The fall of Angry Birds
treysmithblog.com
treysmithblog.com
One of the things I really used my iPad for a lot is games. The distribution mechanism and purchasing system are super-simple. You could (and can) get high-quality games for a low price. I see I've spent 100+ hours playing Bejeweled 3 alone.
Yet the trend has clearly gone towards in-app purchases. I tried some golf game (Tiger Woods something?) and it was constant nagging for in-app purchases. That got deleted in about 2 minutes.
Then there are the "social games", which to me is really an abuse of the word "game", since they are nothing more (IMHO) than exercises in feeding addiction and inducing compulsive behaviour. There is no element of skill. It's simply who can purchase the most. And I've tried a bunch (spending no real $$$) to see (I'm a sucker for world-building games and there's a dearth of those, sadly).
The second category (normal games with in-app purchases) create the wrong incentives. Whereas Angry Birds originally spread because it was a hugely fun game, the game developer is incentivized to make you fork over more money, typically at the expense of the game itself.
It saddens me that Angry Birds has gone the in-app purchase route too.
Sadly the genie is out of the bottle. Any sensible game developer will go this route. Add to this the "social" layer being foisted on users and it's really looking like dark days ahead for gaming.
Zynga was just the bellwether here.
I wouldnt say it will crash the mobile games market; I would rather say the ratio of all the games designed in ".99 cents" a pop scheme will be on rapid decline...
The biggest challenge for mobile game developers is that the platform just really isn't all the great for making good, fun games that people will want to actually pay for. And all the brainpower is going into monetization strategies rather than innovating on that platform. Like games on Facebook, mobile is good for making games that separate from their money people with addictive or compulsive personalities. Little else.
I fucking love video games. Console and PC. My Steam account is worth many thousands of dollars by now. I haven't paid for a game on mobile in over a year (and I haven't been downloading any of this free garbage to make up for it, either), and I don't miss it. I read on the train instead. I don't think I'm atypical.
The same could be said for Casino's, if the visitors looked at it rationally. But humans often don't make decisions rationally. Especially when it comes to entertainment and escape from reality.
However, there are huge limitations to casinos: they are limited by regulation; they are limited to physical infrastructure; they have limited space that the customer has to come to.
Quite obviously, none of this exists for the online world. This is the incredible success story of Zynga. They've managed to build a giant online casino and call it a game, and get the execs of Google and Facebook licking their heels.
This is a market sector that will not simply expand. It will explode.
I agree there will be a correction in mobile gaming. At least I hope to see these vapid "games" get kicked in the nuts a little.
Casinos offer a variety of different games, which have different appeal to different types of their clientele. There are lottery type games, in which there is a faint hope of a extraordinary windfall, which appeal to people who want money without working for it (i.e. people in debt). There are games in which there is a large degree of control and which the winner emerges because of his/her psychological prowess which appeals to the serious gamer (i.e. professional poker players). And then there are the run of the mill ring-ding-ding games, which appeal both to the idea of winning money, the suspense of the spinning wheel, and various other attention keeping mechanisms.
Social games have the ability to emulate virtually all of these. Although ostensibly buy-in is limited to virtual money that can never be removed from the game, there is nothing stopping large markets to grow around virtual items that can be traded (as happened with Ultima, EQ, SL, Eve, etc.).
The clutch here is that the "fun" of the experience in both cases largely revolves around ideas of advancement, social enhancement of the idea of advancement, and (potentially) some real world tie-in.
Actually, in many respects the social game is far more advanced than the casino already, insofar as it offers the idea of advancement which is potentially not tied to money (i.e. leveling up), but which can also be tied to money if people want it to be.
The problem of this right now is the fact that virtual currency cannot be liberated, but as soon as that problem is solved the casino will be an obsolete institution, soon to be extinct.
I agree with the sentiment, which is why I only play in the poker rooms, where the odds are effectively neutralized and you just worry about the rake (which goes away in tournaments, minus 'fees'). But even though I don't like the odds of playing the table games, I will occasionally set aside a small amount to play craps with because it's fun.
As the other commenter pointed out these games aren't making money from the average person. It's making money from the "whales".
A close friend of mine is a compulsive-gambler, trust me they aren't there for the booze or the social experience.
Whales are just the bonus on top and the tables give the sense of glamour/sophistication.
There'll always be a market for great games at a fair price.
I actually think social games are here to stay, just like old card games.
