How Kingshot Leveraged Psychology and Behavioural Economics to Generate $1 Billion in Spending in Just 13 Months

Kingshot by Century Games PTE. LTD.

TL;DR

1. Kingshot by Century Games PTE. LTD. reached $1 Billion in-game user spending in just 13 months by combining behavioural psychology, game architecture, social systems, and sophisticated game monetization strategies.
2. Kingshot turns the game into a social ecosystem by building alliance communities where players form friendships, support alliance members, and fight battles together to increase engagement, strengthen player retention, and increase players’ willingness to invest time and money in helping their alliance succeed.
3. Kingshot promotes itself as an ad-free strategy game to get players. However, it generates revenue through in-game purchases starting as low as $0.99, providing an easy way to bypass the psychological hurdle against in-game spending. It then gradually nudges them towards larger and more frequent in-game purchases.
4. Kingshot uses powerful behavioural and psychological concepts like Anchoring Bias, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), Scarcity, Hyperbolic Discounting, Framing Effect, etc., to position in-game purchases as opportunities rather than an expense.
5. The game provides limited-time events, event passes, hyperbolic value bundles (for example, “3050% Value Pack” or “7085% Value Pack”) to increase spending by leveraging gaming psychology, dopamine loops, Sunk Cost Fallacy, and Endowment effect, etc.
6. Constant battles, leaderboards, cross-kingdom battles, and competitive events create a need to spend money continuously if a person wants to win.

Introduction

While playing Kingshot, I came across players who have spent over $20,000 and are not planning to stop anytime soon. I was astonished and speechless, and wondered how a person could spend an exorbitant amount of money on a game they might not even play for a few months.

I was fascinated by how the game leveraged behavioural psychology to create a game in which players make purchases worth tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a few months. So, I conducted a deep dive into the game to understand its design, monetization systems, social engineering, and behavioural psychology, and interviewed high-spending players (often referred to as “Whales” in-game).

Initially, Kingshot is advertised as a strategy game with no advertisements. All mobile game players find it appealing immediately, as most of the mobile games have forced, unskippable advertisements, which are incredibly frustrating. The advertisements interrupt the gameplay and often reward players with in-game advantages to encourage further advertisement views. This further increases frustration, especially for players who lose to people who used advertisements to gain an advantage. So, it becomes incredibly infuriating as players feel pressured to watch ads to remain competitive in games.

Kingshot leverages this strategy to acquire players. But what people don’t realize until much later is that the game is ad-free because it relies on players’ in-game spending to make money. Many players join the game thinking they will enjoy it as a free-to-play (F2P) game, but end up spending money on it eventually. Over time, though, the players feel nudged to spend money despite their original intentions.

Let’s look at ingenious methods used by game developers to encourage in-game spending, as modern mobile games are redefining the economics of gaming.

How Kingshot Turn Small Purchases Into Massive Spending

$0.99 Starting Offers

Kingshot Recurring Fishing Event $0.99 Set

A player never starts playing a game thinking they will spend $10,000 on it. It usually starts with something much smaller.

In Kingshot, players can start with purchases as low as $0.99. This lowers the psychological resistance of people who have never spent money on the game. It makes the purchase seem trivial. Once a player spends money, subsequent purchases become psychologically easier.

A player wouldn’t start by buying a $99.99 pack. It generally progresses like this:

$0.99-> $4.99-> $9.99->$49.99-> $99.99

Weekly/Monthly Packs in Kingshot

Kingshot Weekly and Monthly Passes

The game also has multiple weekly/monthly packs, which are positioned as high value for money, and players get daily benefits after logging into the game. This helps improve player retention.

Value for Money Packs

Kingshot Hero Rally

Purchase packs are positioned like “3400% Value for your money”, “2600% for your money,” indicating enormous value and benefit illusion. They have carefully implemented behavioural concepts to nudge people into spending their money.

