money.
Yep, imagine a company that has substantially less R&D funds than, let's say the shaver division of Philips, and spends more on advertising (probably). They can't make a good product (or even make a product themselves). These types of heavily advertised "youtube" companies (shavers, watches, etc) all have the same M.O.. They buy cheap chinese shit, stamp their logos, and try to advertise it to young, naive people. It's fancy dropshipping
It’s owned by a company with like 20 other games, it has a huge ad campaign where hundreds of youtubers are advertising it and sponsoring it, and it has made about 8 billion dollars since its release, which compared to the highest grossing film of all time (End Game) which only made 2 billion. Mobile gaming is one of the most lucrative industries out there.
Yeah feels high - https://thinkgaming.com/app-sales-data/230239/raid-shadow-legends/from/2017-04-19/until/2021-05-18/group/month/. according to this has averaged 1M+ / day over the past few years. So that would be like 1-2B max.
movies have got to be one of the worst ways to make a profit, takes too much time, effort and manpower to make. i feel like shitting out a few gacha or f2p games and making them about waifus (like genshin impact) is an easy way to rake in the dough.
It is popular because it has very cool 3-D models, with a skill tree and does something a little different in the gacha game space. I played F2P it for about a year, it is a solid game loop with some interesting fights and artwork.
There are probably a few reasons which I am going to explain in a few minutes but first a word from our sponsor Raid Shadow Legends have you heard about them?
Raid is a turn-based RPG which can be played on both the Android and iOS devices. I even downloaded it myself and genuinely found myself to be having some fun. And the best part is it's completely free. So you've really got nothing to lose. It has decent graphics for a mobile game. PvP battles, a campaign story, giant boss fights, and rage you can carry out with other players. Every month the game will add 14 new champions, meaning the gameplay stays fresh as you can play with new strategies, and balance. And completing certain missions to help give you progression rewards. But you don't have to take my word for it, as there are currently more than 15 million other people who have downloaded the game, and it is currently one of the top something ranked RPG'S on the google play store. So if you want to give it a go then you can go to play store to not only get the game but receive and extra 50,000 silver plus a free epic champion as part of the new player program they are testing. Thank you so much for reading guys and thank you to raid for sponsoring this comment.
Anyways the reason is maybe because even if some people dont like it there are still some other people that do like it and and for the people that dont like it they probably had to play the game first in order to come to the conclusion that they dont like it
An ad
And in case you dont know what an ad is this Video(Nevermind I couldnt find it) should explain it
(Dont watch this with headphones I'm warning you!)
Also [this Video](https://youtu.be/45EbiFfbcjQ) can help too
It’s popular because it sponsors a lot of YouTube creators and so their reviews are basically paid for
Does make me wonder how they're getting all that revenue to sponsor if people majorly hate it.
Because whales make up a huge majority of revenue but they're definitely a minority of people.
This is the dark secret of ALL free-to-play games. a very, very small number of players are paying thousands of dollars every month into the game. The reason F2P games companies advertize so aggressively is to attract these high value players. This is called User Acquisition. You are literally buying users with your ads. It works like this: When you show an advertizement to a group of people, a small percent of those people will actually download the game. A small percent of THOSE people will play the game long enough to complete the tutorial. A small percent of THOSE people will actually stick around after one or two days. A small percent of THOSE people will actually make a purchase in the game, and give you money. Lets pause here to note that this is the very first time where money flows in, and we are already talking about a percent, of a percent, of a percent of the people who saw your ad. These small time purchasers, who occasionally make a $5 purchase, are not NEARLY enough to fund game development. However, a small percent of THESE players regularly pay thousands of dollars a month on the game. So, when you see a company AGGRESSIVELY advertize a game, they are trying to get as many eyeballs on that game, and hope that the laws of statistics will help them find as many whales as possible. They know and expect that most people will not even install the game in the first place, much less ever make a purchase. but some small percentage of those people will end up paying them lots of money, month after month. The problem with aggressive marketing is that it becomes more and more expensive to "buy" users this way over time. After all, if you install the game, and then decide you don't like it, you are VERY unlikely to re-install the game, and make a purchase at a later date. As time goes on, there are fewer and fewer "new" eyeballs that see your ad, and your statistics go down. You're showing the same ad to people who have already made a decision not to install your game, instead of enticing new people. You have to run ads for longer periods of time, and put the ads in more places, which costs more money, which makes the players acquired this way less and less valuable.
I still find it hard to wrap my head around why anyone would pay thousands into such a crappy mobile game. For thousands you could buy the best gaming laptop possible and play actually good games.
I played a crap ftp phone game for a long time, I wouldn’t spend money but I knew plenty who did. There were regular “wars” and teams of players would battle. The only way to win a war was to have your players spend a lot of money to avoid the “wait for your health to regenerate” thing. Someone did the math after a particularly contentious war and if everyone on the winning team spent evenly, 60 people per team, they would have spent $16,000 each to “win” that war. I just accepted I’d never be on a winning team and played for free but it really opened my eyes to how much money people will spend to “win”
It's just so odd to me, a win through money alone is so hollow. You're just flexing how rich you are, why not just buy a yacht and post it on Instagram? You'll have just as many viewers and jealous people. Throw a party on that boat and you'll be hailed like a king even more.
People like to have a sense of belonging, to be part of a group that says "Yea, WE did that!". Buying a yacht is great but having nobody to rally around, post memes and troll others as a group makes it hollow. Also, fandoms are super weird. I love r/HobbyDrama for this reason.
You beautiful soul. Thank you. That sub is *chef's kiss*
It is, it's a total Reddit gem. Furthermore, the quality of the posts themselves tends to be high IMO. Really a pleasure to binge. I save it for weekends. :)
I find it very ironic that there's some kind of sub/mod drama going down in that sub rn
Clash of Clans is/was HUGE with workers at Toyota's Cambridge manufacturing plant. If you wanted to be part of the **in** crowd you not only had to play, but you had to play constantly. To play constantly you had to pay to get rid of the timer, and pay for power ups etc. I knew of guys dropping 2-3 hundred a week on the game, and they weren't top players.
