Make Money From Home Playing Video Games

after pokemon go was released in the us, ittook less than a day before it was making more money than all the other apps in bothapple’s and google’s app stores. “it’s already earned $14 million in revenuesince launching last wednesday — not even a full week.”but users didn’t have to pay a cent for the game. all that money was coming from optionalpurchases people were making as they played. this is the world of freemium apps — a businessmodel that, in the past few years, has largely wiped out the market for paid games.now game designers have to monetize the gameplay and one way to do that is by applying somefundamental lessons of behavioral psychology. the first thing these games do is set up avirtual currency so that it doesn’t feel

like you’re spending real currency, eventhough you are. this is a variation on something we’ve knownfor decades - which is that people find it harder to spend money when they’re payingin cash than if they’re using a card. “so when you pay cash for something, yousee it leave your hands and you get a very immediate sense of how much your cash reserves havedropped, how much your wealth has dropped.” games add yet another layer. you pay for lollipopboosters with gold bars and you pay for gold bars with your credit card, which is alreadydistanced from actual payment. and then on top of that, they don’t makethe exchange rate simple. it’s not 50 gems for 50 cents.“they’re always something weird like 1

dollar will get you 12 purple diamonds, andthat sort of off kilter exchange rate is the same thing you see with people spending — touristsspending money that they’re not familiar with in foreign countries.”if incense costs 80 pokecoins and a batch of 550 pokecoins costs $4.99, how much realmoney does incense cost? yeah i don’t know either.so you’re spending money that doesn’t seem real and it only takes a second becausethe app store already has your credit card. the whole payment process is designed to bepainless. other parts of the game, however, are designedto be painful. a key finding of behavioral research is thatpeople tend to experience unexpected losses

more intensely than comparable gains. thatcan inform the timing of purchase prompts. in puzzle & dragons, players progress througha dungeon before facing a boss, and if they die, they stand to lose all the rewards theyjust earned. that’s when they’re presented with the option to save their coins and theirpoints by spending magic stones, which you can by in the store with real money.other developers actively embed inconvenience into the games, so that you can purchase convenience.in clash of clans and game of war, everything you try to build has wait times that get progressivelylonger but are skippable, for a price. “so they build incentives to remove painpoints into the games and then if they want that, then they have the incentives to insertpain points into the game.”

ultimately though, only a tiny percentageof players actually become payers. and a small percentage of payers are those so-called “whales”— people who will pay hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars in the app.the marketing firm swrve estimates that about half of the revenue for mobile games is comingfrom less than a half of a percent of all players.which means that for some of these games, non-paying users, which is most people, areessentially pouring time into a game designed to hit the pain points of a small, susceptiblegroup of players. if you’re really having fun, that’s fine.but it might be worth rewarding games that find another way. as of now, the monetizationin pokemon go is unobtrusive, it’s kind

of tucked away. and that lack of manipulationis a pretty good reason to buy some lure modules and some incense. one argument in favor of free-to-play gamesand in-app purchases is that they give developers a reason to keep updating the games. and they’recollecting tons of data in order to inform those updates — things like where you getstuck, where you close the game, which features are most popular. all that data can help themkeep making a game that you want to keep playing. but it also means that they can tweak theprices based on individual profiles and behavior. if it seems like you’re about to quit, heyhere’s a discount. or if you’re the type of person who will spend a lot of money, maybethey bump up the prices a bit. they can even

look at how fancy your phone is and what countryyou live in and set the prices accordingly. according to one survey, 40% of game developerssaid they were setting different prices for different players. but the survey was anonymousand it’s pretty hard to tell which games those are.

Just got my check for $500 

Sometimes people don't believe me when I tell them about how much you can make taking paid surveys online...

 So I took a video of myself actually getting paid $500 for paid surveys to finally set the record straight.