A game that markets itself through a social network is not intrinsically social. It's just parasitic. Zynga is Facebook's tapeworm. Games, for over 5000 years, have been a lot more social than Fartville. This Zynga shit is alienating. It's about as "social" as playing the lottery is intellectual because it involves numbers.
I was at Google during the Real Games battle, and inadvertently became somewhat of a lightning rod for it. I'll skip over the whole history but just say this: if decisions had been made on merit rather than rank, Google+ Games could have been something, and if it had, Google+ would have become an actual contender in the social space. I saw first-hand the damage that Zyngaism can do to a potentially major product.
I think all of this Zyngarbage is an attempt to emulate the success of Magic: the Gathering and its iterative pay-to-keep-current mechanism, but without the insight and work that made Magic (in spite of its annoying pricing model) great.
There will be a flight-to-quality in the gaming space (Zyngarbage will always exist, just as third-rate porn always will, but it will become a low-margin commodity) but I have no idea when it will be and what it will do to the current cottage industry.
It seems like a common handicap amongst otherwise smart and capable people, to possess the inability to ignore tone, style grammar etc, and just judge the message on the strength of it's argument alone.
I consider it a strength to notice both and critique each accordingly. Otherwise you guarantee that you will inadvertently irritate either the big-picture people or the detail lovers (as you have just, ironically, seen demonstrated).
Err No, it is in fact rather apt. As of now, there are two replies to my comment, both nitpicking on the grammar, instead of DH6.
And yes you can have both, but that is not relevant to the argument. The interesting part is that x, (being well spoken), is not a necessary and sufficient condition for y(having a solid argument), yet many behave as if that is the case.
Suit yourself. But time is well-spent learning to craft readable sentences.
> The interesting part is that x, (being well spoken), is not a necessary and sufficient condition for y(having a solid argument)
It's necessary but not sufficient. Having literary skill won't save a bad argument, but lacking literary skill will surely undermine a good one.
Grammatical ability is a sign of respect for the reader/listener. Without that sign of respect, one is placed at a crippling disadvantage in advance of presenting the argument.
Eg. Claim1: The motherfucking sun is deff larger than da moonz!
Without getting into petty semantic deconstruction, the essence of the statement is true, regardless of the respect (or lack thereof) for the listener. You seem to be confusing logic, with persuasion and communication.
No, only the outcome -- effective communication.
> You seem to be confusing logic, with persuasion and communication.
You seem to be confused about the purpose of writing -- which is effective communication. Without an awareness of the recipient, writing becomes onanism.
BTW apropos the topic, both your sentences above contain an unnecessary comma.
I tend to feel that when someone gets angry and start calling names, it signals that either the person hasn't really thought things out or the person has difficulty seeing other points of view. There are multiple perspectives on many engineering topics.
They are most definitely not going to disappear unless there is competition that appeals to that target group more, and the (admittedly short) experience says it's not going to be something with a big element of skill.
I think you can see that some game especially on mobile are starting to be more social and more skill based, even if the gameplay is asynchronous. I'm thinking about games like Words with Friends or SongPop. Draw Something is also really social but it's cooperative, not competitive.
Was this not the same with arcade games padding difficulty and length to force players into shelling out quarters? I find the "IAP and F2P will RUIN GAMING!!" arguments to be mostly based in fear and not common sense. It's true the majority of people aren't engrossed in gaming culture, so they are more likely to fall for F2P tactics, but that doesn't mean every single developer is going to leave the "quality" gaming market to wither and die.
On a side note: I would take arcade games over social games any day. Arcade games were made to be hard in order to gobble up quarters. Anyone born in the early 80s remembers games as being really, really challenging. Social games are being made to be mindless and addictive.
It’s their “walled garden” and it’s their responsibility to take care of it when it’s overran by weed.
There have been a number of cases of kids discovering that they can make in game purchases really easily, doing so a lot, and by the time the parents find out thousands of dollars have been spent.
See http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/04/parents-sue-a... for one lawsuit based on this. Admittedly it was over a bug where kids could spend thousands of dollars on a "free" app without needing the password. But kids learn parents' passwords all of the time. How long until there is a lawsuit over the problem of kids who got the necessary password running up huge bills?
The second you start treating your customers like cash cows, the faster history will forget your game. Make games that are fun to play, charge enough to support yourself and expand your company. You do not need to rely on parasitic behavior to accomplish this. The possible end benefit is that you build more loyal customers. After having played my first game with IAP, I will never buy another.
I did pirate a few games back then but the majority of the games I bought at full price were shareware.
