Time is money: How Clash of Clans earns
500,000 a day with in-app purchases
Confession time: While I like to rationalize my
blog’s recent silence with changing jobs and
moving to a new city, the truth is, the single biggest
drain on my free time lately has been Supercell’s
Clash of Clans . While this apparently puts me in
good company , I decided it’s about time I shared
what I’ve learned about how this “free” game
apparently manages to spin well over $500,000 a
day for its creator Supercell. (Update : Forbes
reports Supercell now earns over $2.4m a day , the
majority of that from Clash of Clans .)
Overview
The core of Clash of Clans is a bog-standard
resource management game: mine “gold” and
“elixir”, use gold and elixir to buy improvements to
your town so you can build stronger armies, raid
other players in order to loot their gold and elixir,
rinse and repeat. If you’ve ever played Starcraft, Age
of Empires or pretty much any other real-time
strategy game, you’ll know the drill, and the
buildings and units come off as almost painfully
derivative. There’s a Barracks for new troops and
Archer Towers for defense, you’ve got Zerg -like
cheap and disposable Barbarians, weak but ranged
Archers, slow Giant tanks for soaking up damage,
etc. But formulas are formulas because they work,
and it’s fun to set up your little village, win your
first battles and watch your (thoroughly
meaningless) levels and experience points rack up.
The touch-screen interface is a pleasure to use and
the smoothly zoomable 3D graphics are beautifully
animated with cute little touches; for example, when
you tap to select an army camp, every unit salutes
their leader in a different way.
Show Me the Gems
“So that’s all well and good”, I hear you say, “but
where’s the money coming from?”
In the standard Zynga playbook for making money
off with freemium games, you would let players buy
gold, elixir or the items they want directly. But Clash
of Clans adds a twist: you can’t buy anything
directly, but you can buy a third resource called
“gems”. Unlike gold and elixir, gems are not
necessary for building anything functional, they’re
simply a type of “power-up” that serve as a
shortcut. Need more gold to finish a building? Buy
it with gems. Need more elixir to add a dragon to
your army? Buy it with gems. Don’t want to wait a
week for a building to finish? Complete it instantly
with gems. In other words, gems mean instant
satisfaction. What’s more, their cost is neatly
obfuscated: purchased gems come in big, oddly
numbered stashes (500, 1200, 2500, 6500, 14000),
and once you have the pile sitting in your account,
it’s easier to whittle it away 834 gems at time,
whereas you’d probably think twice if asked to
punch in your credit card details and confirm that
you really want to pay $6.98 (just a sliver under the
U.S. federal minimum wage) to upgrade your
Wizard Tower.
Yet this formula’s beauty is that none of this is
immediately apparent. You start the game with 500
gems, which is plenty for the initial stages, and
there are many easily earned “achievements” that
reward you with more, so that you don’t initially
appreciate their value. The initial buildings are fast
to build, with some building instantly and others
taking a minute here or five minutes there. And
you’re shielded from enemy attacks for three days,
so you can take your time building up your base
and raiding the AI’s goblin bases for easy loot.
As you advance through the levels, though, the time
and expense of everything ramps up exponentially.
A level 2 Town Hall takes 5 minutes to build and
costs 1,000 gold; a level 8 Town Hall takes 8 days
and costs 2,000,000 gold. And you soon encounter
the next twist: on the later levels, patience is no
longer enough . A maxed-out set of Gold Mines can
produce 360,000 gold a day, meaning you could
theoretically accumulate the sum neeeded for that
Town Hall upgrade in 6 days. However, you’re being
continually raided by other players, and since other
players can see your wealth before they choose to
attack, a fat bank account means you’re a fat target.
What’s more, since successful raids award
percentages of your wealth, a single “three-star”
attack worth 25% can see 500,000 gold disappear
in a flash.
There’s more. In
your typical RTS,
collected resources
immediately go
into your central
storage. In Clash
of Clans , though,
they stay in the collectors, vulnerable to attack both
by location and design (up to 50% can be stolen,
vs. 20% for central storage), until you log in to
manually transfer them to relative safety with a tap.
This, too, makes it difficult to accumulate large
amounts and encourages you to login at least
several times a day. The chart shows why: if you
start with 1,000,000 gold in storage, earn 360,000
daily, and get attacked once daily, losing 50% from
your collectors and 20% from central storage, the
player who doesn’t bother logging in for two weeks
will see their pile drop 75% to under 250,000, while
the player who logs in religiously four times a day
will increase their wealth by over 50% to 1,550,000
— but even their earnings flatline well before two
million.
