"In the final quarter of 2014, King had 356 million monthly unique users – individuals playing one or more of its games – although only 8.3 million of them spent any money on them. So, while 97.7% of people playing King’s games are playing for free, the 2.3% that pay are spending an average of $23.42 a month within the games."
This is close to AAA monetization where you have a few million people paying $40-60 per game. The free-to-play model doesn't work well for every game style but with successes like Candy Crush, it's easy to see why developers want in on it. Even if you just got 1 million downloads, 2.3% would be 23000 paying users and at $23 each, that's over $0.5m. For independent developers, that's a good amount of income, especially if it comes in regularly.
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People still play this?
I know a few still playing daily. Thing is, they don't pay a cent. When the game times them out, they stop until they can play again.
The vast majority of players aren't paying anything and a lot of players are using their other Saga games:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/candy-crush-saga-players-855m-2014
"In the final quarter of 2014, King had 356 million monthly unique users – individuals playing one or more of its games – although only 8.3 million of them spent any money on them. So, while 97.7% of people playing King’s games are playing for free, the 2.3% that pay are spending an average of $23.42 a month within the games."
This is close to AAA monetization where you have a few million people paying $40-60 per game. The free-to-play model doesn't work well for every game style but with successes like Candy Crush, it's easy to see why developers want in on it. Even if you just got 1 million downloads, 2.3% would be 23000 paying users and at $23 each, that's over $0.5m. For independent developers, that's a good amount of income, especially if it comes in regularly.
And people moaned and questioned Apple for buying Beats for half the price that Activision bought this piece of crap.