I don't understand why this business model doesn't seem to exist any more. Just throw a demo of your game onto a torrent website and make grabbing the full game as easy as possible.
Even on Steam there are hardly any playable demos.
As for torrent sites - demos could easily be distributed separately from full games. Companies could even have private trackers, though they might want a custom installer for that.
It seems to me that if people were willing to spend more money on quality titles this trend wouldn't exist.
High quality AND low price? Seems unsustainable to me.
The in-app purchase is one of the worst elements of mobile gaming of all-time. The social games are complete shit and why Zynga is about to be de-listed from the market.
It's a shame there's so much emphasis on QUANTITY over QUALITY these days with both consumers and developers.
For me, that quote about sums up the rest of the article. Too much arrogance in there for me.
While a bit slick/sleazy in their approach their work revolves around using social psychology principles (social proof, scarcity etc), conversion tricks, clever copy, giving away freebies in order to build up their email lists. These guys eventually upsell on their premium products for a ridiculous price whilst offering their digital product for a "limited time only" to convert users who've got a good amount of value from their give-away products.
There's hardly any regulation in this industry and the FTC has come down hard on these guys on more than one occasion.
I think we're all onto these guys and for him to think (or any other "internet marketer") they can take advantage of others through information asymmetry will be thwarted.
That being said, the revenues discussed in this post are crazy.
On a side-note, I wish the App Store allowed to filter out by apps that have or not IAP. I really don't mind paying for apps and games but sometimes there will be a cool free game available. Nowadays most games are free but with many IAP. If I see a high-ranked free game I tend to turn around when I see it has IAP because I know the gameplay will be around buying more stuff.
On a second side-note, I wouldn't mind the fall of Angry Birds. IMO, the game has received a disproportionate amount of success and the merchandising all over the place has been ridiculous (e.g. a "Angry Birds" Roku box? That makes no sense). The game is ok but not very original or entertaining (again, IMO) but the milking of the brand has been the worst part of it.
Maybe we'll see an equivalent of The Great Google Purge.
However, more often than not with games, IAP is used for expendables and more often than not, the gameplay now revolves around making you buy things, rather than the game itself. You have artificial scarcity on some things, not to make the game more interesting/difficult/rewarding but to make more money for the game author.
Don't get me wrong: I'm totally for developers and studios making money, but not when it skews the gameplay.
Roku sells a Wii-like game remote [1] (with motion sensors) and pushes Angry Birds as the remote's demo app. It's perfect synergy using a recognizable brand like Angry Birds to sell your own stuff!
We've gone right back to feeding tokens (in-game credits) because now you can distribute the equivalent of an single-game arcade cabinet -- a game that is designed to optimally take in cash at a given rate -- to every mobile device. A good analogue would be to make a beat-em up arcade cabinet that let you start out for nothing, but when you inevitably get KO'd, you have to feed it a few tokens for the privilege of continuing before the 15 second countdown elapses and you have to start from the beginning.
In IAP module, the game is designed so there is no chance (at least for 99% players) to go through the game without purchasing the stuff on the go. Take "where is my water" for example. You can continue game as long as you keep scoring all 3 coins on each level. If you miss even one coin, after many levels you will be missing that coin to open another level. There you have an option to open the level for $$$ Now, some of those coins, in my gaming experience, were impossible to score, but that's a different story...
If you had better skills, you could get through the entire game without buying a single additional coin! ;)
Older arcade games like Galaga and Super Mario Brothers, however, give you a fair opportunity to avoid the "Insert Coin to Continue" screen based on your skill. I can last 20-30 minutes on a single quarter easily for both of those games.
The issues you're bringing up -- and is valid -- is a fair number of free to play games may instead give you a sub-par experience (unless you pay money, you have to wait) unless you feed in money.
By the time arcade games were sophisticated enough to have things like multiple weapons and super moves, developers had settled on the model where extra coins are used to buy the ability to continue a game after failing. The arcade industry is quite conservative overall.
Arcade games on the other hand were still fun and challenging even if you took away the psychology behind stuffing in quarters. (no one has console slot machines)
Granted I am sure there are some decent free to pay titles, just the mental impression I get before trying new games, based on past experience.
Many of the people playing these new style games haven't played many video games before.
At this point I have enough games to play and any games that have IAP consisting of energy/coins/diamonds/whatever I immediately avoid, even if it's a well-liked game. I don't have time for that sort of thing.