What this means is that, once your bankroll is over
1.5 million or so, the only free way to keep the
balance growing is grinding , a tedious non-stop
cycle of raiding and army rebuilding, with nervous
logins every five minutes to keep raiders at bay (you
cannot be attacked while online). In their
grandmotherly kindness, though, Supercell provides
you a whole wealth of alternatives. Can you spot the
pattern?
You can use gems to buy “shields” that stop you
from getting raided: 250 gems ($2.50) . Lest that
seem too cheap, you’re preventing from using
more than one week of shield per month.
You can use gems to fill up your gold or elixir
storages instantly: 834 gems ($8.34)
You can use gems to upgrade your gold mines
to the next level, where they will work faster: 966
gems ($9.66)
You can use gems to buy additional “workers”,
so you can upgrade your production faster and
earn gold/elixir faster: 1000 gems ($9.98)
You can use gems to double your production of
gold or elixir for a 6-hour period. Repeated
across six mines for three days: 1368 gems ($
13.68)
You can use gems to rebuild your armies
instantly, so you can keep raiding and racking up
loot without anybody having a chance to steal
their money back via the handy “Revenge”
button. Assuming 50k elixir to rebuild and 50k
profit per raid: 2760 gems ($27.60)
And once you’ve
finally earned those
2 million and
clicked the “Build”
button, it takes
another 8 days to
build the thing —
unless, that is, you
fork out another 1123 gems ($11.23) for instant
completion. It’s little wonder most players start “to
gem” (it’s a verb in Clash of Clans parlance) by the
time they reach Town Hall level 7 or so, the stage
when most costs are measured in millions and
building virtually anything unassisted takes days.
Jorge Yao, the game’s undisputed champion,
figures he has spent north of $2500 in real money
on buying gems
, and according to back-of-the-envelope
calculations, the cost of fully fitting out your virtual
village is on the order of $5000 when you include
walls. It’s little wonder the top clans leaderboard is
full of players like “>< Royal ><” from Kuwaiti clan
“Q8 FORCE” and clan UAE’s “khalifa” (presumably
from Bahrain’s ruling House of Khalifa ).
Your Pain is Supercell’s Gain
Unsurprisingly, the
entire game has
been warped in
subtle ways to
encourage buying
and using gems.
For example, in your average real-time strategy
game, you have fine-grained control deploying and
directing your troops, and units that survive can be
used in the next battle. Not so in Clash of Clans :
once deployed, units fight according to their
hardcoded strategy (most commonly the
harebrained “bash closest building”, regardless of
what it is or who is firing at them), and every unit
deployed disappears at the end of the battle, even if
they are victorious. This means it’s essential to
rebuild huge armies and to attack with massive
force every time. And since building those dragons
can take several hours, during which time you’re
wide open to attack, there’s another massive
inducement to solve the problem with a few gems.
Probably the most blatant case of tilting the table is
the recent introduction of “Dark Elixir”, a third in-
game resource geared squarely at high-level
players. Collected at the glacially slow pace of 20
units per hour, even in an raidless pacifist world it
would take 21 days of waiting to accrue the 10,000
units needed purchase its main selling point, the
Barbarian King, and the table is stacked further yet
by subjecting collectors to 75% raid losses. Who
wouldn’t pay $6 to skip the tedium and uncertainty?
In comparison, the “clans” of the name seem
almost like an afterthought. Their primary function is
to be a gifting circle , where players donate units to
others in their clan, and receive units in return. And
that’s it: clan players cannot share gold or elixir,
much less gems. But they do provide another handy
lever of extra social pressure to ensure you log in
regularly, since clan troops defend your base, die
when attacked and can only be received on explicit
request, and since most clans enforce minimum per
week donations and kick out “freeloaders” who have
not paid their dues.
But It Could Be Worse…
Some credit where credit is due: unlike Zynga’s
notoriously annoying games, Clash of Clans does
not require Facebook signup, cram the game full of
ads, spam you and your friends, or pimp your
personal information to random third parties. And
while you’ll be reminded that “Hey, you could use
gems for this” whenever you try to do something
you can’t afford, if you stay within your means and
have the patience of an ascetic saint, you’ll never
even get asked for money.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, my feelings towards Clash of
Clans are distinctly mixed. Being a penny-pincher
whose in-game purchases have been limited to a
single $4.99 gem pack, even that largely as a token
of appreciation to the game’s makers, I can’t really
complain about the hours of entertainment I’ve
gotten in exchange. Yet I still can’t help but cringe
as I run into all the ways the game is intentionally
crippled to get you to pay up, and the way its
Pavlovian triggers to come back for more operate
on fear. Would Minecraft have been any fun if it
required you to log in every six hours or you’d lose
parts of your inventory? And how much more
awesome would Clash of Clans be if the effort of
squeezing every last cent out had been put into
improving the game itself instead?
