The game rewards you for turning up every day and nags you when you don't.
Small daily rewards build a habit of logging in, which is fine until a missed day starts to feel like a penalty, or the progress you would lose makes it hard to stop.
Nothing directly. The daily task or login reward costs you attention rather than money, and a streak makes that attention feel like something you could lose. The habit it builds is what the game earns from, through ads, shop visits and the next purchase.
A daily reward pays you for logging in, and a streak raises the reward the longer you keep it going. Miss a day and the streak resets to zero, or progress decays: FarmVille's crops wilted on a real clock, and other games let what you have built fade while you are away. The pull is less the reward than the loss, because the more days, gear or characters you have put in, the harder it is to walk away. That sunk-cost pull is old: the arcade continue countdown (insert a coin within about ten seconds or lose your run) charged you to keep your progress, and subscription worlds built on daily quest hubs and weekly raid lockouts (big group challenges you can only attempt once a week) made quitting mean leaving your gear and guild behind. Some games now sell protection for what you have built, such as a paid continue. Battle passes tuned daily and weekly challenges to get you back before the pass expired.
When the daily task takes minutes, a missed day costs nothing, and the rewards are small extras. Normal progression in a game you enjoy is also fine, as long as nothing is charged to protect it.
Daily quest hubs and weekly raid lockouts were part of the design of subscription MMOs (massively multiplayer online games, large shared online worlds) such as Ultima Online (1997) and World of Warcraft (2004), and players in those worlds found that quitting meant leaving their gear, guild and characters behind. Older still, the arcade continue countdown is often traced to SNK's Fantasy (1981) and stayed rare until Atari's Gauntlet (1985); it is the ancestor of 'watch an ad or pay to keep going' on mobile. FarmVille (19 June 2009) put wilting crops on a real clock. The battle pass (Fortnite, December 2017) added daily and weekly challenges as the way to earn the pass back. Even pay-once games can use the pull: the 'just one more turn' habit became a signature of Civilization. By the live-service era, players were 'maintaining' games: dailies logged, a season raced before it expires.
The 2026 criteria of PEGI, Europe's age-rating system, add a 'pressure to play' descriptor for games that punish you for not returning, and Germany's USK has flagged 'pressure to play a lot' since 2023.
Historical prices and revenues are in US dollars at the time unless marked A$.
The 'continue' countdown is often traced to SNK's Fantasy (1981), one of the earliest known examples, and stayed rare until Atari's Gauntlet (1985).
The 'just one more turn' compulsion became such a signature of Civilization that later entries put the phrase in the game.
Covered in Video Games & Money: Ep 16 · Sub mmo, Ep 28 · Battle pass, Ep 29 · Live service, Ep 4 · Arcade golden, Ep 6 · Early pc.