The problem is that to remain competitive, I'm feeling pushed to build an IAP game :-\
It's funny how me doing this is quite comparable to piracy, but - rightly or wrongly - I feel almost no guilt about doing this because by the time I've got to this point I've lost all respect for the game anyway.
It's ironic how Apple's locking down of the device is enough for most developers not to bother obfuscating their game save files so that if you have taken the trouble just for that jailbreak step, you're unlikely to meet much further resistance.
And finally when I do run into a game which has apparently taken cursory defensive steps such that my crude hackery only succeeds in stuffing everything up and losing whatever progress I did have, this too turns out to be funny. As I have no impulse to start playing from the beginning again, I breathe that very same sigh of relief, and forget all about it. Win-win.
Developers are learning to fight against it, but it funny how much effort goes into making sure some bits dont get flipped.
Games are supposed to be fun. In a free-to-play game, the game designer's goal shifts from fun to incremental revenue collection. I think it's an abusive dynamic between the game designer and the player. If free-to-play becomes the norm, we might wonder why games are not as fun anymore, without being able to put a finger on it.
iOS is basically brand new, so maybe it was inevitable for these types of games to take over. I'm interested to see what happens in the next console generation - it might be a sad state of affairs beyond big-budget AAA titles.
Yes, TF2 is F2P, but I think they've done it in a fairly tasteful manner. The MvM stuff with tickets is skirting the edges a little bit, but time will tell how it all turns out.
Possibly free-to-play is different, certainly it doesn't have the same requirement of keeping the gameplay fast-paced, so it's possible to make a boring one. But there are plenty of boring flat rate games as well. I wonder what people growing up on this game model will think about it?
If you think about it, the demo model seems like a special case of the free-to-play model: a small amount of content is free to play and the rest of the content can only be accessed through a purchase.
> In the last month, this single game generated over $12,000,000 on iOS alone. They have not ported the game to Android yet.
> If this is the case and it holds ranking for the rest of the year, then this single game is worth $109,500,000 PER YEAR on the low side.
Holy fucking shit. $100m a year of high-margin sales for a single iOS games?
World of Warcraft makes, last time I calculated it, roundabout these amounts, and WoW is one of the most financially successful games ever and requires masses of investment in infrastructure, new content, community management, developers, and so on - so big it swallowed Blizzard whole for a while.
If a silly, simple, stupid looking iOS game can make $100m a year of almost raw profit, this is... well, just mind-blowing, really.
World of Warcraft subscribers have been declining steadily for the last couple years [1], but they still have ~9.1 million subscribers.
The least a subscriber can pay is by buying in 6-month increments, which is 12.99 a month [2].
So, even though they're making less money than ever, 9.1 million subscribers at 12.99 per month is 1.4 Billion a year.
[1] http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/08/02/world-of-warcraft-los... [2] http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/payment-option-credi...
So, unless my math's off, I think that's pretty close.
Horia Dragomir and Stephanie Kaiser from Wooga gave a presentation[0] on metrics driven game development at GOTO Copenhagen earlier this year. Through the lens of one of their more popular franchises "Monster World", they discussed, among other things, A/B testing and the surprisingly short life (days to weeks) of a game feature before it becomes irrelevant. Nothing in their talk suggested late night meetings in dark corners, plotting to turn their users into addicts. Rather, they discussed adapting to rapidly changing trends and patterns--which sometimes but not always included introducing new in-game purchase items.
If on the surface the game industry as a whole appears to you to be an online equivalent of a casino, thats fine. What I see are dedicated and passionate engineers trying to ensure the survival a product in which they've dedicated years of their lives to getting right, by employing many of the same techniques nearly every other user facing tech company uses everyday, and I for one am not ready to cast the first stone and accuse entire industries of moral bankruptcy.
[0] http://gotocon.com/cph-2012/presentation/The%20Metrics%20Des...
And the fact that they use "what every other user facing tech company uses" is exactly the problem. I like and use A/B testing, but it's purpose as a tool is to take decisions based on what extracts the more money from users. There's no dark corner, but the goal is definitely the same. And it's not exactly something that I want to associate with games.
The fact that your whole post, and a big part of the link you give, is as much applicable to selling games as to selling rocking chairs or any random saas product is exactly the problem. Marketing and sales come first, game development is merely an afterthought.
Back in the early days, only "hardcore" players would really pay attention to video games, but now, with so many casual games coming out, everybody is busy click or tapping away at least for five minutes each day. While there are heavy monetization wheels turning in the casual world, it's still about getting people to relax.
