He spent all day playing WoW and admits that he was more excited to play it than he was for his kid's birthday.' 'The first entry on there is someone who missed his son's fifth birthday because he was on a guild raid. 'The best example of this is on ,' author and addiction and recovery consultant Ryan G. While the amount of money spent within these 'freemium' games can be surprising, what scares some about them is the time people are putting into it and the real-life activities they can end up replacing. Downie offers reassurances: 'We are dedicated to this game as not just a forerunner in the freemium space, but also as a foundational franchise for Ngmoco,'he said.

Spending that much money on any game raises a question of longevity-how long will these titles exist, especially when they rely so heavily on a server farm that might share its CPU cycles and capacity with future titles. The current average time spent playing the game is 45 minutes per user, per day-well over FarmVille's 15 minutes. They've spent 2.2 billion minutes harvesting crops, erecting buildings, and sending jobs to fellow players.

We Rule, an iPhone and iPad-only game developed by San Francisco-based Ngmoco long after Zynga's FarmVille took hold, now has more than 3 million registered users. Katie also said that she plays a handful of other online games including PopCap's Bejeweled Blitz, which can also be played on Facebook and as of April had an average play time of 43 minutes a day by its users.įarmVille's dominance of the social-farming games world hasn't gone unchallenged. It wasn't even fun-just addicted clicking,' she said. 'I justify this as being my only source of entertainment, and I'm forgoing movies and dinners out, so it's OK,' she told us.īefore playing FarmVille, Katie said, she spent 18 months playing Zynga's Mafia Wars game before quitting cold turkey. And she's spent about $2,000 on in-game currency expenses-roughly $100 a month. Since beginning to play the game last August, she's reached an unusually high level 111 in the game-40 levels beyond where the game offers incentives in the form of newly unlocked features. if a new feature is out, and I'm excited about it,' she said. 'I've been known to stay up all night until at least 5 or 6 a.m. Typical activities for these users involve planting and harvesting crops, reorganizing, and helping to tend friends' neighboring farms. More than 63 million active users each month spend an average of 15 minutes a day in the game, Zynga told CNET News. One of the most popular social-gaming titles is FarmVille, a game designed by San Francisco-based Zynga that users can play in Facebook and on iPhones. alone and projected three times that revenue in 2011. A research report from eMarketer in June said social games generated more than $725 million last year in the U.S. The companies behind these titles are raking in millions of dollars from people who toil on land that doesn't even exist, and that number continues to grow.

Indeed, one individual who CNET spoke with said that it's all she does between waking up and going to bed-and that's every every day of the week. On average, the users of these types of games are spending anywhere from a few minutes a game to the greater part of an hour.

Online games that pays real money