Disney Sorcerers Arena Mobile Game by Glu Mobile | Soft Launch Review

[Music] everybody we're gonna kick off a new series where we review games and soft launch and review these games for their long-term potential the first game we're going to start off with is Glu's Disney Sorcerer's Arena which is in soft-launched and Denmark Singapore Australia and a few other countries this is basically an RPG battler very reminiscent of the classic here is charge but more similar to games like Marvel contest of Champions and Star Wars Galaxies appear as more recently in terms of checking out the gameplay you can see that this is the main screen which is very similar to here's charge map based system and it's very similar to mana costs of contents of champions and from met assistances design it has

the most similarities with those games for like from a core gameplay perspective what you're going to see is that the core gameplay has the most amount of innovation in terms of what they've tried to do with the game so as you can see from the screen below essentially the system that they use is something like trying to integrate clash royale into the battle system so it's not turn-based its real-time you have cards that basically are are bit are the spells and then when you have enough mana you choose what spell to cast also there is this notion of grids and kind of Lane based battles so these three lanes with different grids and so there is a little bit of additional strategy with respect to you how you play your cards and where you play your cards so it's a little bit of additional strategy

that we'll talk about further in the video ahead please keep in mind that soft launch games are under constant change and can undergo very dramatic pivots so be ready for that however soft launch games are interesting to study for a few reasons one they can show you what actually doesn't work as features in the games that you see are kind of swapped out secondly you can kind of get a flavor for what's coming to the market soon and third you can get a sense for how different game companies optimize their games in terms of update cadence the type of experiments they run and how these companies reacted games under different types of performance final note that I want to mention is that it's actually very easy to be a critic especially if you're an unemployed youtuber such as myself but very difficult to launch a successful top-grossing game so I just want to highlight that while I have been

critical about glue in a recent podcast and here in this video you know the feedback that I give is actually trying to come from a place of good intentions trying to highlight issues and problems so that they're not repeated in the future also that crowd star team at Glu are a bunch of superstars if those guys ever gave a talk I would be there taking notes those guys are fantastic and you know certainly a guy like me has a lot to learn from from Glu and so while I am critical again in this video please remember it's coming from a place of good intentions and with that let's go in this video series I'm joined by Jeff wit and Joel Joel Coonan exa Joel did I pronounce your last name correctly that those great pronunciation okay and today we're gonna cover Disney Sorcerer's Arena which has been in soft lines for a little bit but I wanted to start off

first by talking about your high-level thoughts in terms of the game Jeff and Joel what do you guys think this seems like kind of like a kitchen sink of a game with so many different things from different types of RPGs thrown together I mean that's problematic on itself but really what just gets me is just terrible early game balancing that even if a player really likes the game it's gonna be hard for them to really like dive into it and I think it poses a lot of long-term challenges as well right Joel what'd you think yeah I gotta kind of agree I also see the balancing is a big big issue first time user experience might be a bit too complex for let's say casual audience who might be kind of drawn into the game because the IP and that's another big big thing I CSS problem because there's

the casual Disney IP but then we have a kind of meet core more complex meta game in the game and that's that's usually a bad thing when you have been there's kind of mismatch between the IP and and I'm the game mechanics right and that from my own take as well I completely agree with you Joel I think that the game as it is probably cannot succeed at all there's a you know to your point there's a complete mismatch in terms of the gameplay systems and audience and also just feel that you know be overly complicated a lot of stuff especially given their audience and also just the production value to me just wasn't very high it seems like I don't know if they outsource to you know an art studio in a lower-cost country but it just didn't seem to have like the quality that I would expect given the pedigree of that that that team and then glue had their earnings call and they said they were also delaying the long and I think that pretty much shows in the current game so I also wanted to

just show folks in terms of like what we're seeing from from a financial perspective and the performance of the game when we look at sensor tower you know in the game is in soft lines so it's not going to be launched into every country but we can see that in the countries that it is launched if you see my screen that looks like most of the downloads are in Australia and that the game actually is not generating very much in terms of downloads or or revenue the other thing that you can kind of see when we look at the soft launch data is that the game into in terms of downloads it doesn't seem like they are pushing very very many installs at all so if I switch to a daily view here you can see that there seem to have been one two three four maybe five pushes but when they did push traffic they didn't

