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Comment by JonFish85 | Hacker News Reader

Great! Another game company that makes insane amounts of cash with addictive flash-in-the-pan games files for IPO. Fast-forward 3 years, and we have another Zynga on our hands: a company that has no sustainable way of making money. Relying on short-lived hits does not translate well into a public company (in my opinion). I hate companies like that.

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Not to mention the scummy nature of how they entice users to pay to play, such as 'insert coin to continue playing' mechanism after you fail a board a few times.

Also offensive is the use of sound in these games to ratchet up excitement like a slot machine.

Not just sounds. It's every NLP trick across all fronts including crying icons and sad faces that only brighten up when you pay.

... all of which is easily defeated by setting date forward, likely meaning that they are making as much money from charging $0.99 for level batches (each of 20 stages to a total of 400+) as they do from selling in-game gimmicks. They just milk this puppy through every hole.

Pretty much every video game from at least the last three decades has "[used] sound...to ratchet up excitement." I would hardly use the word "offensive" to describe this.

Don't forget every movie since the end of silent films.

...wait, no. Also silent films. Because orchestra.

Companies based entirely around building better Skinner boxes is a rather alarming phenomenon.

Or the endless Facebook spam!

King have been around for a fair while.

The appeal while I was under-employed was that you could win small cash prizes, which was pretty compelling. I was able to use these as seed money to earn from various poker sites.

I think that King.com might have a bit more resilience to change than Zynga, and a few more innovative ideas. I am fully prepared to eat my own words though.

EDIT: I am also a bit disturbed by the cynical "turn sad to happy faces for $" tricks they are pulling.

I disagree. They're the new X With Friends. Everyone is playing a *Saga game. Just like everyone WAS playing an X With Friends game.

In a year, Candy Crush will be old and lame and replacements like Pet Saga will never achieve the same success just like Zynga's newer X With Friends titles failed to achieve the same success as the original.

I will be shocked if they can survive post Candy Crush, to be honest. Almost $1M/day is hot stuff, but hopefully they realize how fickle people are with apps.

I know the business school default assumption is that you should basically always reinvest, but every once in a while it makes perfect business sense to just pocket the money, distribute to whoever the shareholders are, and walk away. This is the business equivalent of winning the lottery.

Rovio has been around as long as King, and I'd argue that Angry Birds has generated more revenue, and while a bit played out, probably has a longer shelf life still than Candy Crush.

Record companies, movie studios and even automotive companies are all hits-based businesses, much like games studios. There's no fundamental reason you can't build a sustainable business around this model.

With the added bonus of the JOBS Act which means they won't have to publicize their income until very late.

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