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Mobile Games — The Addictive Money Sink

How Mobile Games Make Millions Exploiting Addiction

MediaVSReality
8 min readMay 17, 2021
Pixabay

Those innocent little games on the app store. Yes those ones. The free ones. Watch out.

In the modern day, almost everything is optimised to take money out of your pocket. Those free games want you to pay. And they will attempt to psychologically manipulate you until you do.

To put it simply, mobile games are highly addictive products. Game creators have found that using a “freemium” model along with microtransactions is an insanely effective business model.

Let’s take a quick look at the highest-grossing mobile games in recent years:

Candy Crush Saga in 2020: $857 million

Clash Of Clans in 2019: $700 million

PubG Mobile: $2.6 billion

Honor of Kings: $2.5 billion

Companies are making an absolute killing off these little pixelated games on our phones. But how do these companies make so much profit? Who actually spends money on these games? And why?

Well dear friends, let me take you down the rabbit hole of mobile games.

The Dopamine Shot

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