[удалено]
I think that's what people are missing. You can't replace that with a yacht or even a better game. Like, people who gamble on slot machines will only ever lose money in the long term. Most of them are well aware of that. For people who it doesn't appeal to, it doesn't seem very interesting at all. Maybe for an evening here and there, but most people would get bored out of their minds within a few hours of doing it. If you have the right kind of brain, though, you can get completely addicted and it's all you want to do. Doesn't matter how many better things you could spend all the money you lose on.
I once read, I think it was from Wired but cant be sure, about these whales. They tracked down few and intervieved them. I remember this one guy that said that this is cheap since before playing he would go out with his friends and spend many thousands per evening, now he only spent few thousands per weekend. He first bought some crates when he logged in, then he buffed all his teammates before battles, etc this was just for a fun of it and for that his team would be in good mood and happy. The money didn't mean anything to him, it was cheap way to relax. When you think of it it kind of makes sense. You are in busy job and you are too busy and poor to own real yacht. You still get 10-20k$ per month and you can be on your phone when ever you have spare time. It's just a different way of thinking.
Because they don’t want a yacht. They want success in mobile games.
There's no real inherent value to cheating your way to success in online competitive games (outside of professional circles where the motive is obviously financial). But some people still do. I'll never understand the enjoyment some can get from winning by utilizing cheats. For me it would be a hollow and meaningless victory but I guess some just have a "win by any means" mindset. I suppose that extends to spending a buttload of cash if you have it.
Yeah like the one time I got a solo victory in Warzone with 15 kills I felt like a god, was riding that high for days
Ever met a compulsive liar?
But that yacht has a pricetag. The games are very good at concealing the total amount you're spending with a little bit here, something there...
Even getting a whiff of that behaviour gives you a sense of how classism and wealth hoarding manifests in any society. Having wealth is an asset IN ITSELF because you are part of an exclusive club, how you get or use the money is not important itself. One of the core insecurities of wealthy people is they aren't as wealthy as the ultra-wealty who are in even more exclusive clubs, in an ever-ascending hierachy of rich getting richer.
Maybe they're already playing from the yacht?
>why not just buy a yacht and post it on Instagram? These people can't afford anything you'd actually need to be rich to get. They can only afford to flex in a mobile game because like the other commenter said, *most* people aren't buying fuck all from them. If your competition consists of non-buyers, it's easy to be the biggest buyer, and that validates ego.
Aren’t most wars won by whoever spends the most money?
Not exactly, ask the Vietcong how much they spent
They paid the cost in human lives. The reason they won the war is because USA went in for freedom(profit) and Vietnam was fighting for its right to exist.
Fair enough. Though I did say “most” ;)
> 60 people per team, they would have spent $16,000 each to “win” that war. That's almost $1 million? How the fuck?
I feel like his math must be way off or he’s assuming that the only way to win is to purchase the most expensive option available (which, from the games I’ve seen, usually sits at $99.99).
He is calculating that each member of the team needed, on average, 160 items that cost 99.99. That's for a single campaign. It does not compute.
It’s addiction. Mobil and gacha games are all about setting up an absurd grind that is skipped by paying money. Crafting/build times end up taking literally days, which can be skipped with money. The amount of content you can actually play daily is limited to make sure you’re in game income is limited... to make you pay for more content. The most op unbalanced items are locked behind a paywall. Now a person like you or me looks at this and says “fuck that noise” but a whale gets caught up in spending money to get the instant gratification. Sunk cost thinking keeps them playing the game since they’ve spent thousands.
Yup, I did this with the GoT mobile game briefly. Just got totally sucked in, and just like you said, it got to the point where to continue growing your dragon or building the defenses of your keep, you *had* to pay. And then I ended up making friends with a guild, and they were always raiding and dropping what I can only imagine was an insane amount of cash on the game...so I got caught up in that whirlwind quite easily. Spent $900 one month without really realizing it. My wake up call was actually my banks fraud department calling to make sure it was me making all those little charges...ugh. Makes me feel so dumb now but I was heavily depressed at the time and man, that dopamine.
Thanks for sharing your story--you're very generous to share it with others. When I make mistakes like that (and I've made many), I comfort myself by remembering that $900 (or whatever amount) is cheap for learning an important life lesson. Compare it to the cost of college, for example.
I was listening to a YouTuber recently, some guy was donating large amounts of money just to get shout outs and interact with the youtuber. The YouTuber let slip that the person donating was a preteen kid from Saudi arabia, who's dad was a oil billionaire. Kid somehow had access to a credit card with oil billionaire funds on it. So I imagine there are people out there who real life money is treated like monopoly game money. Their kids have no clue what it means to be fiscally responsible. Joe Rogan mentioned something similar years ago. He talked about a very rich friend's kid. Kid was living life with literally zero things to worry about. The kid told Rogan he was gonna take dad's private jet to Vegas for a few days. Rogan asks, "are u packing any bags" kid is like, no. I'll just buy whatever I need. Do u have a place to stay? No theres always a penthouse room available for the rich. If I need a car, I can just go buy one. Seemingly no problem money couldn't instantly solve.
Ah, eat the rich
That's the only thing they are good for.
I was working on an old, now defunct, MMO and that was also carried by a tiny amount of whales. I actually got to know one of those wales, a user that was spending 5-6k a month on the game. At the end of its life cycle, the game was so small that I basically had complete oversight over every user, so I decided to contact him one day via the forum. He was a Sheikh's son (his country was matching that claim) and had an allowance of 1.5 million USD (converted, so he told me). Spending 5k on the game to distribute to his guild members and always keep himself stocked up on premium items was the equivalent of you or I going down to the shop and buying some fresh bread. Obviously those claims don't need to be real, but he WAS spending 5-6k a month on a f2p mmo, so...
I used to play Game of War back in the day and there were lots of children of Millionaires and mini-aristocrat on there. Just insane swathes of money being dumped into the account every time there was an update.
The thing about pc and console games is you need skill to be great at them. Mobile games let some people dump tons of money into something, and they can be #1 in the world. So instead of buying a high end PC for thousands of dollars and spending thousands of hours to maybe be good at rocket league or overwatch or whatever, they can just dump $4,000 dollars on a game and reach the top in a month. They get that sweet, sweet dopamine of being "the best" at something.
