Given their numbers, even if ads weren’t a big percentage of their revenue, that is still millions of dollars.
Their claim is that is that is a move to improve UX, which if true, that sets a great precedent and hopefully a trend.
I have to wonder if the ad money was running low, then spin it into
“The reason we’re doing that, is that we want to focus all we can, and all our resources, on delivering a great player experience,” he continued.
That is definitely one reason that I have heard. I have heard other rumors/reasons for the decision, but if taken at face value, they would have seem to determined that a better game experience would lead to higher revenue over time. Which intuitively seems very obvious, but very hard to prove with statistics. But King has the type of numbers that they could have actually gathered enough data to prove that. Improved UX impact on revenue needs time and a large sample size to prove, ad revenue appears almost instantly.
Looking at this in the most optimistic light, I hope this leads others to the conclusion that overall game experience in and of itself is a valid path to monitization. Rather than the more short term paths to revenue. Again, this is the optimistic view, but one I hope pans out.
Yeah, if you have king’s revenue. For others in the real world… nope.
They must have access to data that the ads are a waste of money. You need to get lucky and good once and then it’s a matter of brand loyalty.
I mean what are we on now? Doom XXX? Wolfenstein CCMMXXII? Halo @!#%!? CoD Redux?