Talk:The Elusive One/@comment-33048836-20171025080932/@comment-28169398-20171025214319

"And then the best drivers (like Speed Junkie) would get better reward (better results in WWTT, need to spend less in those events, etc) but that's OK because thay are better..."- LenaelTheElf

I would argue that the ad watchers do more for the game than the best drivers? Why? Because they are the players that generate the most revenue for the developers and keep them profitable and able to deliver future development. The vast majority of players likely cannot afford gold packs or refuse to buy them.

Cars are prohibitively expensive and repair and upgrade times are very long not because FM/EA want to sell gold but because they want us to watch ads and run farming events. The rate that they can bill at for ads likely comes from the amount of user time on the game. Then the number of clicks that they get from discrete users for an iteration of an ad over a given period of time.

Think of the Newspaper model prior to the internet. Newspapers didn't make profits from the cost of the newspaper or subscriptions, that was used to pay the person who sold the papers. The majority of the revenues came from ad placement and circulation size. As we became more sophisticated and collected demographics information, advertisers could target their message and media outlets could charge more per ad for delivering prime consumer demographics.

If there are 200,000 active users (suggested by Sirebel), and the average in-app spend is $10 per year (some might spend 1,000, some 100, many 0), then the game would only pull in 2MM in revenue. It would be impossible to maintain and develop this game (this isn't snake and blocks) on that revenue. The majority has to come from ad revenue and very possibly usage data. I haven't read the ToS for privacy, but I am sure even anonymously the usage data generated by this game is a valuable asset that can be monitized.