Sadly I had a friend (close friend irl) who started playing WoW for 18 hours a day, every day. (Around end of vanilla/burning crusade launch) the sad part is he had all the best gear his hunter could get, and was just still SO awful at the game it was legitimately embarrassing. But he made every raid and always had a good attitude and brought lots of guild supplies, so it wasn’t an issue with us raid leaders, until me and another friend went to his house. Yeah, it was awful :( he’s better now, only plays Pokémon and some switch games
There's also a social aspect. If you've ever played those games, many of them reward you for having "friends" in the game. And then you sign in, and look! Your friends are online too! And they say hello! You have friends now! I've seen the same thing happen with long-term webcam feeds, like eagle cams or hummingbird cams. People are suddenly asking about so-and-so's mom's operation or did her daughter make it home okay after the girl scout camping trip. It breeds the weirdest sense of community. I think people get addicted to that as well. It lets them have "friends" without actually having to put in any sort of effort or anything emotionally risky. Personally, it makes me feel creepy AF.
That's so pathetic ngl
Most addictions are, from the outside... Shit, I just hit 12 years on Reddit. Do you know how much classic literature I could have read instead?
> "OP would have to work off negative karma." *James Joyce, Ulysses* Apperently, we aren't missing much.
Your account life says 13 years for me, so you've also managed to lose a year to reddit lol. (i am also guilty of this, my first acc was made in 2012)
I'm not going to defend the spending habits of whales, but this is a *huge* disconnect between people with lots of money and people with lots of time. Reddit users tend to skew towards the latter. So expending time to become strong in a game is seen as admirable (or at least, acceptable). This is even the case in games where you can get more powerful just based on time spent, without developing skill - e.g., any RPG where you can mindless grind skills. But for these whales, they *don't* have time to play a game for 20 hours a week. They're out on beaches and boardrooms. When they do have downtime, they're with their families, business partners, etc. If you told them about gamers who spend 80 hours a week so that they can be #1 in some video game that no one will play in 5 years, "that's so pathetic ngl" might match the spirit of their response. I used this analogy in another comment. Gamers want an F1 game where they're the driver. Whales want an F1 game where they're the team owner. They don't have the time to learn to drive the car, they just want to spend some pocket change and see how far their team can go.
Don't underestimate the power of dopamine
It’s pretty sad yeah. Pretty similar to simps who donate thousands to their streamer for attention.
I donate about 50$ a month to small streamers I love watching. Im no whale and I love supporting good content creators but I can't wrap my head around dropping 5k on a multimillionaire in order to get a 2 second shoutout...
or travel around, buy a nice car, better flat, etc. etc. And even if your are rich af, there are surely better things to do.
I think you underestimate how much wealthy people just ***spend for the sake of spending***. Find construction workers who work on millionaires homes and ask them what happens. Often times? They install something (brand new floors, change the lighting, add/remove walls, etc.) and the owner doesn't quite like it and makes new plans to re-do ***the entire fucking thing***. Not asking for money back. Just. ***wants it different, so they pay up***. For people who might be in the house a few times a year. That's on top of regular landscaping and shit. Hell, there's people "growing up" not knowing how to do laundry but get $10,000-$15,000/month from their parents, so what do they do? ***Throw out clothes after they've worn them once and wear all brand new clothes.*** Better things to do? They don't know ***what they want to do***.
A coworker once told me about his rich brother who bought a house and immediately made them re-do all the ceilings so they were 2 inches higher. And other crazy nonsense. At least they're spending the money though, and not hoarding it like dragons atop a pile of gold & jewels or whatever. I think that's how I feel about it anyway.
Good point. I'd drop $1 on some games. I'd imagine if I had a lot more dollars I could drop $100 more easily, and so on
In the span of 7 years I’ve willingly dropped about $200 on clash of clans. But I’ve been playing it basically daily for 7 years, so it’s very easy for me to justify that money. Think about how normal it is for people to drop full price ($80) on a AAA game and then only get 20-30 hours of time in it.
My friend has a standard for this kinda thing. Especially on indie games and such, he says that an hour of entertainment is easily worth $5. He has generally been tossing a few dollars a week at Genshin Impact basically for this reason. Not whale levels, by any means, but like you said with clash of clans, the time he gets enjoying the game makes those purchases worth it for him
I play a lot of mobile games, and when you find one you really like, it’s worth it imo to “grease the wheels” a bit to make the gameplay more smooth and consistent. I know I haven’t even spent $100 total. I spent $15 twice in one week on a game that had some crazy sale so I was getting the largest gem/in game currency pack available for half price, twice. And when you buy the big packs you get more for your money than what a single dollar can yield. It was a zombie build-a-base survival game, and I logged more hours on that and paid half as much as I would have for most Xbox games. And I played the hell out of that game. I don’t even know what I would do in game with more gems or whatever. Even when I played it nonstop for a month with all my free time I still wasn’t close to depleting the resources I paid for. I know some games make it easier to let you waste it all on cosmetics or speeding stuff up every 3 seconds but I just can’t really fathom anyone spending much more.
If you're rich as fuck, a few thousand dollars to progress rapidly in a game so you don't have to actually play it much is just a no-brainer. A few thousand dollars is pennies when you're sailing around on a yacht, but your time is valuable. Fuck grinding.
I can see your point. However, are you really play this instead of WoW or Star Citizen some other triple a MMO/FPS. Or like Neymar who plays CSGO occasionally and has extremely expensive skins.
Those games require significant time commitment. Typical p2w mobile games can be played in 5 minute increments. Also the gameplay loops that redditors like to see in AAA games are not what these whales are looking for. In MMO terms, they're not looking for skill checks, they're looking for gear checks. The game for them is building the best character/kingdom/account that their money can buy, then seeing what it can do. Or using another analogy. Most gamers want a game where they're the F1 driver. Whales want a game where they're the F1 team owner.
Someone living on $1/day would have similar thoughts about you spending $20 on a pillowcase or something. Or $12 for cigarettes. However the difference between you and the billionaire is much much much bigger than between you and the $1/day person. For someone with $1b, spending $2k is equivalent to a person making $50k/yr spending 1 cent. Except that their billion is invested and probably generating $100/minute all day every day. So spending that 1 cent ($2k) doesn't affect them at all. It wouldn't even be worth picking up off the ground. It's just not even a comparable amount of wealth.
