How Build Away! integrates rewarded video ads

hello and welcome to pocket gamer. bus YouTube channel I'm John Jordan and this is build away so this is a an idle game we're looking at so you can see with idle games the whole point of them is they kind of play wrong use of the term I suppose but they operate while you're not playing them so every time you go back to these games this is one of the nice thing about idle games every time you Lo load one up it says wow something Big's been happening as you can see there's just the the number my 5.4 trillion gold waiting to be collected um the other thing about idle games is they tend not to monetize very heavily in terms of people spending money directly spending money on inapp purchases but they're very good um at uh monetizing in different ways so indirect way in this time um in this kind of point in the industry rewarded video ads are the big thing for indirect monetization and as you can see here I fired back in I've got now you see it's going up um but 5

trillion Golds double them up why wouldn't I want to double them up of course I want to double them up so double them up what do we get rewarded video ad Fairway uh solitire so um the rewarded video I add is I watch a video for typically another game but sometimes it could be a brand or something and my reward is I get something some currency in the game or some extra thing in the game that I'm playing that makes me me feel happy that makes me obviously more likely to choose to click on on the reward in the first place that makes the that means I'm more likely um to then go oh I had a nice experience I got some um currency that Fairway game looks really great let's go and play it now in this case I don't actually want to play it now but anyway I've Got My Rewards so there we go doubled my uh gold so I'm building away so let's go in and have a look at what build away looks like so as most idle games are it's not graphically um I mean looks very nice but it's not whizzing around this is the menu this is there not kind of a deeper gameplay mechanic happening the kind of gameplay for idle games is the meta game really

so as you can see we're building a city it's still fairly early stages so you start off with this little one here this little um kind of Caravan thing so every time I tap on this you can see I'm collecting gold so you can see I'm not collecting very much gold from this particular one because I've got 150 billion or B I suppose I suppose it is billion isn't it um um so I'm not gaining very much you can see it's going up all the time and you can see as you unlock new buildings so at the moment I can't unlock any other buildings I need 210 billion to unlock the next building so at the moment what I'm doing is I'm just these things are just like whizzing away um again we've seen how rewarded video ads work when I come back into the game and it doubles up what I've got there's also a rewarded video ad going on at the moment or the reward is still going on so if we get click on here so the ice cream delivery truck deliver is in progress I watched a short video ad so at the moment I've got um 6 hours worth so it's counting down from 6 hours I can extend it by another 2 hours

extend my delivery what should I do watch another video ad okay so see see how you see very quickly now how this um these this particular idle game and most idle games really get as many kind of video into as many Loops as possible to speed stuff up because the whole point about idle games is all about speeding up your rewards because when you got your rewards um then you can do stuff with them so you can see now that's that's added 2 hours so I can go up to 12 hours so effectively I can watch six video ads chain them all up and get those rewards so if I go here I'm kind of collecting up and now we can see I've got the um I can unlock the next uh building so let's click on that so there we go a cardboard factor is built um so now what other interaction is there in the game so there are a few little bits so there's this one here so this is the construction so says at the bottom invest in construction to improve your profits so this basically is on the timer for each building you get more um per kind of second or minute of of of

idle time so we can see for Mo for most of these other ones um they're on level three the one I've just unlocked is OB on level zero so I'm going to spend some of my currency now just hold that down and basically you know you just kind of use it all up um so I can spend a bit more on this one but you can see how currency us gets used up very quickly I mean that's why the term billion is a bit meaningless in this case but anyway um so that's construction there's another way of kind of speeding stuff up so there's the um Power so this doesn't speed up the kind of resource per second but it just speeds up how fast effectively how time how fast time works for each individual building so there's two different ways of using your currency um so we can see in most of these cases again there's um okay use some on this one so there's two separate things there and as you can see now the these things are just kind of whizzing around the little blue um circle around the circles you just got that's that's the cycle time for it to do its full upload so you can kind of see how there's this balance between how

fast it does that and how much you get per per per Revolution effectively there's this one here so there's you can invite friends I can add my friends U to a profit boost U what we got here there's um I can select a spot to raise a new building and get love okay um select a spot don't know how to do that um oh I see how much love have I got I've not got enough love okay I've only got 18 love so you get Love by um it's a resource you can kind of you get can gift it and and get it from friends and stuff so there's this briefcase idea as well so briefcases are a a kind of Ina purchase using in-game currency so the normal one I get three things so I got oh I got so got this building unlocked a blueprint I got some more resources and I got some more resources okay so there's obviously again there's some hard currency ones where I'm guaranteed rare blueprints rare and legy blue so we can see how the kind of the way the kind of um GAA system the GAA system is just um a randomized reward system um comes

from the Japanese where they've been using this kind of thing in free toplay games RPGs in particular for ages um so I can see there's different currencies but if I spend 180 um so it's going to cost me like $2 to get 200 to get that reward I'm not I'm guaranteed some red blue blue blueprints but I'm not guaranteed any specific things that's where the gaet comes in you're guaranteed a certain level so the Rarity but you're not guaranteed the actuality of getting something you might actually need so you might get some doubles um so obviously more friends so I can send gifts um no friends to send I've already sent some daily gifts today so I can't do that anymore um and this other one down here is this is the other game so this was the first game um Farm away this was the first game from the developer the the developer is called um future play it's a um startup out of Helsinki pretty experienced guys they're making Idol games this is their whole thing the whole thing is they came out of places like um like Rio um and they wanted to make free-to-play games that

really integrated rewarded video ads because they saw how um lucrative rewarded video ads could be thing about re rewarded video ads is they they're kind of lucrative but in order to kind of generate big revenues you have to have a big scale so you have to have a lot of people playing your game so obviously the the um idle games allows you to do that because there's not any complicated gameplay what am I going to do now how am I leveling this up I mean actually this game is maybe a bit little bit more complicated than some idle games um but you need the complication I suppose to have a bit of um longevity as well so it's always a balancing act but the whole point of making this game very simple and very easy to get into is they want a lot of people they want millions of people play in this game what else can I do while I've been talking well the thing about idle games is there's not much you can do while I've been talking so even though everything's whizzing along there's not really there's not any point staying in these games for long periods of time because I can't even level anything up now can I level up I can do this some here but now basically I can't do anything in the game now I'm done so I have to leave the game which is a good example of um how how idle games work so

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