King has publicly stated this is not the case. If it were, that'd take a billion off their valuation.

This is something that should be pretty simple to test. Do you have any more details?

I believe that it's not so much that it specifically gets hard after you've paid (although that's a neat dark pattern that I wouldn't put past some of the current crop of App game developers frankly!) but rather that after a certain point it simply gets too hard to progress without paying. So the developers draw you in with what appears to be a skill game that you can enjoy playing, and then after they've got you committed they gradually turn it into a money game by making it progressively more and more unfair.

I can't remember where the article is that I read about all this though.

> I can't remember where the article is that I read about all this though.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/1949... ?

> Another novel way to use a progress gate is to make it look transparent, but to use it as the partition between the skill game and the money game. Candy Crush Saga employs this technique artfully. In that game there is a “river” that costs a very small amount of money to cross. The skill game comes before the river. A player may spend to cross the river, believing that the previous skill game was enjoyable (it was for me) and looking to pay to extend the skill game. No such guarantee is given of course, King just presents a river and does not tell you what is on the other side. The money game is on the other side, and as the first payment is always the hardest, those that cross the river are already prequalified as spenders. Thus the difficulty ramps up to punishing levels on the far side of the river, necessitating boosts for all but the most pain tolerant players.

Except I have lots of friends who played to the last level of Candy Crush without buying any IAP. The game is not impossible to beat without IAP.

How many hours does it take to reach the last level? Doesn't that game have over 600 levels? At 10 minutes average per level we're talking about 100+ hours, which is several weeks of full-time occupation. If you have lots of friends who did that, we're talking about collectively months of FTE. If those had been paid hours, how much money would they have earned in that time?

I'm not going anywhere with this, just wondering about the staggering amount of time that gets sucked into games like candy crush.

The game has been out for more than a year. So you can get far playing just half an hours or so a day. Unless your goal is to beat the game as fast as possible, you'll get there eventually.

Even I am at level 450 before I kinda quit playing it.

> If those had been paid hours, how much money would they have earned in that time?

This is no different from playing other games or activities. Unless you are pushing this particular game as evil, I don't see the point of saying "he could have spent that time doing better thing than watching movie or playing game I don't like".

Also, isn't it great that I can spent my time on a single game instead of having to move on to new game all the time?

There's a perl script that will talk to the server and complete the game ...