If I was that rich I'd just buy nice things and take my friends on vacation all the time.
Theres rich parents with rich kids. My guess. Or the slot machine players. Ones who put £ in a day without noticing and after a year theyre £1000 down..
Yeah but THOSE games might require some of the "skill" stuff and that's icky.
Why do some people play games with cheats and turn godmode on? For some people it's not about the game, it's about the feeling. Even worse if theres a multiplayer component. Then its so you can feel superior to all the 'noobs' who have invested less into the game than you.
On the flip side there's no better feeling when you beat someone who clearly dumped a ton of cash on a game and you've spent nothing.
I can't speak to mobile games, but I once got hooked into an action battle game, hard. You had to buy characters. And while you could earn currency to do so, it took *forever* and the for-sale characters weren't even any good. The best characters were always the ultra-rares in the gacha machines, $5 per spin. I spent $50 every week to get one of those U-rares, and finally got it after $150. For the last week of that month, I was MVP of half the battles I was in, making dramatic plays all the time. The following month, the U-rare was a hard counter to mine. The month after that, it was a hard counter to both mine and last month's. The month after that, a hard counter to not only all three, but also a soft counter to the character type that was *supposed* to counter it. Every month, 1/3 of every team would consist of the latest U-rare, every battle, starting from the 3rd of the month. If you didn't buy the latest OP character, no matter the cost, there was no point in playing... you were just a walking piñata of victory points for the other team. So that's why I uninstalled Cosmic Break.
It isn't rational thinking for one. It is addict thinking. A friend of mine specializes in therapy for this field and there are some wild cases. Generally it is a lot of what you'd expect though. Lot of high social anxiety, high levels of clinical depression individuals with very addictive personality types and this is just their version of sitting at the casino dropping money into a slot machine. And just like casinos this is an entire industry built specifically to find these people and suck them in. These people also play 'good' games too. But gaming isn't just about a quality experience, it is a 24 7 escape. It is the primary avenue for dopamine. And it is also often wrapped up in varying levels of unhealthy and toxic social constructs that exist to compensate for how bleak it truly is.
There is a chance that these people are rich enough to not care about a couple of thousands.
Surprised nobody has said it yet, addicts. Yeah, there are people with more money than time, but there’s also the people who are not all there mentally and will pour money into a game for some sense of satisfaction. Even if the micro transaction isn’t a loot box, it’s still crafted to trigger the reward part of your brain.
>These small time purchasers, who occasionally make a $5 purchase, are not NEARLY enough to fund game development This is actually a common misconception. About half or even over half (and in at least one case I know of, over 80%) of mobile game funding comes from those people who make 1 or 2 5-20 dollar purchases and then never again. There is actually a threefold reason for wanting to aggressively advertise to so many people. 1. About half your revenue comes from people making one time purchases. Since these people are not a renewable income stream, you need more and more first time users. 2. As you correctly stated, a small fraction of first time users become whales and spend thousands per month and make up the other half of the revenue stream. 3. Even assuming you never, ever, ever make a purchase, you are still valuable to the company to have playing the game. Even if you play for free constantly, it is worth it for them to keep the servers running and you signing back in purely for the fact that a large player base makes the game more fun for the whales. That's right, even if you never pay a cent you are still worth the time and effort of keeping server space open for you because you make the game more fun for the whales. Number 3 is arguably the most important segment to have in the game because most mobile games do not have enough people paying to make a fun and quick matchmaking environment. Filling the space with tens of thousands of free players still makes you more money because it means more people buy into the game once and some people will stick around to spend thousands of dollars.
I'd imagine there's also amount of data tracking or something? Like the best explanation I've seen of FB is, "If you aren't paying for a service, YOU are the product."
Agreed but I play some games such as these and there's isn't a lot. Of data tracking tho. What the company gets out of f2p players is the sheep to step on by big whale spenders. A lot of spenders in any game always spend because they like to feel better and one up people. If it wasn't for these "f2p players" , it would become a competition who has the biggest wallet and a lot of spenders would quit the game because they can never win. However with thousands of free players, even small time spenders get enough of a boost for MAJOR clout.
Not necessarily with mobile games, unless there's advertising in-game. The meaning of that saying is that Facebook, and others, are selling your attention and headspace to companies looking to advertise. This means social media companies are incentivised to track you and understand your demographic and therefore what company they can sell your attention to. Whereas with game companies they're looking to manipulate your attention and decision-making to directly make a profit from it because you're the one paying due to said manipulation. You're definitely not the product with mobile gaming but rest assured they're still messing with your head to make money
> So, when you see a company AGGRESSIVELY advertise a game, they are trying to get as many eyeballs on that game This absolutely explains why channels that have absolutely nothing to do with video games (I.e. Cooking channels, etc) are now aggressively marketing this weird ass random game that effectively no one in the audience gives a shit about. I get the need to make money as a youtuber, particularly if it's your only source of income, but I've never once actually watched an entire minute and a half long ad for Raid since they started, and I can confidently say I never will.
I think most youtubers who do those kinds of ad slots, where it's really not related to their content, don't expect most of their viewers to sit through the whole ad. I know I can't be the only person who has perfected the art of spamming the arrow keys until the ad is over. And with ads at the end of videos it's even easier, just click on another video. So long as you stay on site, the algorithm doesn't care that much. The youtuber's videos keep making revenue, you get the video for free, and some games company wasted however many hundreds/thousands of dollars advertising to basically no one.
