How do the mobile game ads that no one likes make money, the game is free sonif anyone does care they get the game for free, but they spend so much money advertising that even if 1 out of 100 people spend 1$ it would be hard for them to profit?
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Microtransactions are not to be underestimated. The free to play model basically goes like this: you get the game and it starts fun. The first few minutes or even hours are great and you really start getting into it. After that initial phase progress slows down. Now, you can maintain that fun progress in the beginning but it will cost a couple dollars. You can refuse to pay but it will take you longer to progress. Alternatively you can get a minor boost if you watch this 15 second ad that another company paid to put in the game. Also, we have really cool items that make the game even more fun but you have to open these loot crates. You get the first few free and you can get more over time but if you buy more you get more chances to get that item you want.
Long story short the free to play model uses the same principles as gambling. It rewards you enough to keep you around and spend money but never enough where you are fulfilled. Games you pay for do the same thing now (looking at you EA). So just like gambling it’s not for everyone but there’s a few that fall into it and blow a ton of cash.
There are several things that help them earn money. First or all game is purposely made that sooner or later you’ll encounter kind of a pay wall. You’ll either have to wait through super long periods of time to progress through the game, or have to spend some money. And here’s the trick the longer you play, the bigger the chance that you’ll spend some money, and the more you spend the bigger the chance that you’ll spend some more. And also there’s such a thing as ‘Whale hunting’ (At least that’s how it’s rough translation from my native language) what that means is, the game’s are aimed not at your average casual player, they are aimed on less then one percent of players in the world that are huge spenders. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but basically this small percentage of people responsible for most of the income that f2p games have. There are some more thing to add to this but I don’t remember everything
A couple different ways.
Some games generate ad revenue. Those simple tappy games where you never have to buy anything to advance, but you get an ad between every level, do this. Companies pay to advertise on games, and each ad watched generates a fraction of a cent for the creator of the game. Repeat over hours of play, with millions of players, and a game can churn out a tidy little sum without charging the players a dime.
Other games make soft walls in their progression where you can either grind at a menial, unfun task for hours to get to the next good part, and every round of grinding takes longer and longer, or you can pay a pittance to skip the grind and continue the story. Games like that can bleed a single player of hundreds of dollars, 99 cents at a time, over months.
Someone else mentioned “whale hunting” in this thread. Some games depend on a tiny fraction of their players getting way too invested and pouring huge amounts of money, for mobile games anyway, into otherwise free games.
A lot of games use a mix of strategies, like candy crush showing you an ad between each level, selling you small packs of power ups for 99 cents, and having a shop where you can buy a MASSIVE pack of power ups for $99, for those rare people who have the cash to burn on it.
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