Why Do Mobile Games Chase a Few Big Spenders?

Shaan Puri says Candy Crush has 82 million monthly actives, and all the revenue comes from 4% of the players. The other 96% are the cost of doing business, the cost of finding the whales.

His co-founder at Bebo had been chief technology officer at AppLovin, the biggest advertising network for mobile games, and saw what a game pays to acquire a player, what the player is worth, and which targeting gets them to spend more. Someone who spends heavily in Candy Crush is highly likely to spend heavily in Block Blast and Farmville. People who started Farmville, and people who make Candy Crush style games, laid out the economy as sources and sinks, hard currencies and soft currencies, and a plan for nurturing whales. The design works like talking to a slot machine operator, except Vegas requires an 89% payout rate and mobile games have no such rule. The studio sets the payout wherever it wants, trading churn and growth against frustrating the player. Some of the smartest engineers, builders, and designers spend their careers getting people to put a few more coins in.

A community business runs on the same pattern. Virtually everything is free, and the top 1%, or even the top 0.001%, pay to keep everything running.