Even among these 1-2% of users there is a significant skew in spending, where 20% of the users make 80% of the total revenue.
In these games, you can say there are three kinds of payers:
80%: LTV of $5-10, or people who would have bought the game for $1-10 up front. A significant amount of additional revenue is earned from these users when you change from paid to free-to-play, because they end up paying not the $2.99 you charge at the door but the $9.99 they're actually willing to pay.
20%: LTV of $50-$1,000, or people who really like your game and understand how the mechanics of paying and playing tie together.
~1%: Unobservable LTV, people who will keep spending until your game dies, not until they get bored. These are your diehard fans, they'll buy your limited-run art posters from Kickstarter, they'll play all your sequels simultaneously, they will clamor for you not to shut down your servers, they'll ask you to make more of the same.
A game like Clash of Clans has generated a cohort of people whose lifetime value is longer than the likely age of the game. If you play it, and appreciate how the mechanics of the paying integrate with the mechanics of the game, you'd understand how it differs significantly from your typical psychologically-manipulative casino.
Suffice it to say, it is extraordinarily hard to make a Clash of Clans game.
With regards to your specific example, I think Blizzard with Hearthstone and Valve with Team Fortress 2 both showed unequivocally that, even for people who are willing to spend $60 (or TF2's case, $25), you earn 5x more (Valve's numbers) with a free-to-play title with no pay-to-play mechanics (like TF2). I don't know how much more Hearthstone has earned by being free-to-play, but TCG mechanics tend to earn very well in this setting.
In these games, you can say there are three kinds of payers:
80%: LTV of $5-10, or people who would have bought the game for $1-10 up front. A significant amount of additional revenue is earned from these users when you change from paid to free-to-play, because they end up paying not the $2.99 you charge at the door but the $9.99 they're actually willing to pay.
20%: LTV of $50-$1,000, or people who really like your game and understand how the mechanics of paying and playing tie together.
~1%: Unobservable LTV, people who will keep spending until your game dies, not until they get bored. These are your diehard fans, they'll buy your limited-run art posters from Kickstarter, they'll play all your sequels simultaneously, they will clamor for you not to shut down your servers, they'll ask you to make more of the same.
A game like Clash of Clans has generated a cohort of people whose lifetime value is longer than the likely age of the game. If you play it, and appreciate how the mechanics of the paying integrate with the mechanics of the game, you'd understand how it differs significantly from your typical psychologically-manipulative casino.
Suffice it to say, it is extraordinarily hard to make a Clash of Clans game.
With regards to your specific example, I think Blizzard with Hearthstone and Valve with Team Fortress 2 both showed unequivocally that, even for people who are willing to spend $60 (or TF2's case, $25), you earn 5x more (Valve's numbers) with a free-to-play title with no pay-to-play mechanics (like TF2). I don't know how much more Hearthstone has earned by being free-to-play, but TCG mechanics tend to earn very well in this setting.