Response
For this critical play, I decided to play Clash of Clans. Funnily enough I started playing this again like 2 weeks ago, so this fits perfect for the critical player. Clash of Clans is a multiplayer mobile base building/raiding game where players team in up clans to take on other clans. The game is produced by SuperCell, a powerhouse in the gaming industry when it comes to these types of town/base building games: Clash of Clans, HayDay, Boom Beach, etc. The game is intended for people who like idle games with a bit more action. You get the joy of building something that takes time and energy with the satisfaction of quick attacks and pillaging villages.
Clash of Clans, at least for me, is pretty synonymous with resource gathering. When I think of the game, and play the game, the first thing you do every time you log on is collect your gold, elixir, and dark elixir. And the last thing you do before you log off is make sure you’ve used your resources to start upgrading something. The game is full of transactions, all of them possible for free with the resources you get in the game, but the real valuable resource that the players spend is there time. And SuperCell knows this. That’s why for every construction or research the game has, you can speed it up with gems.
Gems can make it instantly happen so you can skip all the waiting, but gems are extremely rare. One way you can get them is by destroying trees, rocks, and bushes and clearing space.
Although this takes elixir and coins to do so and often grants only 0-5 gems. Another way you can get gems is through the Builder Base gem mine. Although, I have upgraded mine to level 3 and and it only produces 2.6 gems per DAY.
In a game where automatically upgrading something with gems can take roughly 20 gems per hour left on the upgrade, there are just not nearly enough in circulation to successfully use them and not run out. That’s where the micro-transactions come in. Instead of breaking foliage and grinding the gem mine, you can purchase gems in the store – with 80 gems running for $1, and 14,000 gems running around $100.
So for just $1 you can skip around 4 hours of waiting, and for $100, you get 700 hours of waiting done essentially instantaneously. While none of these transactions are required for the game, when you’re at town hall level 7 (not to brag), and things are already taking upwards of 2 days to upgrade, getting that instant gratification can be a very exciting prospect.
The game knows its audience well, it has a clear established type of fun and aesthetic and understands that it has its audience wrapped around its finger. It’s simple dynamics of gathering resources and spending them to upgrade stuff is seemingly harmless, especially since you cannot buy resources directly – gold, elixir, and dark elixir cannot be bought with money, but they can be bought with gems. Since you therefor cannot directly buy an upgrade, but instead have to use resources, the game doesn’t seem pay-to-win at all, it just seems like you can speed things up if you wanted. But, with enough money, you could most likely “beat” the entire game, upgrading everything possible in just a day or two. If that’s not pay-to-win, I don’t know what is. Instead of using a FOMO method like Fortnite or CSGO with different skins and cases, Clash of Clans leans into the most valuable resource of every game – time.
Ethics
This game can put people at risk of for addiction because from the very start it pushes for people to use gems and not wait for their upgrades. The very first thing you do in the game is place a cannon, and the game gives you enough gems to automatically upgrade it and not wait, it highlights it and tells you to do it. Now, you can wait for it to upgrade by itself, but it wouldn’t seem that way to a first time player as the rest of the screen goes dark and they literally put a spotlight over the “Use Gems” button. So from the get-go they make the user used to spending gems and relying on them to speed things up. From there it is a slippery slope as the upgrades only take longer and longer. This game isdifferent from others with transactions as it doesn’t rely on RNG or skins for money. Other games will have users spending money for the latest skin or case, but its understood that all of these things can only be bought with real money, so it comes across exactly as it is – a scheme to make more and more money. But with Clash of Clans, the gems only speed things up, they don’t really offer any extra things that you wouldn’t get by yourself eventually, so it is a much more sneaky way to make money as it doesn’t seem as heartless as other corporations.