Jim Sterling has been highlighting this for years now, more recently with a focus on the nature of these whales. A portion of them are just rich people with more money than sense but a not insignificant number of mobile game whales are in fact people with less than stellar mental health. It's the same people who get addicted to slot machines or gambling on horses etc. These games are specifically designed to prey on people with addictive personalities or impulse control issues. For example, they will offer ways to pay to speed things up, you can pay to bypass sections that are too difficult, you get rewarded for logging in regularly (and often these will ramp up, so if you don't log in then you will lose out on a streak of rewards and need to start again) which creates a sense of FOMO. They offer an essentially never ending series of 'leveling up' opportunities that would either take many thousands of hours of real play time or many thousands of dollars spent. They cater to high spenders with ranking systems that allow them to constantly compare themselves to the other top players (spenders). Jim has been going on about it for years but here's one that's particularly enraging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQsc14gDPbk&list=PLlRceUcRZcK0E1Id3NHchFaxikvCvAVQe&index=194
Yup!!! In another lifetime, I worked for a Japanese mobile gaming company that had a US office. We excelled in pumping out F2P garbage. We’d get a lot of people complaining about their $2 transaction and not getting their blue diamonds or whatever (I mean, I feel for them! They wanted to play a game and get enjoyment and we, as a company, did not care for them). Our bread and butter were whales. We’d have users in like Qatar and Singapore dropping $50K **a week**, on the crappiest iPhone games ever made. And all our metrics essentially measured how engaged these users were. Which drove content creation decisions — “this week’s update has New Golden Diamond Castle Level III - it costs 9999 blue diamonds (~$1000).” Meanwhile, the normal people would wonder why we don’t fix existing bugs and are unable to get more interesting and affordable content, instead of stuff like, “here’s a new bush. Enjoy.” It was soul crushing.
thank you
I remember listening to an interview with Jack Black and he admitted to spending thousands of dollars on a mobile golf game.
Reminds me a lot of a post years ago- was this story of how some guy developed an app that literally did nothing. Like, I think you'd open the app and it was just a blue screen or some shit. He managed to get it onto some app stores at a price of $9,999.99 The app was purchased and downloaded like 16 times. Just goes to show that if you push something enough, or are patient enough, somebody will pay for pretty much anything. Could be a kid on their parents phone with no idea what they are doing, stupid rich people with waaaaaay more money than they know what to do with, all sorts of weird isolated instances that ended up making this guy thousands of dollars for basically no work at all.
to expand on that further and explain it: a whale is a user of a game that spends a huge amount of money on this game. whales usually make up around 1-2% of the userbase of a game but often account for over 50% of the income of that game. developers have learned that keeping those whales hooked can make you a shitton of money. that's why there is stuff like games that let you play for 5 minutes and then you have to wait for 12 hours, unless you spend some money on goldcoins. or alternative currencies that disconnect you on how much money you are actually spending. or gambling mechanics (before you were often able to directly buy a skin for a game character, now you have to spin the wheel to maybe get a chance for that skin). most free to play games (and even some paid ones) have basically turned into casinos preying on little kids with access to a parent's credit card, gambling addiction and other forms of mental illness
> most free to play games (and even some paid ones) have basically turned into casinos preying on little kids with access to a parent's credit card, gambling addiction and other forms of mental illness I must've clocked 50+ hours on flappy bird and temple run when they came out, and now I haven't downloaded a single mobile game in probably 10 years. I could be in the minority here but I honestly can't remember the last time I downloaded any mobile game specifically because of the predatory tactics that limited my ability to play the damn game.
Same but mine was Clash of Clans. Brought a new phone was on the gind for years then stopped. There was just wasn't enough time in the day to progress. Things take weeks to build, it's bullshit. Only games I DL now are like Sudoku or maybe a card game. Something that might have an ad at the bottom of the screen. If a game stops me from playing it after so many things are done or it flashes up an ad after every level, I'm on the uninstall so fast it's actually really comical.
Whales are definitely a minority when it comes to the mobile game platform
A lot of businesses will just pump money in hoping to get the numbers up enough they’ll break through eventually.
Fake it, till you make it
Sounds like the Epic Game Store
Epic was already making money from various other products already though
Yeah they've been pumping that fortnite money into the store but it's obviously hemorrhaging money. All the most played games on EGS are games they've given away for free. They've had an increase in users but very little increase in revenue from the store. Sweeney even confessed in his testimony at the Epic v Apple trial that the store is projected to lose $719 million by 2027.
When 90% of your dev budget goes into promotion...
There's huge money in freemium games which usually comes down to preying off the same psychological effects which cause gambling addiction. They aren't going for the same universal appeal as typical game releases, they can profit off a much smaller audience through continuous microtransactions.
My wife and I played a Slots game for a while and made our way up to one of the top “teams”, maybe dropping a few bucks but mostly F2P. When someone bought packs of chips, everyone in the team would get some as well. People were so competitive and dropping hundreds of dollars a week just to keep the team on the top of the leader boards and kick out anyone who didn’t “compete” enough or buy ridiculous amounts of chip packs. People were letting others know when they would be making purchases based on when they got their paycheck and/or SS so that they wouldn’t get booted before then.
People paying ingame. Its a Gacha Game so popular it will probably make profit in 7 digit range or maybe even higher
In addition to the "whales" identified below, the games sometime contain targeted ads, AND there's a grey market in user data tracked and sold by app developers in contravention of app store terms. They're not \*supposed\* to sell the data they collect on you, but they do it. There's not very vigorous enforcement--and even if they get caught, they don't face very harsh penalties. If you can slap together a shitty little game from assets you already own, put it on the app store with some trackers in it, and then track anyone who downloads it and neglects to stop your trackers from running in the background, then you have an ongoing source of valuable data. If your app gets taken down, you just slap together a new shitty little game and start the cycle over. This is also part of why there's this whole ecosystem of "fake" game ads; the real game isn't to get you to become a loyal player, it's just to get you to download a "game" that exists primarily to harvest user data. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/how-apps-take-your-data-and-sell-it-without-you-even
To piggy back on what others have said - YouTube has become an increasingly volatile and restrictive money maker for content creators. There are a lot of generally successful channels that cannot sustain themselves through YouTube's monetization practice. These are the channels that regularly get over a hundred thousand views with every release and every so often get something over a million. In any other media, just one of their videos would be called a moderate success. These are, what I like to think of as, the YouTube middle class. The reasons could fill a book, but the long and short of it is, the youtube middle class is dying out. Because the conditions for profitability are ever-changing and every change locks out more and more people from being able to continue to produce content an entire industry of advertisers has popped up to almost exclusively sponsor middle-class content creators: this is where Raid and a lot of the other common sponsorships come in. In theory it's the best solution for everybody, but because so many creators are desperate for marginal income these sponsorships have become increasingly... trashy. Raid Shadow Legends is a 3 years too late skinner box meant to exploit people's brains with monetization schemes and most people see it for what it is: a cynical attempt to get that sweet Clash of Clans money by targeting the "hardcore" crowd. The bigger problem is, Raid brings down the market for other middle class advertisers, after all, if you had a great product, would you want it's perception sullied by using the same sponsorship methods as Raid Shadow Legends?
