random rants

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.

coc-gold-vs-loginsThere’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?

Farewell Lonely Planet Melbourne, hello Google Sydney

On the Metro, Helsinki, FinlandAt 18, I spent the summer delivering mail at minimum wage minus 15% (it was “training”, you see), and promptly blew my meager savings on a frenzied one-month Interrail trip through Europe.  When my parents read through the angsty, near-incoherent notes I’d scribbled into a diary while waiting for trains in Holesovice or Ljubljana, complaining about expensive yogurt and Hungarian orthography, they ruffled my hair the same way I now praise our two-year-old for going potty and said “This is amazing!  You should go work for Lonely Planet!”

“Ha”, the cynical teen thought.  “Fat chance of that ever happening.”

Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple, Little India, SingaporeYet 15 years later in Singapore, as I sat warming my hands over the dying embers of Wikitravel Press and glumly contemplated a return to the grim meathook world of telco billing systems, I received an e-mail from Lonely Planet.  A few days later, I took Gus to Komala Vilas for roti pratas, and he outlined the vision for what would become the Shared Publishing Platform and why they could really use a travel wiki kind of geek for it. A few weeks later, I was in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray, staring at the world’s largest accumulation of travel knowledge in the Void and pinching myself: “Holy crap. This is for real, I’m standing inside the HQ of Lonely effing Planet, and these people want me to come work here.”

Industrial Science Laboratory, U. of Tokyo, JapanNow I sit here in equal disbelief, voluntarily saying farewell to the best company and best team I’ve ever had the privilege of working for, and that’s not just the kind of hyperbole expected for these public farewells.  The past three years of replacing a jet’s engines in mid-flight have been an intense learning experience, and the work is nowhere near done, but unlike the company’s three previous attempts, it’s now over the hump.  All authors are now writing directly into the content management system, where editors and curators weave their magic, with printed books, e-books, apps and the website being pumped out the other end, and Lonely Planet can now start fully focusing on its shiny digital future.

Sydney Opera House
And me?  I’m joining Google’s Geo team in Sydney, where I’ll be working with the world’s most popular travel application, Google Maps.

I plan to continue to write this blog, although there will be less idle speculation about what the Big G is up to next and less of a focus on the print publishing business I now depart. That said, my next post ought to give some food for thought to those in the industry, so don’t unsubscribe just yet!

Wikivoyage name confirmed, Internet Brands contests SLAPP but drops one charge

Two more pieces of news in the all-too-long-running Wikitravel-versus-Wikimedia saga.

First, the name of Wikimedia’s new site is now effectively confirmed as Wikivoyage, as the voting has ended with 160 votes in favor of the name, with a feeble 44 for the 2nd highest-rated option.  The English version of the site is already open to the public at http://en.wikivoyage.org and hosting will shortly be transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Second, Internet Brands has filed an opposition to Wikimedia’s motion to dismiss.  This document is even more bizarre than the last one, starting with the claim that their lawsuit is “strictly a dispute among would be business competitors“, which seems to acknowledge that defendants Holliday and Heilman are not even running a business yet!  Internet Brands also claims that they “have used [Internet Brands’] mark … as part of Defendant’s name for the rival website” — but as you may recall, this “rival website” a) doesn’t exist yet, b) did not have a confirmed name when IB filed their opposition, c) shares nothing with Wikitravel but the word “wiki”, and d) has nothing to do with Holliday and Heilman.

The following pages then proceed to perform awkward legal gymnastics with the aim of claiming that their lawsuit is not about the future Wikimedia site, but the defendants’ “one time swing at deceiving” of sending e-mails to Wikitravel users.  No, that argument doesn’t make any sense to me either, but obviously they’re trying to furiously backpedal from getting the Foundation involved and making it seem like their beef is solely against Holliday and Heilman.

But buried at the end of the document, Internet Brands quietly drops the second of their four claims, the Lanham Act charge against the brief use of the term “Wiki Travel Guide” on the Wikimedia discussion page.  This effectively means that the only charges left standing are trademark infringement and unfair competition, which only serves to make the domain name charge earlier is even more incomprehensible.

Holliday’s response is due on October 22, and the first court date is in early November.  Stay tuned!

 

 

Internet Brands get anti-SLAPPed

In response to the spurious lawsuit against ex-Wikitravel volunteers, Wikimedia’s lawyers Cooley LLC have yesterday filed a motion to strike Internet Brands’ charges under California’s SLAPP legislation. Full document attached below, and it’s a really good read (seriously!), but a few select tidbits for your reading pleasure:

The Complaint filed by Plaintiff Internet Brands, Inc (“IB”) is a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (“SLAPP”), a meritless action brought not to win, but to intimidate, threaten and ultimately silence persons engaged in speech that IB dislikes but the Constitution protects. …

IB’s claims against Ryan rest – entirely – on allegations that Ryan was involved in sending emails to Wikitravel users concerning the proposal to set up a new travel site allegedly called “Wiki Travel Guide”.  As a reading of these communications shows, to the extent they contain any “use” of a trademark at all, such use is limited to referencing “Wikitravel” by name to distinguish it from a new travel site being planned.  This is known as nominative use, and is permitted by law. …

IB’s state law claims for trademark infringement, state law unfair competition and civil conspiracy can and should be dismissed under California’s anti-SLAPP statute … because they all arise from constitutionally protected speech and IB cannot demonstrate a probability of prevailing on the merits.  …

IB may not survive dismissal by simply reciting the elements of a Lanham Act claim without supporting factual allegations.  … For this reason alone, Count II of the Complaint must be dismissed for failure to state a claim.

