Clash of clans is a great game. I have played it nearly every day since I've downloaded it. Am I a zombie, sucked in to the compulsion loop so tightly that I can't escape? No. iOS games are not habit-forming drugs. They're pixels on a screen.
I play every day because it's fun as hell. I love searching for opponents, analyzing their bases, discovering their weaknesses, and exploiting them with my troops. I love building my clan and getting higher on the leaderboard. I love discussing the ever-shifting optimal layout metagame with my clanmates. These things are FUN.
Yes, games use certain tactics that when examined naively look like manipulation machines. But that's fucking hogwash. Clash of clans is #1 top grossing because it's hands-down the most widely accessible, deep, and fun strategy game for the iPhone. Nothing comes close.
Settlers was pretty damn fun, but there haven't been many that I would call AAA hits for the iPhone, despite having purchased something north of $500 worth of games for iOS in the last five years. Maybe a handful that got me as excited as Settlers did.
In general, people don't make fun "deep" games for the iPhone, they make them for the Console/PC. Any studio making something fun and free for the iPhone is probably more interested in extracting $$$ as quickly as possible from you, particular where you see the dreaded IAP. I'll try out Clash of Clans and see if it falls into that dreaded _suck the player in and force him to pay cash_. I suspect there will be Gems that I have to drop $$$ into in order to speed up building things instead of waiting 30 minutes. We'll see.
[Edit: 3 minutes later. Installed it. You need Gems to finish building things in reasonable (<5 minutes, in the case of a Gold storage, 30 minutes. ) time. My guess is the entire purpose of this game is to suck me in to the point at which I start shoveling money for IAP - doesn't this pattern annoy people? Or is it just because they haven't seen it dozens (hundreds?) of times before? I'll play with it for another 10 minutes, but so far, the game pattern looks pretty straight forward and not particularly entertaining or engrossing. I'll try and keep an open mind.]
[Edit 2: I'm sorry - I lasted all of 5 minutes with this thing. Buy Gems. Speed up Building. You can even use Gems to Acquire more "Gold" or more "Elixir" - they don't even attempt to hide the mechanics of cash extraction. It's almost a straightforward "Give us Cash and you can build things really fast and go attack others and win." Probably the shortest time any game has ever lasted on my iPhone, ever. I'm confused as to what fun people see in this...]
> I'm confused as to what fun people see in this...
Maybe they treat it as an asynchronous game, closer to academy of heroes or outwitters than to starcraft? That's what I do anyway: look up my options, queue up a few actions, then go do stuff, check back a few hours later. That's how I tend to play on my phone anyway, so it works nicely, and while it's explicit about the gem things it doesn't bash you over the head with it, and you can get gems through achievements.
I think his point was that games like that are engineered to maximize 'fun' that converts to profits.
Arguably, there are things they could have implemented that would have made the game more fun, but they chose not to implement them because they would harm their profitability.
Do not confuse them for games.