It’s no secret that free-to-play games on mobile devices are much more of a cash cow than paid titles, and games like Super Cell’s Clash of Clans are perfect examples of the sort of success that a company can achieve with a free-to-play model. The most recent game from the mobile game development studio, called Clash Royale, takes its characters and its theme from the Clash of Clans universe, but offers a different style of gameplay as it’s based on real-time matches between players instead of the defense style play from Clash of Clans. Although Clash Royale is not Super Cell’s most successful game, it’s proving to be quite the money maker already and it’s only a couple of months old.
According to a new thread on Reddit, one player has already spent around $12,000 on in-app purchases for in-game items that help them to advance their gameplay. With such a high amount of money spent on the game, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the player, known as Chief Pat, is the number two ranked player in the world for Clash Royale. In the video below you can see a match between Chief Pat and the number one ranked player, LightWing, as they go head to head in a high-level matchup.
If you’re a current Clash Royale player or have been interested in giving the game a try, this video is worth a taking a look at just to get a sense of what the gameplay is like for those who play with a higher skill level. More importantly though, it shows that not only do in-app purchases have the capacity to make developers a crazy amount of money, but they also have the capability to affect the gameplay quite a bit. That isn’t to say that spending $12,000 on a free-to-play game is a requirement. It certainly is not. However, it does help things along, and when you play at such a high level it brings the ability to give your gameplay a boost. It’s also worth mentioning that Chief Pat plays and streams games on YouTube for a job with nearly 2 million subscribers, which undoubtedly brings in enough revenue to allow this kind of spending on the game.