The ad for Vikings (which featured a sexy lady) took me through to a screen depicting another woman in a state of semi-undress. I’d speak to some of those people, including the big spenders, but first I needed to get a taste of the games for myself.ĭepending on which ad I clicked, I was taken through to a sign-up page for either Throne or Vikings, two games by an Israeli developer called Plarium. At the center of all this madness is a library of identikit online games fuelled by people forking out hundreds, even thousands, of dollars each month to keep levelling, keep conquering, keep clicking. To learn more, I clicked the faux-Deku tree, jumped into the games and spent some time getting to know the people who play them.īehind that tree lay a world of games driven almost entirely by marketing, filled with sleazy adverts on the one hand and high-budget trailers, blockbuster movie licensing and celebrities on the other. It'd be easy, if these games didn't have enormous audiences and generate huge amounts of revenue.
It'd be easy to assume that we've moved beyond the days of late noughties empire-builder/clicker hit Evony, when women with no connection to the game invited players to “Join the Fun”. These are games with advertising so desperate that it'd be easy to assume no one with a sliver of taste plays them. The image might depict a Deku-esque sentient tree looming over a brave warrior captioned with ‘If you own a computer you must try this game!’, or a voluptuous elf with the label '95% of Players LOSE CONTROL When They Play This game', as if it's so raunchy that you'll be manically tearing your pants off within seconds of starting to play. One is maybe at the bottom of the page you're reading. We've all seen them before, between the thumbnails offering an explanation why 'millions of people' are cancelling their Netflix accounts and the promise of a fruit that 'scientists claim' can reverse ageing.
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