Full text: 2012-09-26 D6 Notice of Defendants’ Special Motion to Strike

Notarizing your fingerprints for fun and profit

Today’s post has nothing to do with travel technology, so click here if that’s what you came here for.  On the other hand, if you’d like a heartwarming tale of triumph over Kafkaesque bureaucracy, or a step-by-step guide to bypassing obstructionist police departments in your quest for the fingerprints needed for a Singaporean Certificate of Clearance, read on.

For the past half year, I’ve been immersed in the soggy bucket of fun known as an application for permanent residence in Australia.  Now, I like to think of myself as somewhat of a connoisseur of obscure immigration bureaucracy, my passports being littered with Saudi work permits, Indonesian multiple-entry business visas and Japanese trainee landing permits, but nothing I’ve seen yet comes close to the sheer bulk and complexity of the Employer Nominated Sponsorship (Subclass 856), recently renamed ENS 186 just to keep us pesky migrants on our toes.  The checklist for what to include alone runs to five pages.  By the time we finally lodged our application in May, it had grown to a wodge of 74 pages, and that was just our half, with my employer (thanks Lonely Planet!) submitting another lot of the same size.

Perhaps the most pointless hoop to jump through was proof that I possess a “vocational ability” in the English language; in other words, that my English is good enough to work in Australia.   Now, given that the ENS 856 is an employer-sponsored visa, you’d think the letter from my employer confirming that they’ve tolerated my antics for over two years and are willing to try to put up with them for another three would suffice, but no cigar: for the Descartesian philosophers at the Department of Immigration & Citizenship (DIAC), it’s not enough to possess practical ability, I have to demonstrate it in theory as well.  Moving to the United States at the age of 8 months?  Completing the entirety of my education, including a master’s thesis, in English?  Nope, nyet, nein: I could either get a combined score of over 5.0 “Modest User” on the IELTS or go pound sand.  So I forked out several hundred smackaroos, prepared yet another stack of paperwork (fun fact: IELTS photos are identical to Aussie photo guidelines, except that glasses are not allowed), spent two days to apply for and complete the test, and eventually received my results: 9.0 “Expert User”, the maximum score.  I can only presume somebody somewhere is getting a juicy kickback from all this.

But like the boss in an old console game, the toughest obstacle of all awaited at the end of the grueling journey.  The application requires submitting criminal record checks for all countries you’ve lived in the past ten years, and while Australia, Japan and Finland proved no great problem, for Singapore this requires a Certificate of Clearance (COC).  As 99% of people requesting this are Singaporeans wishing to leave the ordered shores of the Little Red Dot for good, you are only permitted to request this once in possession of a “document from relevant consulate/immigration authority/government bodies to establish that the certificate is required by such authority“, and the form goes to great lengths to ask why you wish to commit this near-treasonous act.

And if you’re in the 1% who are not Singaporean?  Tough luck: since October 2010, the Garmen decided to score political points and stop cuddling non-citizen scum, so no COC for you.  However, in their grandmotherly kindness the Criminal Investigation Department has instituted an appeals process, allowing non-citizens to rend their garments, sprinkle ashes on the head and wail for “exceptional, case-by-case basis” permission to apply for a COC — and fill out another form, of course.

Now, filling out a form or two is no great shakes, Lord knows we’ve had plenty of practice recently.  However, there are two other requirements: the first, “a bank draft made payable to ‘Head Criminal Records CID ’ through a Singapore-based bank“, and the second, a full set of fingerprints.

For the bank draft, the usual approach is to waltz over to the HSBC and OCBC offices in Melbourne and try to convince them into write you an international bank draft for 50 Sing dollars at some stupid markup.  (Apparently HSBC will do it for A$18 if you have an account with them.)  Being a lazy cheapskate in possession of a Singaporean bank account, though, I worked out another way: order a free DBS iB Cheque online, mailed to Head Criminal Records CID, c/o My Buddy in Singapore and forwarded by him to Australia.  There’s only one catch: the cheque is valid for precisely one month, so you need to make sure everything else is lined up…  including those fingerprints.

Now, in most sane countries, getting a set of prints done would involving rocking up to the nearest cop shop with a box of donuts in hand and walking out 15 minutes later wiping ink off your grubby fingers.  Unfortunately, this is a former part of the British Empire we’re talking about, and Australia has inherited the colonial bureaucracy with gusto, but unlike still triplicate-filing India it’s all been upgraded to high-tech bureaucracy.  Here in the great state of Her Majesty Victoria, Defender of the Faith, the police scan and store fingerprints electronically, no ink needed or allowed, which means that unless you’re on really good terms with the local constabulary, they can’t do squat.  (As it happens, Singapore also does its fingerprints electronically, but getting their machines to talk directly to Victoria’s machines would obviously be pure crazy talk.)  For dealing with the rest of the world, there is a central Fingerprinting Service in Melbourne that can take your prints the old way, so one sunny morning in April I called them up and asked for the next available slot — which would be in October.

