Kim Kardashian’s New Money Maker

The hit mobile game of the last month has a familiar face behind it. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is an adventure game for IOS and Android that lets players create their own celebrity and interact with the titular reality show star, her friends, and her frenemies.

Following its release on the 25th of June, the game has quickly risen to become the third most popular free app in Apple’s store and on Android. Although the game is free to download, the company that made it, Glu Mobile Inc. stands to make a mint due to in-app purchases that players are making (one player reported spending nearly $500 in just a few days). It is projected that the game could make up to $200 million annually from advertising and in-app purchase revenue.

Due to all the hype surrounding it I decided to give it a go. I’ll admit I went into it rather sceptical; I am an extremely casual gamer at best (despite having a game illustrator boyfriend), I find Kim Kardashian abhorrent as well as having absolutely no desire to be a celebrity (even an imaginary one). So with that I downloaded the game and started playing. Whilst the initial game-play was fine; even quite fun at times, fighting with ‘celebrities’ and outfitting your character with better clothes. I did find that the game was quite unresponsive at times, lagged and chewed through a lot of space on my phone. But my biggest complaint was in the end was the advertisements that would pop up at terrible times like when you needed to tap the screen to collect awards, and you’d then be redirected away from the game to purchase another app. All in all this money-maker is not worth the hype.