Selected excerpts
For the TL;DR
In 2013, when Yao and his invitation-only clan, North44, were at their peak, Clash of Clans helped create $555 million of revenue for the company. The next year, Supercell's revenue tripled to $1.7 billion -- a seemingly inexplicable sum produced by a roster of games that, like Clash, are free to download and can be played without spending a dime. So how is Supercell generating all that money? By relying on players who don't simply want to enjoy the game but who want to win. Players who, like Yao, are willing to spend a great deal of cash.In the video game industry, many larger developers make extensive use of psychologists and professional economists to improve the game -- and its bottom line -- in subtle ways....Yao took to Facebook to announce to his 20,000 followers that he was quitting the game. He'd escaped. "It was such a relief," he says quietly.No sooner than Yao posted his message on Facebook, he heard from a surge of game studios wanting to know about what he'd learned in his year on the freemium front line. First, rival game publishers made consultancy offers, hoping to learn Clash of Clans' secrets. Then came a formal job offer. Yao was bored with his life in the finance industry, so at the same time he quit the game, he also quit his profession. He moved to London to join Space Ape Games, where he now works as manager of live operations across a number of the studio's freemium titles. Samurai Siege, the first game Yao worked on, is a "carbon copy" of Clash of Clans, he says.
Survival is often based on finding the highest spending players, known as whales (a term that originated in the gambling industry), and keeping them invested. Will Luton, author of "Free-to-Play: Making Money From Games You Give Away" -- and a player who spends about $2,000 a year in Magic, The Gathering Online -- estimates that only 2 to 5 percent of a freemium game's audience will spend any money in the game. Of these paying players, he says, a tiny percentage of big spenders typically provide up to 50 percent of the revenue.
Yet today, just as he once labored to upgrade his troops in Clash, he works to turn casual players into legions of George Yaos -- players who give their all to the game, perhaps even beyond the limits of what they can afford, as they seek to find the flow state in which, as MIT's Schull puts it, the world's problems disappear. It can become a dispiriting cycle: Players pick up the game to escape the pressures of the world but, in time, the game can mimic those same pressures and become its own kind of stress and labor -- one that can, in some cases, even invade the shower.
Originally Posted by ItsMagic824