push very much traffic and generally what that means is that when you're not pushing a lot of traffic you're trying to make big changes because in order to detect to detect us or in order to put have enough installs to see a difference you need to have if you're working on small things you need to push a lot of traffic traffic to get to statistical significance or to you know detect a change and so it does seem like based on these pushes that they're actually swinging for really really big changes just given a low volume of traffic and then from a revenue per download perspective if we look at that one of the other things I think that they need to be concerned with is just the the revenue that they're generating in the various countries and now certainly in different countries the revenue per download is going to be lower but it's it's definitely not very high when we compared to like revenue per download

for like let's say a normal contest champions if you were to take some of their countries like like Australian Denmark at 52 cents and 29 cents when we compared to you know Australia for normal contest champion this $12.57 and things like that and certainly like the revenue per download increase should increase over time but even having said that you know it's pretty low for the level that that it's at currently and even for you know compared to the other game and I'm comparing to Marvel contest of Champions and Star Wars Galaxies of Heroes because clearly there's been a lot of inspiration in the game from a systems perspective from from those two games the other thing that I wanted to point out is just looking at the audience and so when we look at Disney for example we can see that a big majority of a on it sixty-three percent are women based on Facebook and based on and we have to be a little bit careful because Facebook

only tracks users over 18 but we can see a an audience that skews highly female and then when we look at the page lengths of that audience that like Disney we can see it's kind of a very middle America kind of you know soccer mom you know soccer dad type type of audience you know they like baskin-robbins they like Ikea they like Olive Garden Gerber a lot of parents old maybe Betty Crocker they like to cook and you know these this audience you can tell are very general sort of casual middle America type of audience and when we and these are the top countries but when we compare to like some of the games that they're influenced by my contest of Champions we see that you know contest 71% male based on Facebook data in that the audience here you know they're highly gaming focused and you see they're you know they like Madden they like NFL Network they like

Marvel and Marvel related properties in the top affinity would be thanks to like Assassin's Creed Marvel comic books things like that so very core hardcore audience and when we look at Star Wars Galaxies heroes it's even actually stronger where it's like 91% male and again we see a similar sort of demographic in terms of audience that really really skews towards you know really liking that specific IP so a lot of the page likes from a category and a piece likes perspective is really focused on Star Wars so they're an audience that loves the brand and that will pay for Star Wars characters is opposed to like this you know highly female audience that that's really about my Betty Crocker sonic drive-in Baskin Robbins and things like that and so from an audience perspective I think that that's one of the big misses as both as

we had mentioned is that you know the gameplay from a systems and from a systems design perspective from a gameplay perspective is really keeping to our much hardcore audience which i think is just a complete mismatch and so with that I also wanted to hand it over to you Joel and Joel maybe you can also just introduce yourself a little bit so I would probably should have started with that and then talk about the game refinery power score and kind of how you guys have scored you know Disney source force arena and I'll stop share so that you can share your screen if you liked you yeah thanks Joe yeah yeah I'm Joel I'm from gamer finally one of the founders I'm leading our analytics department oh there what it means in practice is that basically what we gain before it does is we are analytics kind of services data provider for the markets but we are different from let's say since dollar a penny in in the way that we focus more on the kind of feature level made up of games so we track over 200 features from objectively

from from all of the games and I'm in a couple of years that we have done that we have gathered a huge database of games but also the feature sets or the DNA's of each DNS those games and that then allows us to do a lot of data data crunching and and what we have created we have our own KPI that we call the power score like actually now share that share the screen I want to slide it over here so the power score it is actually an objective kind of dynamic effect based indicator of the th assets commercial potential and well now we are talking of the distance or zarina this is actually a great example case because what the power score doesn't includes it doesn't include any kind of subjective of or kind of let's say implementation stuff or or or or then marketing in the u.s. absolutely about the blueprint of the game the feature said that's the game have the bits of PCs that are trending in the given genre

