this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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I'm on a game, Whiteout Survival, you've probably never heard of it. I haven't spent a penny, but I was curious about how much one obscure "upgrade" cost. Mind you, there are hundreds of purchases in the game.
It was $100 US, and it said 29,000 had been sold... in the last WEEK!
2.9 million dollars a week for NOTHING. And that's just that one obscure item, far from their biggest seller.
And that's just in one game you've never heard of.
You're a non-monetizer, just like 95% of the players. The game will make you some form of offer in order to convert you into a paying minnow, dolphin or whale. Whales are rare, less than a percent of the players, but they generate a significant amount of the revenue.
Companies compare their conversion rate with each other and have specific goals to meet. 5% for example is good. If your company has say 3%, you'll want to focus on improving that. Each product will have a specific goal here, and otherwise is shut down because there's a customer acquisition cost. Games easily cost more to market than to develop.
A lot of effort is spent on the first offer. This is where you'll see a screen that makes an amazing offer you'll seriously consider. It'll have something that is high value but incredibly cheap and so temporary. This isn't to earn money, it's simply to convert you. Because after you've spent your first dollar you're likely to keep spending.
Yeah it's been showing me that banner every time I start the game since the very beginning.
And I nope it every time.
Yeah not the best design
It's highly likely they fudge those numbers or outright lie.
Reason for saying that?
BTW: not the company reporting those numbers. Google Play's numbers.
Because every single thing about those games is a psychological ploy to get people to spend as much money as physically possible. They run studies on what tweaks get people to spend more or less and I guarantee the numbers they show in the store have been studied.
Also, who's going to call them out on that? What court wouldn't throw that out immediately? And even if you did win, the company wouldn't even notice. You probably signed away the right to be part of a class action lawsuit in the Terms of Service anyway.
I knew multiple people who spent several ten thousands USD in State of Survival. A fucking mobile game.
A buddy of mine spent several thousand on Marvel Heroes. He wouldn’t go out to lunch with us, and finally I asked him what was going on. He eventually told me, we had a “dude…we are adults and can’t be doing that shit. Imagine the hookers and drugs you could have bought!”
He quit, but still tells me he thinks about it and is immediately filled with regret.
One time I nearly cut a job due to being asked to make something gambling related, but when I worked on an addictive mobile game I simply didn't realize what I was doing. Honestly, I couldn't have known unless I had asked about their monetization strategy before they brought new people on to implement it. And at that point the game was as good as done. I remember walking through Barcelona and seeing all these kids on their phones in the park and not playing or having fun, it felt surreal. I bawled my eyes out and didn't return to the job. You know I genuinely just wanted to give people some fun in this world.
The issue with mobile games is that nobody is prepared to pay even 5 euros for a game. So for mobile game developers it is business as usual to do it this way.
It’s crazy to me how we went from buying a complete game for $50, and now we get an enshitified, half completed mobile game for free but people spend hundreds of dollars playing it.
And it’s nowhere near as good.