Energy and wait timers

What you're actually buying

Permission to keep playing now, or time itself: refills of energy, lives or stamina, and gems that finish a build or upgrade instantly. You are paying to remove an obstacle the game placed there on purpose. The longer the game makes the wait, the more the shortcut is worth.

How it works

A game that never made you wait never made you pay, so engineered inconvenience became the design: energy bars that empty in minutes, crops that wilt on a real clock, and builds and upgrades that take hours or days. Pay, and the wait disappears. Clash of Clans, for example, sold gems that skip its build timers, selling players back their own time. The wait is designed, not accidental: a skip is only worth buying if the wait is long enough to hurt, and the payment comes at the moment of greatest impatience, so it feels smaller than the same price in a shop. A limit that refills later also doubles as a hook, because it is a reason to come back.

When it's fine

When the limit is generous, resets quickly, and you can enjoy the game within it without being pushed towards the shop. A built-in break is fine; a sales funnel is not.

Where it came from

FarmVille (19 June 2009) put the timer on Facebook: crops wilted on a real clock, energy bars drained in minutes, paying could 'unwither' them, and Zynga earned 93% of its revenue from virtual goods. At its March 2010 peak the game had 83.76 million monthly players. Facebook banned the spam that fed it in 2010 and ended Zynga's special deal in November 2012, but by then the timer, the energy bar and the nag had already jumped to phones. When Apple allowed in-app purchases in free apps on 15 October 2009, energy meters ran dry and timers made waiting cost something, and Clash of Clans went on to sell gems that skip build timers. The ancestor is the arcade continue countdown (insert a coin within ten seconds).

Historical prices and revenues are in US dollars at the time unless marked A$.