500,000 a day with in-app purchases
Confession time: While I like to rationalize my
blog’s recent silence with changing jobs and
moving to a new city, the truth is, the single biggest
drain on my free time lately has been Supercell’s
Clash of Clans . While this apparently puts me in
good company , I decided it’s about time I shared
what I’ve learned about how this “free” game
apparently manages to spin well over $500,000 a
day for its creator Supercell. (Update : Forbes
reports Supercell now earns over $2.4m a day , the
majority of that from Clash of Clans .)
Overview
The core of Clash of Clans is a bog-standard
resource management game: mine “gold” and
“elixir”, use gold and elixir to buy improvements to
your town so you can build stronger armies, raid
other players in order to loot their gold and elixir,
rinse and repeat. If you’ve ever played Starcraft, Age
of Empires or pretty much any other real-time
strategy game, you’ll know the drill, and the
buildings and units come off as almost painfully
derivative. There’s a Barracks for new troops and
Archer Towers for defense, you’ve got Zerg -like
cheap and disposable Barbarians, weak but ranged
Archers, slow Giant tanks for soaking up damage,
etc. But formulas are formulas because they work,
and it’s fun to set up your little village, win your
first battles and watch your (thoroughly
meaningless) levels and experience points rack up.
The touch-screen interface is a pleasure to use and
the smoothly zoomable 3D graphics are beautifully
animated with cute little touches; for example, when
you tap to select an army camp, every unit salutes
their leader in a different way.
Show Me the Gems
“So that’s all well and good”, I hear you say, “but
where’s the money coming from?”
In the standard Zynga playbook for making money
off with freemium games, you would let players buy
gold, elixir or the items they want directly. But Clash
of Clans adds a twist: you can’t buy anything
directly, but you can buy a third resource called
“gems”. Unlike gold and elixir, gems are not
necessary for building anything functional, they’re
simply a type of “power-up” that serve as a
shortcut. Need more gold to finish a building? Buy
it with gems. Need more elixir to add a dragon to
your army? Buy it with gems. Don’t want to wait a
week for a building to finish? Complete it instantly
with gems. In other words, gems mean instant
satisfaction. What’s more, their cost is neatly
obfuscated: purchased gems come in big, oddly
numbered stashes (500, 1200, 2500, 6500, 14000),
and once you have the pile sitting in your account,
it’s easier to whittle it away 834 gems at time,
whereas you’d probably think twice if asked to
punch in your credit card details and confirm that
you really want to pay $6.98 (just a sliver under the
U.S. federal minimum wage) to upgrade your
Wizard Tower.
Yet this formula’s beauty is that none of this is
immediately apparent. You start the game with 500
gems, which is plenty for the initial stages, and
there are many easily earned “achievements” that
reward you with more, so that you don’t initially
appreciate their value. The initial buildings are fast
to build, with some building instantly and others
taking a minute here or five minutes there. And
you’re shielded from enemy attacks for three days,
so you can take your time building up your base
and raiding the AI’s goblin bases for easy loot.
As you advance through the levels, though, the time
and expense of everything ramps up exponentially.
A level 2 Town Hall takes 5 minutes to build and
costs 1,000 gold; a level 8 Town Hall takes 8 days
and costs 2,000,000 gold. And you soon encounter
the next twist: on the later levels, patience is no
longer enough . A maxed-out set of Gold Mines can
produce 360,000 gold a day, meaning you could
theoretically accumulate the sum neeeded for that
Town Hall upgrade in 6 days. However, you’re being
continually raided by other players, and since other
players can see your wealth before they choose to
attack, a fat bank account means you’re a fat target.
What’s more, since successful raids award
percentages of your wealth, a single “three-star”
attack worth 25% can see 500,000 gold disappear
in a flash.
There’s more. In
your typical RTS,
collected resources
immediately go
into your central
storage. In Clash
of Clans , though,
they stay in the collectors, vulnerable to attack both
by location and design (up to 50% can be stolen,
vs. 20% for central storage), until you log in to
manually transfer them to relative safety with a tap.
This, too, makes it difficult to accumulate large
amounts and encourages you to login at least
several times a day. The chart shows why: if you
start with 1,000,000 gold in storage, earn 360,000
daily, and get attacked once daily, losing 50% from
your collectors and 20% from central storage, the
player who doesn’t bother logging in for two weeks
will see their pile drop 75% to under 250,000, while
the player who logs in religiously four times a day
will increase their wealth by over 50% to 1,550,000
— but even their earnings flatline well before two
million.
