Clash of Clans Proves That Our Impatience Is Worth Billions

Tiny cartoonish characters mill around a cartoon village on a player's phone screen, building cute little armies that they let loose on enemy camps. Often, just when things are going really great for the clan, resources run out; then players have to wait a few hours while the game slowly regenerates gold and elixir, or they can spend four dollars and ninety-nine cents to buy in-game currency and keep playing right away. Since most of us are impatient, Supercell, the company that makes Clash of Clans, has done quite nicely. Those real-money-for-virtual-stuff purchases, or micro-transactions, contributed to the company's 2.3 billion dollars in sales in 2015. This week, the China-based company Tencent Holdings paid 8.6 billion dollars for a controlling stake in Supercell, and therefore a stake in our need for instant gratification.