Difficulty tuned to make you pay
The game is made hard or easy on purpose to get you to spend.
When a revenue target sets how hard a game is, the challenge is a way to end your turn or nudge you to buy past the hard part.
What you're actually buying
Another turn, a way past the hard bit, or a boost. The difficulty is set by the business model, not by what makes the game fun.
How it works
In the arcade, designers were commissioned to build games an average player could not survive for long. Space Invaders sped its aliens up the longer you lived, Defender's controls were brutal by design, and a credit was tuned to last a couple of minutes. Gun Fight's microprocessor let designers tune your odds of losing in software. Today the same tuning is guided by data: King found that almost all Candy Crush players who quit did so after failing level 65, and softened it. In 2024 King said level 65 was still both its best-converting level and its biggest source of quitters.
When it's fine
When the difficulty is the same whether or not you pay.
Where it came from
Gun Fight (late 1975) was the first arcade video game built around a microprocessor, letting designers tune failure in software. By 1982 arcades took about $8 billion in quarters, and Space Invaders and Defender were tuned for turnover. King's data team found that almost all Candy Crush players who quit did so after failing level 65 (reported in 2014). Patents have since been filed for matchmaking that nudges players to buy; a patent shows intent, not that the system is in use.
Historical prices and revenues are in US dollars at the time unless marked A$.
By the numbers
Space Invaders was the first fixed shooter with endless, escalating difficulty.
Midway's Gun Fight (late 1975) was the first arcade video game built around a microprocessor.
King's data team found that almost all Candy Crush Saga players who quit did so after failing level 65, and the designers tweaked the level.
Games that use it
No games in the database use this yet. Well-known examples: Space Invaders, Defender, Gun Fight, Candy Crush Saga.
Related badges
Covered in Video Games & Money: Ep 2 · Coin op, Ep 4 · Arcade golden, Ep 8 · Arcade versus, Ep 36 · The game is a sensor.