Kim Kardashian: Hollywood

~ the obituary ~

In the summer of 2014 i was thirty, writing code in ankara, and the top of the revenue chart on both app stores was a game about becoming famous. i did not play it and it was not built for me. What i did do, like most people working in software that year, was read the numbers, because the numbers were the story and they were ridiculous.

Kim Kardashian: Hollywood arrived on 24 june 2014 for ios and android, published by Glu Mobile. You started on the e-list as a nobody folding clothes in a shop and worked upward by booking modeling jobs and going on dates that doubled as career moves. Every action spent energy. Energy refilled on a timer, or immediately if you spent K-stars, and K-stars cost real money. Kardashian appeared throughout as herself, a mentor inside a simulation of the industry she actually worked in.

It took $1.6 million in its first five days. By the end of the first quarter it had 22.8 million players and $43.4 million in revenue, and people had put 5.7 billion minutes into it. Glu later gave the two-year figures as 145 million downloads and $160 million. Kardashian's share was reported in the press at close to half, and this game is a large part of why she turned up on celebrity earnings lists that year for something other than television.

~ the case file ~

~ the money ~

The reason this matters to people who do not care about it is that it settled an argument. Before 2014 a celebrity mobile game was understood as merchandise, a licensed skin over a template, sold on the name for a month. Glu's ceo Niccolo De Masi has described approaching Kardashian in early 2013 with roughly that logic, to reuse engines and add popular appeal, and then spending eighteen months on it with her reviewing every build from alpha through gold master.

What shipped was not merchandise. It was a working free-to-play economy about status, in which the fantasy being sold and the mechanic being sold were the same thing, since what you spend money on is looking better than the other people in the room. Critics were unmoved and it sits at 57 on Metacritic. Polygon still named it the 86th best game of the decade.

~ the slide ~

Games like this decay on a schedule. The first year brought $120 million and later quarters were down to single-digit millions, which is an ordinary curve for the genre and would have been survivable for a game the publisher owned outright. Glu did not own this one outright. A deal paying out close to half of gross is comfortable while gross is enormous and impossible once it is not, and in 2021 Electronic Arts bought Glu for $2.1 billion, which put that contract in front of a much larger company with much less patience for it.

~ the postmortem ~

On 3 january 2024 Glu posted to the game's own forums that in-app purchases were off immediately and the game had already been pulled from both stores. Anyone with it installed could keep playing on the currency they had until 8 april 2024, when the servers went off and the app stopped opening. Kardashian's line was "I'm so grateful from the bottom of my heart to everyone who has loved and played Kim Kardashian: Hollywood in the past 10 years."

Ten years is a long run for a mobile game and an eternity for a celebrity one. What ended with it was every wardrobe and every a-list ranking that 145 million downloads worth of players had assembled, none of which existed anywhere except on a server owned by a company that had been bought by another company.

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