The Curse of Clash of Clans

Tell me Clash of Clans is a good game. Go on, I dare you.

There has been a noticeable incursion upon the adverts I see on evening and weekend TV. These new adverts, about 20-30 seconds in length, are colourfully animated, well-acted and usually accompanied by good music. So why has their appearance irked me so much?

It’s because they’re advertising free-to-play games on mobiles. The word “free” should most definitely be used loosely in these cases. You more than likely would have seen a member of this sordid cast of games – Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, Game of War – all of them survive off of the gullibility of human beings.

But back to these adverts. In those promoting Clash of Clans, a cast of colourful and cutesy characters charge a well defended castle complex. In the course of this, various escapades occur. A skeleton knocks down a tower, a mage’s hood falls down to reveal a massive afro or a goblin steals gold from his allies.

All of this is well animated and intrinsically charming, but that is, of course, the purpose. The adverts are grossly misrepresentative of the actual game, where pixels-tall blobs of units run in a straight path towards a mish-mash castle with no real form. All in a three-quarters view reminiscent of very early RTS games on the PC.

The model is repeated ad nauseam amongst others in the genre. Whether you’re attacking a castle, city, beach, tower or dungeon, they all look the same. Perhaps I could tolerate this if the games were, as they advertise, “free to play”.

True, downloading, setting up an account and building a rudimentary base are usually all free to do. It’s then that the pay plans kick in. “Oh, you want to build this tower? That’ll take 12 hours unless you use these coins to speed it up.” “Haven’t got any coins? Don’t worry, you can buy them with your real money here”.

It doesn’t take much to hook people. It’s just a few pounds after all, right? What’s that against having a cooler looking beach / castle / town / dungeon / garden / skybase? Now that your base is looking awesome you should aim to conquer others right? That’s what makes this shadow-of-a-real-game tick, after all.

“Oh, you want to build some troops? Well you can build this small army for free over three hours or you could BUY this massive army right now for just 1000 coins!”

You can see where I’m going with this. These games are an interactive version of entrapment – it draws people in, gets them involved and then, just when the player believes they’re getting somewhere it pulls the rug from under them and asks for a fiver to help them back up again.

Alex, you might be thinking as you stare, incredulous, at your mobile screen. This is such a bad game, I would NEVER pay money for it!

Yes, you might have the sense to recognise a trap when you see it. You, a seasoned gamer, a person who knows the difference between good content worth paying for and crap worse than the kind you’d find on the bottom of your shoe after a walk through a field of diarrhoea-ridden cattle.

You’re not who these companies are aiming their games at, though, are you? Any idea where your kid brother’s pocket money keeps going? What about grandma’s pension? Why is your dad always glued to his phone in the evenings?

Those people are the target demographic. Those with little to no experience of the wide world of video games, who can easily be snared by the mobility and ease of gaming on a phone and those with a nice big chunk of disposable income.

Over the period between 2013-2014, Game of War, which is a lot less popular than Clash of Clans, was averaging a daily profit of $1 million. To put that into perspective, in a month the studio behind Game of War makes as much as Alien: Isolation made in four. One is an AAA title that took years to develop, the other is a bunch of pixels on a screen with a paywall. It boggles the mind.

Of course, aside from a few players who spend hundreds and thousands on their nominally “free” games (what the companies call “White Whales”), the main objective for these free to play games is capturing new players. They drop users as fast as they make them, hence the overly flashy advertising – even Game of War splashed the millions required to air an advert during the Superbowl – and cutesy appeal.

You can’t say it isn’t a successful business model, though. Perhaps this should be a call for big companies to look at the mobile market more seriously? But this could be in itself be a dangerous path to lead them down. How soon would it be before we see beloved franchises stripped down to the bare bones of development in an effort to make quick money – even further than Ubisoft have managed it already?

I’m preaching to the choir here: I know that many of you reading this have the same passionate dislike for these non-games as I do. Maybe we just have to hope that it’s a passing fad, before we find everyone glued to their screens (no matter the console) watching the timer count down until they can build their next section of wall / beach / underwater palace.