I have never been a fan of mobile gaming. I tend to enjoy playing games on a big screen and will even at times complain about the fact that my PC monitor is a mere 25 inches. Like most people, I have a ginormous television that I play console games on. I just can't really understand that allure of playing a game on a 4 inch screen on a phone.
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Nevertheless, I knew a lot of people that were playing this game back in the mid 2010's and despite the fact that their numbers are dwindling, Supercell, the Finnish company that made this game, managed to bring in $700 million in revenue from this game in 2019. This is a full 7 years after the game was released.
My girlfriend at the time tried to get me involved in the game so I could be in her clan and compete against other teams out there. I never participated in this. I do know that she would sit there in our house and play this game for hours and I'm not judging because I do the same thing with what I consider to be "regular games" and was seriously addicted to MMO's at one point as well.
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I'm sure I don't need to explain what this game is all about because I would imagine that everyone out there knows at least one person who plays (or played) it but it is a strategy game of sorts with timers that take increasingly long to expire the determines your progress in the game. Like many other mobile games the only way to get past these timers is to pay money, and while I find this to be exceptionally foolish and I only personally know one person that ever did this, there has to be a lot of people in the world that were willing for them to pull in nearly a billion dollars a year.
Supercell isn't required to release their internal financial figures but what little there is to see out there shows that their total operating costs are somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million a year but here is the thing, Clash of Clans is not the only game they have. There was one other game that I dabbled in (at my GF's request) called Hay Day, which is just a farm simulator that I thought was exceptionally stupid, but it also pulls in millions of dollars a year as well. Nowhere near as much as Clash of Clans, but still a lot of money.
To put things into perspective about how massive the profits in mobile gaming potentially are, let's look at an extremely popular "normal game" like Red Dead Redemption 2. This game is one of the best-selling games of all time and it managed to sell a staggering 36,000,000 copies. Since these sales were at different prices, it is difficult to know exactly how much money that made but when it was first released it sold most of those copies in the first week at full price for around $700 million.
This is considered a very good ROI for Rockstar. Here's the thing though, unlike mobile games, once Red Dead Redemption has sold the copies, there isn't any more money for the company to make. Once you have bought the game, that's it! No more shekels for the manufacturer. Also, RDR2 took 7 years to make and involved more than 1000 staff to make it happen.
Clash of Clans pulls in this much money in a bad year and even though the popularity of the game has dropped, it still managed to pull in hundreds of millions of dollars every year despite being nearly a decade old now.
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It's no wonder that studios are starting to focus on mobile gaming and for people like me, this just plain sucks since I never have, nor will I ever be, interested in gaming on such a small screen.
What about you? Do you mobile game? Do you spend money on it? In my mind micro-transactions have kind of ruined gaming and I will never get involved in it.