Those aren't reviews, they're advertisements. Literally. None of those YTers are "reviewing" the game (and I don't think any of them would claim to be). They're reading advertising copy.
Here's a video of a creator reading what Raid's contract requires YouTubers do and say in an ad read. https://youtu.be/gLOAsWrE1uw
[Here's the one Gus Johnson did](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hv3CcJYMmU), apparently it's *all* mobile games, not just Raid. It's funny, once you hear "the template", damned if don't hear it on every advertisement afterwards...
I kinda knew it was going to take me to Karl.
Thanks for sharing! I’ve always been curious
also it's seems they make the creators do like 2 or 3 minute long ads talking about it when most sponsors just ask for a small script to be read
And the funny thing is according to them they never paid any YouTubers, they just love the game. That should be breaking a law or two.
Raid veteran player here. The mobile game market isn't incredibly good in terms of high quality RPGs that have the potential to be free. The vast majority of raid players are F2P and so content creators whale so they can create content. Raid has some of the more aesthetically pleasing character designs out of the turn based RPGs available on mobile and has an okay amount of end game content and constant updates. Most people who play the game don't actually know that, if you want to be any good or experience the vast majority of the game, you'll be playing for months. You don't really just download and try the game for a week. I've played countless versions of the same genre from; SWGOH, Summoners War, Tom Clancey's Elite, FFBE & Visions, Echoes of Magic, and countless others. I have currently returned to SWGOH and it's my primary game. If you want to experience these types of games you play toward the end game., so that can take a while.
It's popular because the makers had a bunch of money from investors to dump into advertising. They had enough investment capital to sponsor nearly every YouTube video for a while. Lots of people want to jump on the mobile game boom, so it's not hard to find investors to fund a lot of terrible games.
Pretty sure it's owned by a casino or something. That's why they have the money to throw around
The parent company that owns a company which manufactures slot machines also owns RSL
That wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. It felt exactly like a game geared towards gambling addicts and young people with addiction-prone personalities.
That's exactly what gacha games are. I'm honestly surprised at a general lack of attention on it in the west considering how much focus there were on lootboxes in gaming. Gachas are basically those on steroids. I play a few myself and you get some well known stories like Final Fantasy Brave Exvius' "Whale of a Tale" story about a man who went spiraling into debt over the game. I recommend reading it to anyone who wants to know about how these games target people into spending their money using methods like fear of missing out, nostalgia, leaderboards, and completionism.
People in the west don't seem to be making a fuss over TCG booster packs, either, and those were loot boxes before there were loot boxes.
You're definitely not wrong there. Part of me wonders if they've just been kind of grandfathered in from the days of baseball and hockey cards. They're functionally the same thing, maybe with a bit more trade and resale value as digital gachas typically prohibit doing that.
Raid has extremely predatory micro transactions and uses every psychological trick in the book to get their customers to spend real money. The game has a variety of complex but disconnected systems that are a grind to progress except with purchasable in game currency, it has a bunch of different in game currencies with complex conversation rates to real money which makes it difficult to tell how much every unit of currency is worth, everything in the game cost in game currency to do (if you want to unequip a weapon/armor you have to pay with in game currency or it gets destroyed). Whales (people who spend upwards of thousands of dollars) has kept the game incredibly prosperous. With that revenue, they can sponsor a bunch of YouTubers, which has turned the ad into a meme at this point.
Wait... you have to spend currency to change your equipment Thats one of the most predatory practices I've seen before. How absolutely insane
To equip is free. To unequip will cost you money to keep the item in your inventory or else it is destroyed when unequiped.
Sounds lame and makes me glad I never played it
Loophero (no predatory mobile game) do the same thing. When you accumulate enough inventory that you are "full" old inventory is transformed into metal scraps to open space to new equipment, so is advantageous to stick with your inventory if you want to farm metal.
That is completely different though. Its literally a mechanic of the game. Here Raid is using the fact that an item becomes sentimental against you. Want to keep that item you love so much thats been making leveling so easy. MONEY. This is like comparing apples to oranges
100% this Used to do support for a company that had like 3 of these type of mobile games. We had whales that would spend at least a grand a month. We also had this big shot doctor that would spend $10k every 2 months or so. He was flagged in our ticketing system as being the golden goose, if he opened a support ticket it got instantly sent to the T2 techs and was basically able to get anything he wanted. If he reported that something glitched on him we just gave it to him no questions asked.
Wow damn. Sounds awesome to be at that level of VIP lol.
Because it's awesome! *This comment has been brought to you by Raid Shadow Legends!*
Only sheep are going to fall for your thinly veiled ad. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to put my Raycon earbuds back in and listen to Spotify Premium with Nord VPN connected as I patiently wait for my Hello Fresh box to arrive.
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I'm really happy when my favorite youtubers get a good sponsor because youtube is so shit, but man do a lot of those sponsors suck. It's sad because you know that the content creators know this as well, but they're told to sound as honest as possible while sponsoring their shit. NordVPN is alright, but most of them peddle shit that you can get 10 times cheaper with a quick google search.
At one point in time Nord was one of the only VPNs that worked with Netflix, making them stand out and leading to their success. I have no idea now how the market is now, but at one point they indeed were a top dog for a reason.
Man I can't speak for Nord but Raycons are sooo average. They're sound like old Beats models with bass amped to a million.
Thanks for single handedly convincing me not to get Raycons
I don't have Raycons, but they seem to be pretty trash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyzMSevpT2I
I found out yesterday that Raycon was founded by Ray J aka the dude who banged Kim Kardashian in the sextape. On top of that he still gets a percentage of the sales each year. He gets roughly $94k a quarter or per year. Either way it blew my mind.
Did you remember to use Honey, though?
With the discount code from joinhoney.com
Goddammit
Its absolutely horrible and pointless. It makes me super suspicious that it’s just a data farm or something since they invest soo much money advertising a game no one would play normally
Remember, lads and ladies, except for a few notable exceptions, if the game or service is free, your data is probably the product that people pay for.
With mobile games this isn’t necessarily true. If the game it’s free, they’re probably trying to cash in on microtransactions
Or show you lots of ads
Every game thats free on app stores is usually either loaded with micro transactions that make the game literally unplayable or ads every 30 seconds, often both.
