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Comment by fbdab103 | Hacker News Reader

>...which was bringing in about 30 millions EURO per month, was the only thing keeping the company alive.

I am curious what were the expenses. Few things are as simple as they appear, but from the mobile games I have seen, they look like they could be put together by tiny development teams: simplistic (+recyclable) art and rules. Once the foundational app is created, feels like the further development could happen on a shoe string budget: artist to make new cosmetics and/or someone to develop additional puzzles. Presumably minimal server load from the whales to handle converting dollars into tokens.

I suppose the trick is in getting lucky with the one app that happens to hit it big due to some unknowable pattern of the universe. How many $0 flops preceded the blockbuster hit?

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I know for a fact that there's at least one company (that I can't name) that offers what I would call "Addiction as a Service".

Their system allows to create n-dimensional currency systems (coins, diamonds, etc), currency conversion rules, collectible management, in-game stores with their schedules, crafting/merging logic, probability distributions (including "dark distributions" like OP's link) and even prices (for profitability hints/warnings). Basically everything a fleecing game needs. They even offer templates inspired in famous games to get you started and tune as you go.

They charge quite a bit, but the "foundational app" upfront cost is much lower: it's limited to UI and a relatively thin business logic that targets their API endpoint (mostly mapping API ids to in-game assets and use or server-side logic).

> I know for a fact that there's at least one company (that I can't name) that offers what I would call "Addiction as a Service".

Ouch. Of course they do.

I don't even know why reading this surprised me at first. With the explosion of mobile games following pretty much the same addiction mechanics but with different skins, it was only a matter of time for someone to package mechanics and offer them in form of a backend service.

The problem is competition to get to the top and competition to stay there. Mobile games companies are machines in optimising user retention, user acquisition and market analysis.

I am assuming they had pretty high costs, more than 120 employees working on more than 10 different games, none of which was profitable. Offices in a high-rent European city for all these people and so on. Then comes marketing

The blockbuster hit was actually the first game, with success never to be replicated

Most spend is on advertisement. The churn rate of users is very very high because it's a time waste game play.

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