but the game belongs so it doesn't tell us if your game is good or bad but it tells us if the TV set is solid so this is sources arena and scores I mean really high high scoring so it's it's into ninety ninety range but big part of that comes actually from the brand or IP power we use Google Trends trends based algorithms to kind of measure the hotness of the brand and that's get included to the score if you remove that from from the source of the arena they'd be around 70 75 eight range which is still good but having said that it's only this one of these three areas only this one one apart the feature sets but the implementation part is the one that I see SS one of the biggest shortcomings and I'm up again okay and maybe we can also just you know I mean so Disney's Russia's arena we all said is kind of

not a great game and probably not on a path to success but what about some of the good parts of the game maybe we could start there were there things about the game that you guys liked and maybe starting starting with you Jeff if anything no I mean I when I first played I got really excited you know with the potential for their character development Disney just has such a huge stock of characters that you know can resume with players who are into the Disney brand and you know from an RPG perspective that is something very valuable like a lot of RPGs struggle I feel to like have a lot of characters that players can care about so I do feel like Disney hasn't abandoned from that from the start and then you know given you know they clearly built a game with guild play in mind which offers a lot of

long-term possibilities you know and it it seems promising when I first started to play it for sure so that there are definitely some good parts to it but just like Joel said like you know implementation is so important balancing is so important that's not done right then it doesn't matter how good a game I said itself up for if you know these things proved to be problematic right and John what about you you are there any parts of the games that that you thought were we're good yeah actually I hundred percent that great chips those were my exact first first expression just well when I when I start playing the game on paper the game's features it's really compatible and that's coming back to the power score at the feed ship if you think about mid core and tactical benders RPGs you have you have your

deals you have your coops you have different kind of you have both synchronization cross PvP they'll be daily upon mechanics you already have those live event rotations in place and as we mentioned so many times I'm Jeff chat pointed out and I highlight the fact that this is the IP or paper in theory also it's a really good IP for these kind of character collection games because like Jeff said it as huge roster of characters you can use them now you can build on that they are probably coming own a lot of this new movies coming so you can you can expand do either even even versions of the characters but then then that's that's the the good things so on paper pitch by pitch wise mother potential but then well let's stick with the good now and I'm talk about this other stuff a bit later but that's the good things okay alright and for me I you know I kind of felt the only good thing that I saw was

their attempt to try and innovate in terms of the gameplay but then I felt it was just a bad mismatch for their audience and more complicated than you know other more core games focused on a karate and so I thought that wasn't yeah anyway I should be more focused on the goodbye I would say that I like the attempt by the team to try and you know mix up the gameplay and then in terms of the bad what do you guys think maybe starting with you Jeff what are some of the key weaknesses are false with the game well since you know I mainly focus in economy I was just shocked at how bad the early game is balanced you know trying to like improve my characters to progress along the different PvE tracks for the amounts of energy and farming

I'm doing I'm gaining levels as if I'm already in the elder game and everything is slowed down like you know their times for life I will just pump all my energy from both heroes and villains and the special PvE into just grinding for you know potions and and and item inputs and that barely makes any of my characters stronger I think there's an instance we're living about the character only gives it three health like this is so bad when you're trying to get deep into a game to get hit such a uphill climb within the first 15 20 minutes of playing and that by itself was shocking also you know I like you said Joseph I I agree that like using the class RAL sort of gameplay style and PD is super

interesting the problem is that with different characters as you're trying them out like and given the time pressure of like using the different cards as as you're trying to manage your mana and attacking enemies having those cards change with every different character composition makes it really hard to understand like how good a certain character is and that's gonna be very jarring for even an experienced clash royale player because in clicking on clash Royale like you're using you know you know when you use a card like the set of cards that you know you're gonna be using is a lot smaller and you're gonna more easily become knowledgeable about them but when each character in in Disney Sorcerer's Arena has their own set of cards and those are changing as they're swapping out different characters it's gonna make it much more difficult for a player to

