Those innocent little games on the app store. Yes those ones. The free ones. Watch out.
In the modern day, almost everything is optimised to take money out of your pocket. Those free games want you to pay. And they will attempt to psychologically manipulate you until you do.
Mobile games are highly addictive products. Game creators have found that using a “freemium” model along with microtransactions is an insanely effective business model.
Highest-grossing mobile games in recent years:
Candy Crush Saga in 2020: $857 million
Clash Of Clans in 2019: $700 million
PubG Mobile: $2.6 billion
Honor of Kings: $2.5 billion
The Dopamine Shot
Candy Crush gives the player a dopamine short
Mobile games encourage surges of dopamine, just as cocaine and gambling do. Like most video games, they hijack the natural reward circuitry in our brain and trick us into thinking we’ve achieved something when we complete a level in Candy Crush.
These dopamine shots are addictive for many people. Mobile games will encourage these dopamine shots with congratulatory fireworks, on-screen XP counters or numbers and complimentary text, like Candy Crush’s “Sweet!”.
Subway Surfers gives a dopamine shot to the player for completing a level
Bright colours. Sparkly animations. Increasing coins or XP. All of these things serve to activate the dopamine reward system in our brain. We feel like we’re accomplished something, like we’re progressing somehow. The truth, of course, is that we’re sat still hunched over our phones; completing none of our real life goals.
While all mobile games have different tasks, different characters, different graphics, different colours; most of them are essentially the same. Most mobile games today follow the exact same model.
The Model
Many mobile games aren’t games, they’re sales funnels.
With the primary purpose of many mobile games isn’t to create an enjoyable game for their audience, it’s to get as many customers to make in-app purchases are possible.
The only reason they want to make the game fun is because a fun game is more effective at hooking gamers and getting them to part with their money. It’s just that making a fun game happens to coincide with getting users to spend money.
It isn’t a game with a shop added on, it’s a shop with a game added on.
Most mobile games are the same. It doesn’t matter what colour the pixels are, how they’re arranged on the screen. It doesn’t matter what the goal of the game is, they’re all simply methods of spiking your dopamine and encouraging you to use the shop. And most of them use the exact same model:
1. The Hook: Early stage of the game is easy and satisfying. With plenty of rewards, encouragement, congratulatory messages and addictive dopamine hits. The goal of this stage is to hook as many users as they can – a challenging early game would mean losing potential spenders.
2. Investment: Game difficulty begins to slowly increase. Players become more invested in the game and begin to mentally set goals: I want to get 1000 gold, I want to reach level 10, I want get on the global highscores.
3. The Bottleneck: Game reaches a “bottle neck”, a level that’s incredibly hard or impossible to complete without purchasing items from the shop. Some users will quit at this stage, while others (who are invested in achieving the goals they mentally set for themselves) buy in-game items to pass the difficult level.
4. Addiction: At this stage many players are dedicated to achieving their in-game goals and they’ll stop at nothing to achieve them. Of course, the player who wants to complete the game will have to spend a large amount of money on in-app purchases to do so. This player is also addicted to the dopamine surges he gets through achieving different goals within the game.
Yes, mobile gaming addiction is real.
To the mobile gaming industry, these two gamers are “Whales”. 90% of all income from mobile games comes from “Whales” such as these. This means, that most of these mobile games are made with the purpose of creating addiction and ruining lives. If a game doesn’t create addiction, it loses 90% of it’s income.
In the past, players were charged a small initial fee, anywhere from $2-20 to purchase the game. The player purchased the game, then enjoyed it as much as they liked, and no in-app purchases were available.
Overtime, mobile game developers discovered a far more effective monetisation model for games: The “freemium” model. Offer the game free of charge, then psychologically manipulate players into buying virtual items from the shop.
Over the years, thousands of mobile games have been made and game developers have experimented endlessly with which model extracts the most money out of players as possible. The freemium model is the end result of those experiments. If the goal is to make as much money as possible through a game, the freemium model is inevitable.
Only around 1.9% of players end up making in-app purchases, yet they bring in 90% of all income to the game. Most of this income comes from what the mobile gaming industry calls “whales”. These are players who splash out extraordinary amounts of money on mobile games. And of course, most of these people are addicts.
The freemium model relies on addicts. It’s created to encourage addiction, after all, the freemium model doesn’t work without addicts. The model is created with addicts in mind.
