I don't own an ipad/tablet so C of C's is the first game of this type I have played. By time based I mean to progress in the game you either wait hours/days to upgrade some part of the game or you buy gems to speed this up(or get rid of the time restraints completely). So is this a common way to do this on tablet games or is this a new model for making money. I am sure loads of mmo or other games use this model but then I don't know as I don't play tablet games and I doubt PC games have really adopted this way of selling their games.

Yes, very common, and it actually started from web browser games.

I don't know exactly who's first, but Travian is one of the early games to do this. Before cellphones were smartphones, before tablets existed the way they exist today, before Facebook got popular, web browser was the perfect platform to build this kind of games. You can access it from anywhere, from home, from work, from library, and play. Unlike the traditional PC games in which you have to install to a particular machine and play it only from there, logging into a web browser can be done from anywhere. So you can pick up your progress, that you started from home last night, at the office the following morning.

Then come Facebook, then Facebook games, then Farmville appears, then iPhone got popular, and we get to where we are today.

For mobile games yes, its extremely abused to milk money from users. Almost every mobile game that doesn't have an initial cost to install. I rather hate this model. It's like having a subscription to a game and causes most games to be "You better be rich and spend 500$ to win, or be a loser that only gets to enjoy 25% of the game and never gets to progress". I rather liked the old days of games when these types of games were called "demos" and the pay option was to buy the full game.

Nearly every freemium game is structured like this now, as far as I can tell. Clash of Clans is actually towards the less abusive end of the scale. Try Sim City to see a real disaster of it.

King Of Towers is another example of the absurd end of this.

Almost all FaceBook games have a timers of some sort

2 notable examples would be Candy Crush and Farmville ...

In more recent times, EA decided to abuse the #### out of timers with their Dungeon Keeper 3 game, were you have to wait up to 24 real life hours to mine one block ( or pay $ ) .

I have been thinking of adapting this model to my desktop casual game in a fashion.

Rather than charging to speed up time, provide daily power ups via a random event to encourage replay value.

i also plan to add new weekly levels.

of course, i dont really plan to charge for that as it is just a hook to keep the user base.

If you get something new often people will keep coming back.

Well that shows how out of touch I am with browser and tablet based games, or at least some of the revenue models they use! Only 10 years or so. I still live in the PC/console traditional games era and I don't use facebook(much).

It's a pretty sneaky approach in my opinion, and I am sure most of you will agree. It's borderline gambling mentality or at least it's somehow getting close to that area. It presents you with an ongoing temptation to purchase credits to further your status and ego. Moved away from traditional games, but then if you don't want to pay then you don't have to I suppose.

It's a pretty sneaky approach in my opinion, and I am sure most of you will agree. It's borderline gambling mentality or at least it's somehow getting close to that area. It presents you with an ongoing temptation to purchase credits to further your status and ego. Moved away from traditional games, but then if you don't want to pay then you don't have to I suppose.

See the South Park episode "Freemium Isn't Free". Unfortunately, http://southpark.cc.com/ doesn't have all of the full episodes available anymore, so its Hulu+ exclusive, but yeah, its exactly this, with the gambling analogy made explicit with Stan's grandpa, and an alcoholism analogy thrown in as a bonus with Randy.