this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Adding thousands of levels for 1 whale is unlikely to be profitable. That's a lot of development cost for content that likely won't be seen. Pointing to other games by the same studio is a much better idea if you can get them to make the transition.
Candy Crush Saga now has nearly 17,000 levels in it, so you’d be very wrong about that. Your average player might get into the hundreds, above average maybe thousands, but 17,000? They’re fishing for whales and not even that many of them.
This problem is way worse than people think and most mobile games on the store have the sole entire purpose of only hooking a small handful of whales. Then once they do, they mold entire games around just a few people. These companies that run apps like Candy Crush actively change the price of lives per player and watch the statistics of what they’re buying and when. It’s so sinister and the entire industry survives off of gaming addictions and whaling.
I mean you're not entirely wrong, but you're a little wrong. Just because they added levels later doesn't mean you were correct... These games have road maps, and they don't quickly change gears. There's math and analytics that go into all of it.
I think you're stretching when you say "around a few people". There's more money in 10,000 people spending a bit than 10 spending a ton. It's a gradient. The top 10 spend a lot, but not enough to morph your road map for. Especially when the companies own multiple properties. Better to get them transitioned to a new game within your umbrella than disrupt the entire content road map.
There's also far worse stuff than that and way harsher criticisms. You're getting closer with the "changing the prices" bit, but it's even worse than that, imo.
It's the reason I left working at one of them as a data analyst. I'm not speaking in generalities or that interested in debating here... I know precisely how the calculations for these types of things are done because I used to be on the team that did them.
Not this game, but a different one. The whole industry operates very similarly.
I really wanted to prove myself wrong because you sound like you know what you’re talking about. So I went and looked it up, turns out I was right to say what I said. Most of the major games out there report that more than half of their revenue comes from whales and those whales make up around 5% of their paying playerbase, sometimes more sometimes less. And in some games, that revenue is 60-70% of the total.
So that’s why there are 17,000 levels which that vast majority of players wont ever see. It’s because they’re chasing 5% or less of their audience.
But when it comes to games that are much smaller, I wasn’t really exaggerating to say that a small handful of players can outspend everyone else. When you have a player base in the hundreds and there’s like 20 people spending 50% or more in revenue for you, it’s going to affect your road map. In a larger game though, that percent will still mean tens of thousands of whale players.
And maybe your experience was different, maybe the games you worked on didn’t operate that way. But the industry absolutely does. It doesn’t mean you can ignore the 50% of revenue coming from regular players by the way, I’m just saying that the percent that spends enormously has almost the same weight in changing the games road map as the majority of players sometimes. Which is crazy to me.
Here’s the relevant Reddit post that was one of the sources I found.