It boggles my mind how valuable advertising is. Who is clicking on that shit and presumably buying those products? I just cannot believe that there were actually $100k/day worth of actual ad conversions, no matter the player count. Yet the money flows so I guess people really do click on that shit and then buy that shit.

Kids love ads, and that game was full of kids.

When I say love, I mean genuinely seek them out. When I was younger, there was no internet in my house, and adverts were the opportunity to step away from the TV and do something else. But I worked as a babysitter in December a few years ago and things have certainly changed a lot.

They would turn on the TV just to watch ads to "find out what I want for Christmas" then turn it off again when the advertising finished and ask for Netflix. When playing games on an iPad or laptop, they would click every ad to open it in a new tab, meaning they could browse products after they were done playing.

The first couple of times I told the kids not to do that, and reported back to the parents after. But turns out most parents liked this behaviour...it made Christmas shopping easier, because their kids would make a list of cheaper things aimed at them, rather than all asking for expensive iPads and PlayStations.

I have to agree $100k/day seems close to unbelievably high, so I had to do some napkin math. In short, it seems it may be possible.

If the avg player dies 10 times, and the ads shown had $.5 CPM, then to make a dollar you'd need only 200 players. So to make $100k/day you'd need 20M daily actives, which is very high but it was really popular around those days.

Is 20M daily actives possible? Yes, because if the average play session is 15 minutes, with that many players you'd have ~200k concurrent players. There's currently a game on Steam called "banana" where you just click on bananas, and that one has 292k concurrents. There are also several Roblox games with that many concurrents, so it checks out.