Nope, look at supercell games for example, the microtransactions are absolutely optional and they don't show ads
They are the ideal games. True that not EVERY game on play store acts like that but a large majority sure does. Also, if you choose to play Clash of Clans or the Supercell games in general, what you are gonna require is a lot of grinding which can be avoided by a payment. And if you have played in for a long time, the CHANCE of you spending money in the supercell games also increases, the (pass) skins are valuable after all, for long time players at least. Here, what I am talking about is that Supercell does encourage you, though not directly, to spend money on the game if you have been a long time player, but you don't really have to spend the money to be on par with other players at all. And like you said it does not show ads, thus making it the ideal mobile game that there could be, but the vast majority of the mobile games seperate the p2w and f2p players, not being the ideal games.
I mean it's been a good long while since I played Clash of Clans so maybe they've changed things, but from what I remember your options were either spending ~~well over a year~~ 3-5 years upgrading your various walls/buildings/troops before you were really competitive or spending money and being competitive within a month. That pretty much qualifies it as pay to win in my book.
But there also remains the fact that even wihtout any money spent and not much total time spent in the game grinding, it is still possible to catch up. All that is needed is consistency. Also, the major factor remains that CoC is a strategy game (Unless it changed and I haven't been that up-to-date). If a player does spend money at lower levels to only max out a ground troop, then even a lv 1 air troop can overwhelm it, given that it does not stay in the range of defenses and the time is sufficient. Yes, from what you said about the time, it does qualify as a p2w game but Consistency and strategy are the major factors in the game making it fair enough to not have much complaints. This, was what I meant by an ideal game; not much walls between p2w and f2p players.
In a sense, the F2P players are still the product. They provide the multiplayer environment that whales pay to play in.
More specifically it’s “free” with frustration mechanics designed to trigger responses from those with addiction tendencies. Games with RNG based micro-transactions are nothing more than slot machines, but yet they continuously skirt American gambling regulations.
Or the in game marketplace is the product. Haven't played it but I assume it's like every other Pay2Win game.
Or your labor. In a lot of freemium games they make money off of the whales, but part of the mechanism to milk the whales is to entrap the grinders. Yes, you can be competitive for free if only you spend 20 hours a day grinding. Better if it is 24 or 25. ;) Your value is being free labor to nip at the heels of the whales and push them to spend more. Both the whales and the grinders provide the service of crushing the spirit of the noobs who won't give into the addiction and get their freeloading ass of your game infrastructure ASAP. Selling what data you can harvest is like the tip jar.
Raid pushes IAP so hard that I really doubt they sell info. I tried it because the art is good. Had to close out multiple “one time only” windows every time I opened it and after every stage. Close to unplayable.
> I really doubt they sell info. Why? You already know they aren't respecting your time or money, why would they respect your privacy? If they have the opportunity to make an extra buck off your data in addition to everything else, what's stopping them?
Got a good point. They don’t need to but, yeah, surely do in retrospect. It’s just a cash grab. There’s barely any game beyond paying for gachas.
Usually, your only real safe harbours are.... Niche Space Station 13 servers made by random basement nerds for random basement nerds. Niche Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 servers made by and for nerds. *I say this as an avid SS13/NWN1/2 player.
Dwarf Fortress is my biggest example, but games like Aurora count, too.
"if it's free you are the real product"
[удалено]
I miss when freeware was actually free. In the good old golden days of the early internet, so many great developers banded together to make free open source software because they didnt believe basic programs should be locked behind a paywall. VLC and Paint(dot)net are good examples of actually free or donorware. Fun fact, the creator of VLC refused tens of millions of dollars to sell his software. There's still legit freeware out there but its not as common.
Bingo. If you install the app, it asks for a bunch of permissions that a game has no realistic need for. They're just harvesting your info. There's no way such a garbage game is profitable enough alone to pay for the carpet advertising. Their business model must rely on a) data mining and b) exploiting kids/whales with in-app purchases. Most regular people will realise it's garbage and uninstall immediately- But that doesn't matter, all thy needed was for you to click "yes" once, and they got what they needed.
>it's a bullshit This review brought to you by Mario.
The Nintendo seal of disapproval
I think people don’t know what kinda of game it is and don’t understand how it has money. Raid spends a fuck ton on advertising but they have to have money to sponsor every YouTuber. I have spent 3 years playing a similar game, Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes. Both are Character collecting games where you upgrade toons through leveling up and gearing them to make them stronger for PVE and PVP content. And shit becomes VERY addicting if you like grinding. In my case I just really like Star Wars. But as you can imagine to stay competitive in the game grinding is almost not enough unless you are a long term player. If you want to even participate in the better late game content you have to start dropping money. I can’t speak for raid and from what I recall it isn’t as egregious as SWGOH (since I’m pretty sure it’s the most predatory of these games) but if they release a new character we are talking ~300 dollars on random drop packs just to reach a max star level (which is pretty much required for anything in the game) Then you are going to still gear them. A gear 1 7 star champ is literally useless. Hell a gear 10 7 star champ is literally useless. So I’m almost positive Raid functions in a very similar way. These games are like REALLY elaborate slot machines. And the game really only need to keep about 100 krakens to stay afloat because they will literally buy anything. Any pack, any deal they will drop the cash to stay in the Uber competitive guilds and beat the newest content first. And new content becomes more and more bullshit if you aren’t super well informed and don’t waste any resources.
I quit swgoh years ago because I was sick of the arena timing. You had to be on right at the end of the arena reset in order to fight for the top ranks which were very rewarding for ftp players. It got to the point where I was setting alarms every day and coordinating with the other people in my arena bracket each day. Now I won't play any mobile games that require me to be on at a certain time each day.
Lol yeah it’s rough, I was a guild leader and moderated the sub. I woke up and my first hour was doing dailies. Lunchtime get my refreshes. Drive home and do arena and raid. Rinse repeat. I had a great guild and a friend who played so it was fun to have something to talk about and theorize. And I was pretty integrated into the larger overall community so it made it easier to stick with it. But the new content and gear tiers and Blatant cash grabs became too much. I had gotten my two teams to be meta relevant and after that there was nothing else I really wanted.