Yes, October.  That’s a six month wait to get somebody to press your fingers first onto an ink pad, and then onto a sheet of paper.  Why?  According to the Department of Immigration, apparently mostly because the police want more money, and have thus been on strike since September 2011.  Until recently, you could short-circuit this by taking a trip upcountry to Wangaratta or Whoop Whoop, where waiting times are more like two weeks, but apparently Vic Police got wind of this and now require proof of residence.

Looking for an alternative?  There’s precisely one, namely the Australian Federal Police, who unlike the locals charge $145 a pop for the privilege — and still have queues out the door, with the next slot in September, a mere 5 months away.

Not being the kind of guy who takes “no” for an answer, I considered a few ways to shortcut this.  The obvious one would be to lie, book a slot outside Melbourne and fake proof of residence (a referee statement would be easy enough), but lying to the police is in general bad juju.  Camping at the fingerprinting centre, hoping to snag the slot of a no-show would be another option, but you might be in for a long wait and they certainly don’t seem too cooperative over there.  And then there are some companies that do stuff like forensic fingerprinting, but this seems a bit beyond their remit.

But then I heard about getting a set of fingerprints notarized, and I decided to give Frank Guastalegname of Caleandro, Guastalegname & Co in Footscray a ring.  Now, the COC requirements state that the prints must be “taken by a qualified Fingerprint Officer at a Police Station or an authorized office of the country he/she is now residing“, and a public notary is not going to take your fingerprints for you; however, Frank was more than happy to witness us fingerprint ourselves.  So we printed out a bunch of FBI Form FD-358s, brought them along our passports, and self-fingerprinted away.  With no practice beforehand, the prints came out pretty sloppy, so I would suggest training a bit beforehand: here’s a handy video on Youtube.  Frank then stapled the fingerprint sheet to a grand declaration confirming that he had personally witnessed our identity documents and fingerprints, and then signed, stamped and sealed the hell out of the result.  (I’m kicking myself for not scanning a copy for posterity, it was a sight to behold.)  Total cost for the two of us?  $60.  Whoo!

So here’s what we sent for the application and appeal, with props to PMD:

1. Application for COC (PDF)
2. Appeal for COC request (PDF)
3. iB cheque for S$100 (for two of us)
4. Notarized fingerprints
5. DIAC information request letter (DIAC has a template for this and will provide a copy on request)
6. Two passport photos
7. Copies of passport, including front page and stamps showing first arrival in Singapore, Employment Pass in Singapore plus departure from Singapore
8. Employment letter(s) while working in Singapore

We initially sent 1 through 6 plus copies of current passports, but they do insist on 7 and 8 as well and sent an e-mail asking for scans, since apparently the police computers don’t talk to the immigration computers.  They also understand that PRs don’t get stamps and modern EPs don’t even go in your passport.  So don’t worry too much if you’re not quite sure what you need to send, they’ll let you know if you missed something.

Just under a month after they received our application, Singapore finally gave the thumbs-up and mailed out the certificates on June 19 by registered mail.  Singapore being Singapore, the confirmation included a SingPost tracking number, which duly told us the letter had been shipped off to Kangarooland — and that’s where the trail ended.

It usually takes about one week for mail to get from Singapore to Australia, but that “usually” is dependent on the tender mercies of Australia Post, an organization with all the efficiency and panache you’d expect from a government-owned corporation with a monopoly.  Whenever our mail doesn’t show up and we go complain, the local office blames our crack-addled local delivery guy, who does indeed have a demonstrable habit of delivering our mail to somebody else or somebody else’s mail to us on a weekly basis, and also likes to leave us cards saying a package (with no indication of sender, contents or any tracking ID) is at post office A when it’s actually at post office B.  But I’m pretty sure it’s somebody else along the chain who screwed the mail pouch when a letter takes over a month to actually show up, and on occasion they simply disappears into the ether.

We chewed on what remained of our frayed fingernails and waited, with the occasional ping to Immigration for updates.  On July 27th, a good six weeks later, they emailed to say that they hadn’t gotten the COC yet, so could we have Singapore mail out another one?  I sent another email to the CID, with a CC directly to our DIAC case officer, and lo and behold: she took another look, found the certificate hiding under a snowdrift of paperwork, and half an hour later, we were Permanent Residents!

And that’s how a “skilled migrant” from a 1st world country with a supportive employer won his family’s right to stay in Australia.  Spare a thought for the bewildered refugee with no support, who speaks English as his third language, and has to battle not only with DIAC’s impenetrable but basically fair bureaucracy, but with a venal and corrupt administration (or lack thereof) in his home country as well.  Anybody want to try their luck getting a police certificate from Eritrea or the Democratic Republic of Congo?