The Abstraction Of Money
Left: Bricks Centre: Temple Run Right: Candy Crush Saga
Why do all mobile games have their own virtual currencies? After all, it would be far simply for players to buy virtual items with real currency (Dollars, Pounds, Euros etc).
Candy Crush Saga requires players to buy gold bars, Bricks requires players to buy diamonds and Temple Run requires you to buy gold. Why?
When you pay with a debit card instead of cash, you don’t physically feel the money leaving your hand. Psychologically, you don’t feel a sense of loss when you don’t physically hand over your cash. And this is even more true when you’re spending “gold bars” in Candy Crush.
The more abstract the currency, the less you feel like you’re losing something.
It’s no accident that most mobile games have their own currency. They include their own virtual currency because they know it makes players spend more.
Candy Crush Saga
One of the most successful users of the freemium model and one of the most notoriously addictive games on the face of the earth is Candy Crush Saga. In 2020 alone, the game profited $857 million dollars. Let’s take this classically addictive game as a case study and see how players go through the 4 stages of the freemium model: 1. The Hook 2. Investment 3. The Bottleneck 4. Addiction
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The Hook
Left: The game gives players easy hints for what to do at the early stages of the game Right: The game shells out large amounts of rewards and praise to the user.
The early levels of Candy Crush Saga are so easy that even a 5-year-old could complete them. Gamers are told exactly where to swipe their finger in order to pass the level, and are then praised (like a child) for completing absurdly easy tasks.
The game acts impressed by your performance: “WOW…you passed on your first go!”. Players feel a twinge of pride: I guess I’m quite good at this, they quietly think to themselves.
The Hook is the first stage of the sales funnel. It’s a like a giant net, cast out into the sea to catch as many fish as possible. Most of these fish aren’t worth much, but if the net big enough, and eventually it will catch a whale.
How do you make the net bigger? By making the early stages of the game as easy and as accessible as possible, and that’s exactly what Candy Crush Saga does.
2. Investment
The player looks at the levels ahead and sets their goals.
At this stage, the game begins to get a little more challenging. There are no hints, and finding the right move takes skills. Sometimes players will pass the level, other times they will fail.
The boosters available from the in-app store are not necessary just yet as player can pass the levels with their intellect alone. The player begins to set goals for themselves, deciding that they want to reach level 100, or collect 100 gold bars or get in the global highscores.
The rewards begin to get spaced further and further apart, as do the satisfying hits of dopamine they receive after completing a level. The player isn’t addicted yet, but putting down the game at this point may still prove difficult.
3. The Bottleneck
As you can see, there are multiple levels of candy crash that are impossible, or near impossible to complete without paying for in-game “boosters’“
The game developers at Candy Crush have purposefully designed levels that are excruciatingly hard, or perhaps entirely impossible to complete without paying for in-game boosters.
At this stage, in-app store becomes more and more enticing. If the player wants to finally complete that difficult level (and get another hit of dopamine), all they have to do is pay a small fee to continue.
If a player wants to pass the impossible level, they can simply purchase a 3 “Jelly Fish” boosters for the price of 19 gold bars. Notice how the in-game currency of gold bars makes it easier for the player to forget they’re spending real money.
Now that the player has the jellyfish booster, they’ll find that the level is now completable
The “Jelly Fish” booster in action. This booster makes it much easier to pass the level.
This is where the sales funnel leads to. This moment is what the entire model is based around; the bottleneck is what the entire game is based around. Players can either give up, or satisfy their new addiction by paying the small price of $5 for 50 gold bars to pay for some “Jelly Fish” boosters.
4. Addiction
In case you hadn’t heard by now, dopamine is addictive. Is the same reason people get to other behavioural addictions like gambling, pornography etc.
Those that get addicted to Candy Crush often blame themselves for getting addicted to such a silly little game. Yet from my point of view, the fact that so many people get addicted is no surprise whatsoever. After all, the game is designed with addiction in mind.
There are endless stories, often from women, who have become hopelessly addicted to Candy Crush and have spent thousands in on pixelated gold bars and boosters that allow them to pass through the purposefully created bottlenecks.
That’s the modern world of mobile games. Just one more trap in the modern world that must be detected and avoided.
“The only winning move is not to play” – Wargames (1983)
