Creators of Candy Crush, King Digital Entertainment, was bought by Activision for $6bill. Maybe there will be a Candy Crush Modern Warfare now.. I don't remember spending a dime on this game but i know people who have. www.bbc.com/news/business-34707701
Mobile games are massive profit gainers. Low dev costs, larger market, huge profit margins. I know people that actually spend a decent chunk of money on microtransactions. Its dumb but people do it.
The company made $2.6B last year. They revolutionized a lot of things, and became the biggest gaming company on Facebook. They definitely know how to make money in the social-gaming industry.
Yeah, the consumer base for mobile games is absolutely massive. If you can create a game that generates any kind of buzz 20 million people will be playing it in month. Plus as you said, you can just throw a bunch of crap at the wall and see if something sticks.
Why is spending money on Candy Crush (or similar games), any dumber than spending money on Madden or WOW or other types of entertainment such as NBA League Pass or Sunday Ticket? Folks have different tastes in entertainment and spending $1.00 on Candy Crush to one person is as reasonable as spending $1.00 to download a song on iTunes.
Revenue. 40% from Candy Crush in the last quarter. (they made $575m) Zynga's revenue fell from $1.2b to $690m in two years as farmville waned. 500m users is good, but this is still a risky move and a truck load of cash.
People call it "dumb" because the games are free to download. The money comes from extension, power-ups. and other micro purchases. People do it, because it makes the entertainment more enjoyable. I'm sure other addicting things like p*rn has people paying money for enhancements when the product is readily free. The 2.3% of King's user base who actually spend money are spending over $20/mo on average.
My friend sunk hundreds of dollars in Hearthstone. Microtransactions are dumb, but people are buying into it enough to make it industry standard even in those triple AAA Madden games. I'm not talking about the one time $1, $5, $10, $20 microtransaction.
Let's get together and create a game like this Instead of watching others make big money, we could pocket $10 billion easy, buy the Houston Rockets and Fire Kevin McHale and watch us win the Championship 5 times in a row
I thought the real money was coming from ad revenue not micro-transactions. I guess the game changed?
For games like Madden, developers spend a lot of money to push the frontier on programming, making better and better graphics and more sophisticated gameplay. Candy Crush could have been made for Atari 150 years ago. Maybe that's its own sort of sophistication -- figuring out how to get people to spend billions for a game with low development costs. But, I have trouble justifying rewarding them when they've put so little work into the product.
It sold for less than the IPO price. It also generates 600 mil in cash. Basically its being priced like the it heading down.
Addiction. These game producers, soon, if not already, probably have psychologists working for them on how to hook gamer and get them to spend. Only a few $ here and there add up fast. I was once addictive to this game, playing it anytime I get a chance. Now I absolutely hate it. Such a waste of time. That waste of time is more costly than the waste of money spent on it.
