The Market You Never Knew Existed - The Underbelly of Mobile Gaming

Some of you may know about the app Game of War: Fire Age by Machine Zone, but for those who don’t, it is an mobile app that is one of the highest grossing apps on the market today. It requires users to spends thousands and for some users, even hundreds of thousands of dollars on in-app content to remain relevant in game, which has led to them grossing hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

I downloaded the app a little over two years ago as I was in college and needed something to do in my free time, I had never really been a big gamer and had never spent a dime on a mobile app. Fast forward a year and I had developed a full blown addiction to the game, which had cost me several thousand dollars. What is sad about this is that I didn’t even have it the worst out of people I played with, many of whom had spent over $50,000 in the same time frame. The game utilizes resources, speedups, and gold to allow the users to complete researches, level up buildings, build troops etc. which would allow you to attack bigger and better opponents in combat. It leads to intense competition within the game in a high stakes environment with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line. Too many times I have seen users make mistakes, go out and get drunk or fall asleep early and wake up with tens of thousands of dollars worth of troops destroyed by enemy players. Many times these players will come to their senses and realize they have been wasting thousands on a mobile app and quit, but those who just can’t quit will rebuild to their previous power and often become even greater.

This rebuilding was actually where I began to get into the secondary market which was developing beneath the game, and while it encompasses many aspects including resource sales, cheaper content packs, account sales, etc.. but where I started was in resource sales, which through some guidance from other users I began to charge cash for the resources. I began to sell the resources and gold I would get from content packs at slightly higher rates where if I sold all the content I would be making a pretty good profit. Because the developer constantly changes pack content and usage rates for researches etc, there was always resource inequality (ie. someone would run out of food before stone or wood and need to buy just that to keep building cheaper than buying full pack content). This may be a little confusing, but when pack content costs $99.99 USD per, its cheaper to buy $20 worth of in game food to continue building.

This resource sale business led me to develop many connections in the game, and it eventually led to being taught how to purchase content at discount rates (using differences in exchange rates set by the developer and hosts), which I would then sell to users at a markup, albeit still significantly cheaper than buying full price from the developer. When I first began to provide this service, I would estimate that maybe 70% of users were paying full price for pack content, where the other 30% would use discounts available through Amazon or through these black market providers whom we call “pack loaders”. At the time I am writing this (about a year later) I would say those numbers have shifted to where I could not name a single player who pays full price for pack content anymore.

The last aspect of this market that I will discuss (just so you understand before I get into the actual interesting parts) is that of account sales. Due to liability, the developer bans the transfer of in game accounts from any user to another, although, after spending tens of thousands of dollars on a game, most users will do this anyways just to get something back from it. This is typically done through rooms of users specifically created for this purpose. So to transfer an account, one person who has never met the other person must send a large sum of money either through western union or paypal or some other money service, and basically trust that the seller is honest and will provide them the login credentials to the account once money is received.

Okay so this is where it actually gets interesting (for me at least), I could tell you about people who have made hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this secondary discount content loading, or selling resources, but I’ll leave that for another time.. Whenever you put thousands of people spending thousands of dollars together, I guess you should expect to find certain individuals looking to take advantage of it..but in my life I have never found an instance where nearly every individual is out to get something free or get something for cheaper, even at the expense of others. The amount of fraud and deception goes on in this secondary market..man I can’t even begin to describe how far its come, and the developers don’t do anything to combat it, so its up to the honest users to police the secondary market, track down those committing fraud, and make them give back what they have stolen. Whether its individuals loading pack content through pack loaders, then calling the money sending host (credit card company, bank, etc) and claiming fraud and charging back months of content purchases, or people selling accounts and stealing them back through backup links, or charging back payments for accounts, it has escalated from where we saw a stolen account maybe once a month when I first started playing, to seeing it happen every day.

Now what’s great about all this, is that the users of this game are people from all walks of life, so we’ve got people working in credit collection, in the FBI, as lawyers, police, for PayPal, etc. so since the developers don’t do anything about protecting the users from this really, the users band together and use what they do in real life to find those scammers. When you play for hours a day with someone you get to know them pretty well, so when they lose an account they have spent thousands on pretty much everyone helps them out to get it back. I was a middle man of accounts for a while, helping to make transactions safe and while I never had an issue, I got to see first hand the stuff that goes down, you literally can’t make some of this stuff up.

The problem with all these secondary transfers and pack loading is that the people selling take all the risk, since to the developer, or the credit card company etc, the person sending the money is the consumer, and the sellers aren’t supposed to be selling the content (or accounts) in the first place, so its incredibly hard for them to prove they actually provided the content to the company. So since no one really wants to help us out, users go and find the scammers by any means possible. I know users who have literally tracked down scammers in real life, found out where they worked etc and threatened to get them fired. It really goes beyond just a game at this point, and that’s crazy to comprehend. I just wanted to share a little bit of my experience, since I’m still mind blown to think back and think how the majority of the people in the world can never comprehend spending $100 on an app or a game, let alone hundreds of thousands. And then beyond that, to have an entire secondary market beneath it filled with real world market concepts and fraud.

I know it’s a long post but comment if you want to hear more detail, some of it is truly insane and I was lucky enough to have an inside view to the entire development of it and all the things that go on.

Thanks for reading!