What this means is that, once your bankroll is over
1.5 million or so, the only free way to keep the
balance growing is grinding , a tedious non-stop
cycle of raiding and army rebuilding, with nervous
logins every five minutes to keep raiders at bay (you
cannot be attacked while online). In their
grandmotherly kindness, though, Supercell provides
you a whole wealth of alternatives. Can you spot the
pattern?
You can use gems to buy “shields” that stop you
from getting raided: 250 gems ($2.50) . Lest that
seem too cheap, you’re preventing from using
more than one week of shield per month.
You can use gems to fill up your gold or elixir
storages instantly: 834 gems ($8.34)
You can use gems to upgrade your gold mines
to the next level, where they will work faster: 966
gems ($9.66)
You can use gems to buy additional “workers”,
so you can upgrade your production faster and
earn gold/elixir faster: 1000 gems ($9.98)
You can use gems to double your production of
gold or elixir for a 6-hour period. Repeated
across six mines for three days: 1368 gems ($
13.68)
You can use gems to rebuild your armies
instantly, so you can keep raiding and racking up
loot without anybody having a chance to steal
their money back via the handy “Revenge”
button. Assuming 50k elixir to rebuild and 50k
profit per raid: 2760 gems ($27.60)
And once you’ve
finally earned those
2 million and
clicked the “Build”
button, it takes
another 8 days to
build the thing —
unless, that is, you
fork out another 1123 gems ($11.23) for instant
completion. It’s little wonder most players start “to
gem” (it’s a verb in Clash of Clans parlance) by the
time they reach Town Hall level 7 or so, the stage
when most costs are measured in millions and
building virtually anything unassisted takes days.
Jorge Yao, the game’s undisputed champion,
figures he has spent north of $2500 in real money
on buying gems
, and according to back-of-the-envelope
calculations, the cost of fully fitting out your virtual
village is on the order of $5000 when you include
walls. It’s little wonder the top clans leaderboard is
full of players like “>< Royal ><” from Kuwaiti clan
“Q8 FORCE” and clan UAE’s “khalifa” (presumably
from Bahrain’s ruling House of Khalifa ).
Your Pain is Supercell’s Gain
Unsurprisingly, the
entire game has
been warped in
subtle ways to
encourage buying
and using gems.
For example, in your average real-time strategy
game, you have fine-grained control deploying and
directing your troops, and units that survive can be
used in the next battle. Not so in Clash of Clans :
once deployed, units fight according to their
hardcoded strategy (most commonly the
harebrained “bash closest building”, regardless of
what it is or who is firing at them), and every unit
deployed disappears at the end of the battle, even if
they are victorious. This means it’s essential to
rebuild huge armies and to attack with massive
force every time. And since building those dragons
can take several hours, during which time you’re
wide open to attack, there’s another massive
inducement to solve the problem with a few gems.
Probably the most blatant case of tilting the table is
the recent introduction of “Dark Elixir”, a third in-
game resource geared squarely at high-level
players. Collected at the glacially slow pace of 20
units per hour, even in an raidless pacifist world it
would take 21 days of waiting to accrue the 10,000
units needed purchase its main selling point, the
Barbarian King, and the table is stacked further yet
by subjecting collectors to 75% raid losses. Who
wouldn’t pay $6 to skip the tedium and uncertainty?
In comparison, the “clans” of the name seem
almost like an afterthought. Their primary function is
to be a gifting circle , where players donate units to
others in their clan, and receive units in return. And
that’s it: clan players cannot share gold or elixir,
much less gems. But they do provide another handy
lever of extra social pressure to ensure you log in
regularly, since clan troops defend your base, die
when attacked and can only be received on explicit
request, and since most clans enforce minimum per
week donations and kick out “freeloaders” who have
not paid their dues.
But It Could Be Worse…
Some credit where credit is due: unlike Zynga’s
notoriously annoying games, Clash of Clans does
not require Facebook signup, cram the game full of
ads, spam you and your friends, or pimp your
personal information to random third parties. And
while you’ll be reminded that “Hey, you could use
gems for this” whenever you try to do something
you can’t afford, if you stay within your means and
have the patience of an ascetic saint, you’ll never
even get asked for money.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, my feelings towards Clash of
Clans are distinctly mixed. Being a penny-pincher
whose in-game purchases have been limited to a
single $4.99 gem pack, even that largely as a token
of appreciation to the game’s makers, I can’t really
complain about the hours of entertainment I’ve
gotten in exchange. Yet I still can’t help but cringe
as I run into all the ways the game is intentionally
crippled to get you to pay up, and the way its
Pavlovian triggers to come back for more operate
on fear. Would Minecraft have been any fun if it
required you to log in every six hours or you’d lose
parts of your inventory? And how much more
awesome would Clash of Clans be if the effort of
squeezing every last cent out had been put into
improving the game itself instead?
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