understand what these different cards do and even that's for a veteran clash Royale player and like you said with the audience mismatch I can't see casual players really understanding or picking up the game very easily right and then to that point about the cards and the gameplay for me it almost felt like active skills anyway because the rotation is pretty much you know because there aren't that many cards the rotation felt very similar so I I didn't you know it didn't feel like the the strategic depth that they were going for it didn't feel like it was there and you might as well have just had active here in my opinion because you know it just kept on the same sort of a cycle and at least from when you're using the same roster of characters at least from my perspective yeah pretty much and then did you have any thoughts in terms of like the balancing of the cards because it did feel to me also that even the card balancing or this you know spell balancing was a little bit off where that meteor thing was just like

one-shot kill and then and then more you know other cards that cost more had very little on the enemies I yeah I mean I quickly learned like some cards were definitely better than others but besides you know card balancing there's also you know they make it a point to have a positioning of the cards be you know be important and some cards I felt like it looked like it should be affecting multiple enemies because of how I'm dragging in stuff like that but would still only hit one in me like it was there unclear how some cards interacted with the board and with other enemies and that's something you just have to learn by playing which again in the early game is gonna be hard for players to pick up when they're trying to pick up all this other stuff right Joel what do you think yeah I I gotta fact divided my the bad points into two

different sections the one actually touches the core gameplay what you guys already talked about the mix of kind of clash royale recharging when I energy starter stuff seeing battle or tactical grid and then making it sideways the thing is that how it plays out here it's like you sure you said that they have tried to do something new kind of a new way of clash royale core gameplay but in clash Royale the cool thing is that because the because the area that you and deploying your troops in playing the card is it's kind of a much more flexible and big in terms of what you can do over there and there are a lot more tactical def - it's here you just you have your characters and you used to you use your your skills and it always becomes kind of like a sluggish grind both sides clash in the middle of the we agreed and then you have your healers in the back Y times on the front and it doesn't seem at least in my experience

didn't have that kind of fact I call it the rock-paper-scissors balancing clash Royale has it okay I have these cars this work well against those diction and meta violence or the odd kind of so the balancing in clash Royale is kind of top notch and it's allows for rich gonna dick MIT ought to be built in the game and it gives the game exciting and fresh and anything can happen and it's quick paced and and there are always such tactical things that you can do and in my opinion this game kind of lacks all those because of the pacing being so slow and and like I said all of the action is happening in the center of the screen so you're not kind of fact doing that kind of tactical maneuvers so that's that's the kind of why I myself didn't like the core gameplay after a couple of minutes of trying it out so that's that's one thing and the then the other I would say even a bigger one is that we all that share

is the is the meta problem I'm just talking about the misfit of the casual Disney IP and then they clearly meet core meta game more complex meta game elements so if you think about it the casual audiences or people kind of are more likely to atrophy attract each unit this new IP will most probably be struggling getting their head like Jeff said about the how the cards work how to improve your cards and then grinding for a couple of hours and getting 20% more health or something like that it's a bit stuffed first time user experience confusing ui/ux so that's not the problem for the casual audience it's many if you think about the medical audiences who are used to these kind of mechanics I like to consider myself one of the one of those players and for me the IP is more of a kind of thing that pushes me away from the game so if I

collect them some characters from Disney franchise and there's nothing nothing wrong with the beast in French yes of course but myself I'm I'm more got an emotional attachment to let's say Marvel characters like if I if I have a Iron Man collected or spider-man than some some cartoon character from some new beast movie that I don't kind of I'm not too familiar with so that's the kind of the big one second second I would say the shortcoming the IP guys will I be midcourt they find a mismatch right just to you know from from my perspective yeah I think now fundamentally is the biggest problem with the game is that the gameplay and meta mismatch so they've got a mismatch in terms of the gameplay in that it's way too complicated for a casual audience it's not even balanced well and it's not super fun but you know for that audience and remember that audience are have high affinity with Ikea with Betty Crocker not with my comic books and Marvel and