Behavioural concepts used here are:

1. Anchoring Bias — Players compare the current price to the original artificially inflated one and feel that they are getting value for their money. Because of the perceived discounts, expensive bundles begin to feel cheaper, and players jump on the opportunity to buy them.
2. Transaction Utility Theory — Players get emotional satisfaction from feeling they got an incredible deal, and the purchase feels financially intelligent. This makes spending money psychologically rewarding for players.
3. Hyperbolic Discounting — Players focus on short-term gratification and prioritize immediate progress over long-term financial thinking. The excitement of the offer surpasses the rational cost evaluation, resulting in players spending money in the game.
4. Framing Effect — The game frames purchases as “gain” in resources rather than an expenditure. For example, the game indicates you are getting $180 worth of goods for $5 instead of positioning it as spending $5 on a game that you might not play after a few months.
5. Scarcity — A lot of the offers in the game are for a limited amount of time, creating an urgency amongst players to spend money.

Special Limited Time Events

Kingshot Childhood Fun Pack, Childhood Event

The game has special side events like fishing events, treasure hunts, tiles, etc., such that there are always multiple special events going on at any point in time. For each event, there are special purchase options available, which players are tempted to get because of the addictive nature of subgames. These sub-games, along with having packs ranging from $0.99 to $99.99, also have event passes where people can play to earn rewards. These passes have free rewards along with additional rewards that can be unlocked after passing different levels of the event.

These event passes further encourage players to spend money as they use behavioural economics and cognitive biases:

1. Endowment Effect — Before players buy the event passes, they are given free-tier rewards, which are shown alongside the high-value locked items. As a player passes milestones and unlocks free items, their brain already views the locked item as theirs. So, players want to spend money to get the rewards they have already acquired.
2. Sunk Cost Fallacy — Players often feel that they have already invested their time in the game and don’t want to lose the benefits and progress. Hence, they are more likely to spend. Sunk Cost Fallacy is the player’s tendency to spend money because they feel they have already invested a lot in the game.
3. Principle of Progress and Dopamine Loops — We are deeply motivated by the need to move forward and go with the momentum. Event passes, therefore, break massive, time-consuming goals into micro-rewards like a small amount of currency at every single tier or an in-game skin to reward the player. This continuous stream of rewards triggers dopamine releases in the brain, increases engagement by creating anticipation, and reinforces regular playing habits.
4. Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and Artificial Scarcity — Developers create scarcity by fixing an expiration date for the event. Once it ends, all the unique skins and rewards are usually gone forever. The fear of missing certain high-tier rewards creates a psychological sense of urgency, engages the player, and nudges them to log in daily.
5. IKEA Effect — People place higher value on items that they helped create or finish. Rather than just getting the rewards, players have to “earn” them by completing specific in-game challenges to reach different milestones. The time and effort required to complete the pass make the final reward feel much more valuable compared to a standard purchase.
6. Commitment and Consistency — People have a strong desire to complete previous commitments or purchases. When players buy an event pass, they commit to getting all the rewards possible. People want to get their money’s worth, so they complete tasks and reach milestones. This turns casual game play into a daily “job” that people prioritize to get their money’s worth.

This is how the game has engineered the packs to entice people into spending their money. Now, let’s look at some of the other behavioural insights used by the game.

Leveraging Human Behaviour to Encourage Spending

Kingshot understands the multiple fundamental aspects of human behaviour. Let’s look at different human tendencies targeted in the game.

Satisfaction

People who have money often start spending money because they enjoy the game. They derive pleasure from the game, hence they don’t mind spending money initially. But even if a person wants to leave, the social engineering in the game design makes them stay for their friends because the friendships built are extremely valuable in some cases.

Principle of Least Effort

The game provides tools and features that make the lives of players easier in-game. This includes automatic beast hunt and automatic alliance help, the latter of which supports the person’s teammate. If people have the means to choose a paid path that is easier, they will naturally pick that.

Competitiveness

Most people are fundamentally competitive. Kingshot understands winning matters, and the moment rankings, leaderboards, wars, and alliance events happen, a player’s emotional stakes increase dramatically. Suddenly, losing matters and falling behind feels personal. Unlike traditional games, Kingshot creates constant cycles of urgency by having multiple events at the same time, with new events beginning within days. The system is intentionally endless. Even if a player becomes the strongest in a kingdom, the game introduces larger cross-kingdom battles with even stronger players.