Let me explain a small difference, bare with me.
Just think about what user penalties for mistakes are in casual games. Also, think about how many time a casual game has made anyone feel that a mistake is their fault.
Now think about hardcore games: it's always your fault.
This means that to be better at a hardcore game you need to train. There is no magic button to press to become a pro gamer over night. With casual games, the only way to get "better" is to cheat luck of make time go faster. And there are buttons for that. Very few people press those buttons because very few people are looking to do or get better at those games.
These buttons are clearly offensive to a person who is a hardcore gamer at heart. I know that, I see them everywhere.
I guess your affirmation comes as a result of the growth of casual / social games while the pace at which hardcore games are being released has stayed pretty steady over the years.
And the "give them a taste for free" bit makes me think of trial periods for non-gaming software.
I still somehow have a little trouble with the way this in-game purchase works. As a child I used to go to play at the arcades, and of course when you fail, you have to slot another coin into the machine. This is probably quite similar. However, even as a child, I knew I am going to spend some money, within my budget, on playing games. There were no free games.
It seems like a subtle difference, but there is an element of luring-in with something that is marked as free, but actually encourages you to pay later.
Also, the coin-operated arcade (due to technical reasons I guess) offered a reasonably predictable price model. You play until you fail, which is usually a few minutes. If you're really good, a bit longer. You weren't given a chance to buy extra ammo or turbo-charge your car if you add two coins, and then later get the mega-pack for five extra coins and so on...
UPDATE: just to make it clear. I'm really speaking as a complete outsider to this world. I don't play any kind of games, and apologies if I'm making very wrong assumptions based on little knowledge in this area.
I have no doubt this is how it works, but I never thought I would see the day when something that costs a dollar is considered premium.
Perhaps Angry Birds is dropping on the pay charts because people are finally bored of the franchise? How many years and different ways will people pay to shoot slightly different pigs with birds?
Simply put, you don't need to make money in the AppStore (and hand over the a huge amount of that to Apple) when you can monetize outside of it.
Even without this, because so few people pay anything, the dynamic of the in app purchases is skewed so that you have to spend a ton of money to get anything out of your purchases (people willing to pay are willing to pay a lot, apparently). So people like me, willing to spend $5-$10 on a fun phone game but not $50, are sort of left behind.
Angry Birds, as a franchise, is doing anything but falling. Just look around the next time you go to a Walmart or Target. Angry Birds lunch boxes. Angry Birds Halloween costumes. And yes, Angry Birds Cheese Nips[1], which my kids are consuming even as we speak.
And it's only inevitable that Rovio is or will be working on an Angry Birds game that takes advantage of IAPs over an up front charge.
[1]http://www.walmart.com/ip/Nabisco-Cheese-Nips-Angry-Birds-Ch...
is because trial periods aren't being done? Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to make Angry Birds free, have only the first 20 levels be playable, then pay $9.99 for the remaining 80 levels? (I'm making these numbers up BTW.)
Obviously IAP makes a lot of sense for Farmville-style games that are all about "objects", but when tacked onto Angry Birds Space, or most games really, it feels like the company is just trying to take advantage of you.
Why don't we see any "free trials" like this in the App Store? Is it against Apple TOS or something? Or have studies shown it just doesn't work? (And I don't mean the free "lite" versions of games -- those are annoying because you lose all your progress and have to start the full version from zero.)
With traditional games, you either pay the $10 or you dont. Once you have bought the game, you are done. Maybe you can buy an expanion pack later, or a tshirt, but the developer literally is out of ways for you to spend money.
With IAP, players can pay as little or as much as they want.
The danger is that the game can become less fun if you are always being prompted to spend more money. But I think there are games that do it well. I have spend over $100 playing Valve's TF2, a game that is free-to-play, and I don't regret it.
Apart from that any old death of Tetris type article were you change the title to angry birds will be relevant in such matters of simple fun games and there lifespan.
Just today:
Passed by a Samsung Promotion, play angry bird games on SmartTV, win Angry Bird merchandise
The cable car in Singapore has "Angry Bird" promotion cars with Angry Bird Decorations; has whole shop dedicated to Angry Birds Merchandise
Local supermarket, spend $$$, collect stickers, redeem Angry Birds
One of many mentions on their 12x revenue increase from F2P: http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/03/08/2148224/valve-switc...
In FarmVille, when you use up your virtual money you can't play anymore. You can't plant anything, you can't harvest anything, you can't plow anything. You just have to wait a few hours until your plants grow.
