Game of War: Fire Age is a 2013 freemium mobile massively multiplayer online strategy video game developed and published by Machine Zone. The game had a high-profile advertising campaign and was one of the top-grossing apps in 2014 and 2015.
Gameplay
Game of War: Fire Age includes player vs. player battles, player vs. environment modes (monster killing and dungeons), and city building and event quests. Gathering or farming of resources is required to create buildings, produce troops, and research advancements. Similar to other mobile games, much of the gameplay consists of selecting an action and then either waiting a preset amount of time for completion or expediting the task by making a payment. Gameplay in Game of War has no defined end; long-term players continue to grow indefinitely, attacking other players and avoiding significant losses.
The title places an emphasis on each player joining an alliance. Alliances are each limited to 100 players, and are situated within kingdoms measuring 512 by 512 tiles, plotted on a 512 × 1024 staggered isometric map. Alliances provide a team structure to conflicts within each kingdom. After a kingdom has been active for several months, the kingdom emerges from a protected status and players begin to engage in kingdom vs. kingdom combat events, which are periodically scheduled by the developer.
Players are encouraged to engage with one another through alliance chat and kingdom chat. The game's chat system includes translation services that allow players from all over the world to play together. The game's translation of player-to-player chat and email messages is powered by services from Microsoft and Google. The automated translator supports 30 or more languages, and includes user-supported suggestions for translation corrections. Messages that cannot be automatically translated are reviewed by players who volunteer to correct spelling and grammar, or approve corrections made by others, after which the automatic translation is attempted again.
Business and marketing
Machine Zone, the game's developer, was described by its CEO as "probably the world's largest direct response marketer and largest single product marketer on mobile," with 200 employees in marketing, out of about 550 employees worldwide .
Approximately $40 million was spent on marketing Game of War: Fire Age in 2014. Along with advertisements in digital and social media, highly produced television commercials featuring model Kate Upton were created. The ads made use of Upton's sex appeal to promote the game as she leads battles in fantasy settings loosely comparable to those in Game of Thrones. The spots were introduced in the United States during an NFL Thursday Night Football game and have since been prominent during Super Bowl XLIX and other sporting events. Upton was replaced in 2015 by singer Mariah Carey as the face of the game's advertising campaign, and the first commercial with Carey was revealed on September 14, 2015.
Reception
Game of War: Fire Age was the third-grossing game app through Apple in 2014, and it was reported that Machine Zone projected $600 million in revenues that year. In March 2015, it was in the top 10 most downloaded free apps on both the iOS Appstore and Google Play. As of August 2018, the game has grossed in total.
The game and its user interface have been criticized for an aggressive style that "heavily pushes" in-app purchases, "littering the screen with ads and upgrade buttons" for gold packs priced from $5 to $100. A reviewer in Forbes wrote, "From its overall design to how it handles cash purchases, Game of War is the most over-the-top cash grab I've ever seen." Similarly, Macworlds reviewer stated that "Game of War may be the most aggressively monetized free-to-play game I've ever played."
Reviewers have also been highly critical of the title's "mundane" gameplay, which Common Sense Media called "light on both action and strategy." For example, unless a player's alliance is actively at war, "the core gameplay revolves around waiting for your task timers to finish and then queuing up new ones. Even the daily and Alliance quests just ask you to tap something and come back later to collect your reward." Macworld wrote that the game "doesn't bother with interesting gameplay or any semblance of storyline – it's all 'build this' and 'train them,' but the reward is simply more and more busywork."