Video Game Discussion: The Most Successful Games With Microtransactions.

One blog post a month. That's how it's worked, right? I never could really do bi-weekly. Sorry, I suppose.
If I were being paid, I'm sure I'd care. But YOU tell ME if you see any adverts on here.

I mean sure, I would have twenty-thousand pop ups and three adorable dinosaurs holding min-billboards about car insurance and pills to expand your johnson if I could but I have no way to enable them currently. On the subject of monetisation, the topic today is microtransactions in video games.

Here's the definition of microtransactions stolen straight from Wikipedia.

Microtransaction (also referred to as in-app billing or in-app purchasing) is a business model where users can purchase virtual goods via micropayments. Microtransactions are often used in free-to-play games to provide a revenue source for the developers.

Essentially, there are many games that are free-to-play or "freemium" games which have no entry cost at all, but enable the player to purchase bonuses within the game using actual money.

The most successful games, such as mobile game Clash of Clans, can easily generate close to a billion dollars in financial revenue from such transactions.
Funnily enough, it's more than enough to bankroll an entire game.
The people who pay in a freemium game amount to about 0.5% to 6% of the players dependent on the games quality and popularity.
Those players essentially fund the free ride that everyone else is getting.

So which console games make the most money from microtransactions? The ones where you have to pay for the main character to wear a yellow suit instead of a blue suit? The ones like Call of Duty where you pay for weapon packs and certain player emblems?

Trick questions, actually.

Mobile games and handheld games make the most from micro transactions.

And here's how you go about making the most successful game.

1.) Make sure your game relies entirely on luck

Notable examples.) Crossy Road and Pokemon Shuffle.

Pokemon Shuffle is, in essence, Candy Crush with Pokemon. You can have five goes then another one every thirty minutes or buy more. You can also buy coins to buy upgrades or jewels which allow you to take extra turns if you're stuck on a level. Using money to buy money to buy money.  

Also, Candy Crush takes no skill and entirely hinges on luck.

As does Crossy Road, where you make an animal cross a road whilst cars go backwards and forwards.

If your game relies on luck the player will play it indefinitely. They'll get frustrated, but never frustrated enough to stop.

                         2.) Make sure your player can't stop. (Even if the game is turned off.)

                     Notable examples.) Crossy Road, Pokemon Shuffle and AdVenture Capitalist.

What do all the games above have in common? You can turn them off and they will continue to function when offline. Pokemon Shuffle will, after thirty minutes, renew your number of goes and add one. Crossy Road gives you a gift every six hours that is almost always coins that unlock you new characters for the game and idle game AdVenture Capitalist continues to generate in-game money even when the game is off using general calculations of how much you were earning per-second when you clicked off it.

                                         3.) Make sure that the non-payer players pay too.

                                                      Notable examples.) Crossy Road.

In Crossy Road, you unlock new characters through a coin system. You can buy coins, collect coins in the actual game or..... watch adverts.
For each advert watched, you get 20 coins. Watch five and that's a free character.
They're all adverts for other mobile games, usually. Know your audience and all that.

Crossy Road made $7 million from players who bought more coins using in-game currency.
$3 million came from other players who were content to watch 14 seconds of something they didn't want or need. Turns out those 14 seconds added up.

The mother of all mobile games is still Candy Crush Saga, which raked in $3.6 million a day to the tune of a cool $1.33 billion dollars. (That's billion with a "b')

Still, it just goes to show.

What does it show?

I don't know.

Make a game on Facebook and put a button involving paying on there and you're rich, I guess.

Bye.