So your choice is make an IAP or literally watch grass grow.
And even of you could grind through that and keep playing (say by mining gol laboriously)... TF2 is just a more complex, more interesting game. FarmVille and the like seem to exist only to get you to spend money compulsively.
1-5 http://i.imgur.com/cuzGb.png 6-10 http://i.imgur.com/ckpIC.png 11-15 http://i.imgur.com/jzFWa.png
#16 is Line.
Data? Citation? I'm genuinely curious. Is this now the common wisdom for indy games?
I would love to analyze the in-game purchase data across multiple free-to-play games on multiple platforms (e.g. facebook, app store, etc) in order to see the distribution of user spending habits. While I'm sure there are power users who spend magnitudes more than the average, I'm skeptical that they're the main driver of revenue. What I'd like to see is the average % of users who make in-game purchases, the average in-game purchase over time, frequency of purchases and what % of total revenue the average represents.
Unfortunately, I don't think Zynga et al will be releasing this data publicly anytime soon.
Your skepticism is founded on a prediction about a measurable feature of material reality, right? Your prediction is catastrophically inaccurate.
http://casualconnect.org/lectures/games-for-gamers/virtual-g... (Particularly slides 16, 17.)
http://gigaom.com/2011/07/25/game-devs-looking-for-revenues-...
http://www.quora.com/Social-Gaming-Startups-and-Companies/Wh...
Feel free to take anyone in the industry out to coffee if you want confirmation.
This seems like a good time to thank you for correcting many of the catastrophically inaccurate things I've thought over the years. ;)
I don't know what to make of it, really. I'm usually decent at predicting what will be popular, but this time I completely missed the boat.
It really makes me kind of sad. I remember when I was little I would get a game like Zelda for GameBoy for $30. That game obviously had tons of work put into it and gave me endless hours of enjoyment. Games for phones seem to lack this kind of depth.
It is, unfortunately, the logical conclusion of Internet piracy. The pirates can talk about how a ripped off copy isn't really a lost sale and they wouldn't have paid anyway until they're blue in the face, but the fact is that someone has to pay for the games these people obviously enjoy so much. Given that one-off big purchases of games seem to have at most 5-10% efficiency in terms of people buying legal copies, the people making the games are looking for alternative models where the pirates can't just copy the whole thing, which means something where you take the money interactively or something where you never actually get most of the game data installed locally so you can't copy it. And that means in-app purchases for the little guys and things like DLC and MMOGs for the big players.
And they still throw in increasingly obnoxious DRM for good measure, presumably because the net win from making it more difficult or time-consuming for some people to get a pirate copy outweighs the loss of custom from people like me who would buy a good game without the junk but won't spend that kind of money on software we aren't actually going to own/control.
In short, if you miss paying a fair price for a finished game, blame the pirates, and blame the short-sighted executives at the big game companies who couldn't find a better way to respond to those pirates than screwing their legitimate customers.
For one thing, many relatively small payments is often an easier sell than one big payment, even if the small payments add up to more over the long term and even if the customer is fully aware of this. (Although on reflection, a model that seeks to get many IAPs over an extended period isn't so different in this respect.)
For another thing, customers who are unsure can try the service legitimately without paying "full price" or resorting to piracy. At the other end of the spectrum, while you're potentially making more money from long-term subscribers than you would with a large, one-off payment, those are probably the people who get the most value out of your service so they don't necessarily mind. So you get a certain amount of self-selecting market segmentation without even having to do any work for it.
But sure, the automatic copy-protection without the downsides of intrusive DRM is definitely a huge win for SaaS.
Instead of forcing users to pay real money to get better equipment, it has another means of earning credits: viewing advertisements. That means that a) I don't feel like I'm actually spending money (except opportunity cost), and b) they can show pretty well-targeted ads to users who are requesting to see them. I don't know the financial details, but I'd guess they can sell for a pretty decent rate. And you have to view quite a lot of them to get as many credits as you could have bought outright for $10.
As an added bonus to them, relying on ads means I have to disable AdBlock for their entire website.
[1]: http://wgt.com
I have been touring the US this summer and have been amazed by the number of people wearing Angry Birds shirts. Even grown men. Walmart has huge Angry Birds signs right next to established brands like Levi and Nike.
There have to be other ways of achieving the same end goal however without the constant nagging. Has anyone tried a game where people pay by the hour for instance? First hour free?
The blue line is the overall grossing rank over time.