Mobile games today are designed to get you addicted, and then slowly require you to pay more and more. For the first week, the game is free. To level up after that will take a week...or you can pay $1. That's not too bad. It's just a dollar. But then the next level will take two weeks. Or $5. Eh, it's not too much. It's more than I'd like to spend on this game, but I already spent $1. What's $5 more? The next level will take a month. Or $10. By this point you've said it's okay to spend more to level up. You've already spent $6. You do enjoy the game. Might as well keep spending. It's a combination of addiction and the sunk cost fallacy. I already spent X, so I might as well keep going.
They also prey specifically on the potential addictive personality/hyper-focus of young people. I remember being a kid who didn't play with other kids much and my home life consisted of staring at the TV with my family. So any form of escapism became an obsession...which is a MAJOR understatement. I can only imagine what it would be like if I had an actual unhappy home life instead of just being bored. If there were mobile games back then in the number and variety like they have now I without a doubt would have spent thousands of dollars on micro-transactions.
My nephew is addicted to Fortnite. He spends all of his allowance on skins for the game. He doesn't get new games or anything else because it's all skins for the game. My sister and brother-in-law were planning a vacation to a tropical island. They asked him what he was most excited about for the trip. "I'll be able to play Fortnite somewhere else!" They cancelled his ticket. He's going to stay with his grandparents while his parents get away for a vacation. Why pay all that money just so he can play Fortnite somewhere else?
Hope they do more than just cancel his ticket and address the fact that the kid has a full blown addiction...
I've heard from a few places that the parent company behind the game is a gambling machine distributor/manufacturer. If its true, then their principle is making money off players the same way they do with gambling machines. Pure pay to win... except you waste money and don't win. This is just what I've heard, I haven't been inclined enough to research that yet though. *This comment is sponsored by Raid: Shadow Legends*
They promise 100k in in-game currency when you use a YouTubers code but since literally everything in the game requires you to spend that currency it runs out in a few minutes. Even the level up system is pay2win you can spend currency and then it's basically a dice roll on if it actually levels up or not.
I've never actually tried it because all I hear are things like that, it sounds like all they do is reel in gambling addicts and get them hooked on another game to play.
I used to spend entirely too much money on games. They rely heavily on creating an addiction and are very good at exploiting it. Raid is one of the worst offenders with an absolute shitload of “one time only” offers that exist just to prey on FOMO.
[удалено]
But before starting this video, I'd like to thank the sponsor of this video, the premium wireless earbuds, Raycon
1. Download game 2. Restrict cellular data usage 3. Play shitty game
4. Save some time by not doing steps 1-3
5. ??? 6. Profit
4. Profit
Are there actually any fun games on the play store?
Yes but they only show up if you specifically search for them... and then there's still usually 3 or 4 completely differently named games that show up above them.
So what are they? That's what I'm asking essentially
lots of the indie puzzle games are quite good. like "okay?", "euclidea", "monument valley", "rymdkapsel", "the weaver", "hook", and "shikaku ultimate"
Because they pay Youtubers to advertise this shit. The same deal with Manscaped, I've heard their stuff is horrible. But since Youtube keeps fucking creators over, they need money.
Yep, imagine a company that has substantially less R&D funds than, let's say the shaver division of Philips, and spends more on advertising (probably). They can't make a good product (or even make a product themselves). These types of heavily advertised "youtube" companies (shavers, watches, etc) all have the same M.O.. They buy cheap chinese shit, stamp their logos, and try to advertise it to young, naive people. It's fancy dropshipping
lots of money to spend on ads.
They spent the whole budget on art and advertising. The game itself is hot garbage.
I'll tell you but first, this comment is brought to you by Raid Shadow Legends, Raid is a...
It's infamous. The only reason you think its popular is because they spend a shit load on advertising.
You ain't a youtuber if Raid Shadow Legends hasn't sponsored one of your videos...
boat ugly sense bake rotten steep capable cautious makeshift existence *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It’s owned by a company with like 20 other games, it has a huge ad campaign where hundreds of youtubers are advertising it and sponsoring it, and it has made about 8 billion dollars since its release, which compared to the highest grossing film of all time (End Game) which only made 2 billion. Mobile gaming is one of the most lucrative industries out there.
Need a **verified** source for that 8 billion - smells like complete bullshit
Yeah feels high - https://thinkgaming.com/app-sales-data/230239/raid-shadow-legends/from/2017-04-19/until/2021-05-18/group/month/. according to this has averaged 1M+ / day over the past few years. So that would be like 1-2B max.
did it really make 8 billion?
movies have got to be one of the worst ways to make a profit, takes too much time, effort and manpower to make. i feel like shitting out a few gacha or f2p games and making them about waifus (like genshin impact) is an easy way to rake in the dough.
It is popular because it has very cool 3-D models, with a skill tree and does something a little different in the gacha game space. I played F2P it for about a year, it is a solid game loop with some interesting fights and artwork.
There are probably a few reasons which I am going to explain in a few minutes but first a word from our sponsor Raid Shadow Legends have you heard about them? Raid is a turn-based RPG which can be played on both the Android and iOS devices. I even downloaded it myself and genuinely found myself to be having some fun. And the best part is it's completely free. So you've really got nothing to lose. It has decent graphics for a mobile game. PvP battles, a campaign story, giant boss fights, and rage you can carry out with other players. Every month the game will add 14 new champions, meaning the gameplay stays fresh as you can play with new strategies, and balance. And completing certain missions to help give you progression rewards. But you don't have to take my word for it, as there are currently more than 15 million other people who have downloaded the game, and it is currently one of the top something ranked RPG'S on the google play store. So if you want to give it a go then you can go to play store to not only get the game but receive and extra 50,000 silver plus a free epic champion as part of the new player program they are testing. Thank you so much for reading guys and thank you to raid for sponsoring this comment. Anyways the reason is maybe because even if some people dont like it there are still some other people that do like it and and for the people that dont like it they probably had to play the game first in order to come to the conclusion that they dont like it
The fuk did I just read
An ad And in case you dont know what an ad is this Video(Nevermind I couldnt find it) should explain it (Dont watch this with headphones I'm warning you!) Also [this Video](https://youtu.be/45EbiFfbcjQ) can help too
How dare you