Star Wars and we're making you know or they're making this game a lot more complicated in both in terms of the gameplay as well as the systems and so when we look at the the systems and you know the the UI for example you know it's it's it's really complicated relative to other games are relative to even like a PDP battle game like clash royale which has which is a lot simpler a lot easier and understand and has a much tighter core loop and so if we think about the complexity of the systems for this you know I'll just call Betty Crocker highly email and soccer mom audience it's just like wow you know it's it's really bizarre because this game has so much influence for Marvel contest of Champions from you know and you can tell but that the way that they've done the UI the way that they've laid out their at their PvE sort of saga map it borrows so heavily from the this those systems from very very hardcore

games Star Wars Galaxies errs Marvel causes champions and yeah it's just really bizarre it's like a team that just completely disregarded their the audience did not try to understanding on it and was just really trying to force fit hey we love Marvel contest of Champions we love Star Wars Galaxies tears and we're just gonna we're just gonna force this stuff into this game regardless of what makes sense or not and even like you know the the UI in terms of the number of tabs and just all this kind of stuff and just even like you don't like the colors like everything kind of blends together nothing really pops out you know I think that even from an execution perspective the art style the UI UX it's just kind of it's it's just sloppy and then also from a sales and merchandising perspective you can see here is that for this casual you know highly female soccer mom IKEA audience you've got like these you know pretty high price points I would say like they

should be starting with much lower price price points what about audience just to get them in in terms of that initial things that they're seeing in store and even the stuff that they see in store you know it's like it's not obvious you know for example like here there's actually like a 10x value in terms of these packages but it's very unclear it's not really clear what you get whereas you know with clash Royale for example it's very clear that you're getting like a x 5 x 3 x 4 type of value on on what you're buying and then Jeff did you have this here do you want to make a point on this yeah I mean they say it's 10x value but it really doesn't feel like that if you look at like what is involved in the pack again like you know playing the early game I was just shocked at like how little you get when you're actually engaging in PvE like I would spend you know a full energy bar more than the

full energy bar to just grind pee because I want to make my character stronger and a whole energy bar would maybe give me enough potion to upgrade a character from level 12 to 14 which seems just so grindy so early and so you look at like what they're offering and yeah I may look good but once you understand how hard it is to make your character stronger you realize that okay even if I buy this and get this new character I still have to level that character up and it's so hard to do that so there early balance is making these sales less this desirable for someone who's chosen to stick with the game the long term but you know from a presentation point of view they don't do this really a great job in showing everything you get like you know you have to go to sell to see everything and I yeah

they're showing the percent chance but like that whole layout is really kind of weird and and yeah it's just it's not very well done and to your point Joseph like the game's not very anchored because you have about 15 or 20 different places where you could buy stuff and it's hard to know what the exact value is yeah where is in class rel likes shown here like there's relatively few things you could buy so when you see a offer like this that packages these things and a much better presentation the value the perspective value to the player is much more clear right and I think that's a really great point and by the way you know you're the one that taught me that concept in terms of the price anchoring in store but for them to like show a specific SKU that that's clearly much more valuable than something else to kind of push players towards that that's the cific skewer for it for a specific segment of your audience and so

yeah I think everything just seems muddled unclear and it's for me it's just a total mess yep and then do you want to talk about this yeah just just like I said like you know when you look at like you know if you play Star Wars Galaxies if heroes or other RPGs like part of the game as you get into is just really grinding for you know character shards xp items equipment stuff like that and it will involve you spending like a ton of energy to auto-complete and get a lot of stuff and you know in the early game like Weiss the rewards you get for what you do should be you know kind of you know it should be satisfied it should be fast firing the players so like in this case like I said like I'm dumping all my

energy to just grind hoping to make my character stronger I come back with you know this is what it shows me you know some player XP Gold potion jarick equipped items which I already have 70 of because I've equipped all the ones I can and they're useless now until I get more characters and I get enough potion to barely increase this character's level from 12 to 14 or 1113 which only gives me 20 more health like it's there's no satisfaction to leveling up a character because they rarely get stronger in a meaningful way it's just so utilizing and then like I said like you know for if you're Disney fan and suddenly you know you see one of your favorite characters for sale this type of imbalance may prevent me from purchasing it because even if I get that character I know it's it's gonna take a