The goalposts continually shift, ensuring that players are frequently required to spend to remain competitive.

Support Teammates and Alliances

Kingshot has fabulously understood the psychology of social systems as they turned individual spending into a group benefit rather than a solo experience. Players join alliances, build friendships, and chat for hours every day while playing the game. The game becomes a place for people to belong, and for the people who haven’t “fit in” in the world, it is incredibly precious. So to support their friends during alliance or kingdom battles, people spend money to help their alliances win either directly via top-up points or indirectly by acquiring in-game resources. Not only that, but a player’s alliance members also get a reward when a player spends money in the game. This further increases the expectation/pressure of expenditure for the alliance.

The following behavioural science biases and tendencies play a hand here:

1. In-Group Favoritism — People naturally tend to divide themselves into “us” vs “them”. They may view their alliance as their immediate family/group, and spending money helps alliances win, provides additional rewards to the teammates, and boosts the overall morale of the team.
2. Reciprocal Altruism — You spend your money during events to help your team win; in return, you expect them to have your back and support you in the game. Though this might not apply to everyone, the support provided to the player doesn’t necessarily need to be monetary, but could be as simple as a sense of belonging and protection.
3. The “Warm Glow” Effect — Helping your alliance win activates the brain’s reward center, which releases dopamine. This makes you feel good whenever you contribute to the alliance.

Therefore, this game leverages emotional attachment to increase spending amongst players, turning an individual’s spending action into a group benefit. This transforms spending into a socially rewarded behaviour.

Scarcity Principle

Most events and offers last for a limited amount of time, creating an urgency amongst players. Along with that, the game is designed in such a way that it can take over a month sometimes for upgrades to be finished, all while there is a race to power and finishing in-game missions to become the best and most powerful player in the kingdom faster.

Loss Aversion

People tend to feel losses much worse compared to the how the joy if they gained the same amount. This mismatch is called loss aversion. The fear of falling behind your peers and rivals is felt more than the joy of actually winning. Along with that, a race to increase power creates anxiety-inducing fear of missing out (FOMO).

Zeigarnik Effect

People hate unfinished tasks, and leaving an upgrade running for weeks or a month can keep your mind constantly on it. Making them feel responsible for the update quickly.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Some people keep on playing the game just to get their money’s worth. Say a player bought a monthly pass, they might continue playing just to get the daily rewards. This keeps them engaged with the game, making them stay for longer periods, creating an opportunity for players to change their minds. Along with that, the players who have spent tens of thousands of dollars often stay because of the sheer amount of money spent on the game already. But they end up spending money in-game either for fun or to stay competitive. A player said, “This game is a black hole” because no matter how much money you spend in-game, it is never enough.

Result

Kingshot reached user spending of $1 Billion in just 13 months. It didn’t do it accidentally.

AppMagic infographic showing Kingshot reaching $1 billion in user spending, $605 million revenue, 82 million downloads, and top markets including the US, South Korea, and Japan.

[embed]Kingshot Surpasses $1B in User Spending | AppMagic posted on the topic | LinkedIn Kingshot Reached $1B in User Spending 👑 Century Games’ Kingshot, a mobile 4X strategy title blending tower defense and…www.linkedin.com

Kingshot understood human behaviour and leveraged it to create a game that keeps people spending money in game.

And it is not just Kingshot; other games like Whiteout Survival and Rise of Kingdoms are also using this strategy to generate colossal revenues. It is impossible not to admire the architectural complexity of these gaming ecosystems from a business and behavioural economics point of view.

But it is important to know the psychology the game uses to make people buy in-game resources, so that you can spend responsibly and within your means to protect yourself while playing these games.

There is nothing wrong with spending money on a game you enjoy. The problem starts when it becomes an unintentional automatic habit rather than an intentional rational choice.

The goal is not to stop playing. The goal is to understand the game well enough that every purchase becomes an intentional conscious choice because once you recognise how the game is built, you can play it on your own terms rather than being influenced by the behavioural tendencies induced by the game design.