while before I could use them because it takes so long to bring that character up to where about all my other characters it's just this is the kind of balance I would expect when I'm level 60 or 70 in an RPG not when I'm level like 10 or 15 and I think you know lots of problems with the game but this is definitely one of the bigger ones I'd be I feel like and so with that let's go to a scorecard and so let's say out of 10 you know how would you read this this game one at a 10-10 in terms of prospects to be a successful game in a heart launch and for me I'm gonna give this a 2 out of 10 and the reason is as we had talked about before just the complete mismatch gameplay and Menace system to the audience I felt the production values for a Disney IP we're kind of low and I so felt that the ui/ux was kind of a mess and that the sales of merchandising was just completely off Joel what score what

score would you get um something similar I would maybe put it on for for chorus something like that and then I would say that of course what we talked about having success in a and a glue is a big company of course they import higher position so in that in mind don't see that happening with this title and one big thing that many of the problems that we see in this game or something that are not easy some of them can be of course the the balancing that can be fixed but some of the other stuff like the IPM is matched the core model makes mismatch that is something that it's not easily reversed or fixed and that's if you think about the game has been a soft launch what one yeah many other big titles were like Perl stars that person so close for a long time very bit of a couple of overhauls and it's it's a sexual game but with this one I can't see that happening because of the couple of the

really big ones that we discussed what's pressing here is that feature wise this game already has many of the features that these kind of games usually roll out the game I mean kind of in hard loves blubber launch after months after testing after balancing and that kind of leaves me with the kind of a feeling that maybe it might be wise we're just gonna spend more time balancing and I'm thinking this thing's true before slapping all the features on top of the foundation of the game just because let's say condos champions Galactic Heroes or they also have those so we should have those and yeah yeah I think that really speaks to you I mean this all kind of smacks of a pre-production breakdown right like in pre-production you know I don't think they quite figured out what they needed to know there was probably a lot of pressure they were kind of rushing you know with IPS there's always time pressure and things like that I it feels like that's probably what happened and then the developer I think the the lead developer

previously worked on Star Wars Galaxies of years and so they're the problem that team is probably drawing from stuff they did in the past and it's just like rush rush rush and you know this kind of problem happens a lot that unfortunately leads to big big problems okay Jeff what what's your score um I probably go with a I'll go with the floor as well despite all the problems with the game they've set themselves for a pretty deep economy I mean they can if they do if they do future features right and like we said before you know they've they've already you know have guilds guild stuff in place and you know it's conceivable that even with the audience mismatch and even if say you know retention slower and whatnot you can still imagine that if they get players who are who do like the game who made trend may be a bit more hardcore

that they could pump out a lot more money per those players so there is some you know I think potential but um I wouldn't necessarily bet that they're gonna succeed got it okay well there we have it our first soft-launched review of disney sorceress arena unfortunately this game in particular doesn't look like it's scoring very highly but you know just you know not not to be tuning they're gonna have been in like too harsh on that team I mean I really feel for those guys because you know making games is always really tough and you know it seems like that there were a lot of good intentions as we mentioned before in terms of trying to get the you know trying to innovate comes of the core gameplay and not just do another clone so you know definitely wish that team luck if I were them you know my recommendation would probably be a hard pivot or or to kill rather than

trying to continue down this current path which doesn't mean I mean it's just it doesn't seem like it's a good path but besides that any other final thoughts from from you guys Joel or Geoff oh yeah well I hope I hope that they if they decide to continue I hope that they kind of pay attention to the points raised here and of course I forgot to mention that even if we kind of highlighted the IP audience mechanics this match we have couple of examples like the hopeless Looney Tunes game screen rather well it's not in the top 50 or so but it's it's it's kind of also maximum I kind of mix into this kind of casual IP with RPG kind of fact mechanics but so there is a chess that very sort of potential so I hope hope all the best but uh yeah yeah they happy

seems to be that yeah and maybe for our audience out there if there is a gaming soft lines that you want us to cover please comment on that below for me I you know begin that I kind of like bets and soft lunches is well escapes I actually think that they get out of it so actually good one so maybe we should come that next but that one actually looks pretty well executed like I'm very impressed but um anyway alright with that that's it thank you very much guys I do [Applause] [Music] [Music]