How does Assassin's Creed Rebellion monetize?

[Music] hello and welcome to Pocket Gamer bizzy's the enough inspector with me John Jordan the game working at today is ubisoft's assassin creed rebellion so as the title suggests this is a game made in the Assassin's Creed universe it is a free-to-play mobile game and it kind of is a mixture of base building and RPG so it's quickly go through kind of what we can see here so this game doesn't mean soft launch for quite a while it's going to reverse different kind of transfigurations the basic gameplay meta game estate the same you can see here I'm kind of filly about some level 13 I've been playing it for a few months so what what you see here is kind of a someone who's midway through the game we can see here they kind of the basic setup is this base and this is kind of way you create rooms that have different

functionality so you can see in this first building here oh I've filled up all the rooms so the rooms do things like this one here gets me the soft currency and I have to kind of set one of my characters in to do that this one here gives me Intel Intel is the energy system in the game so I've got haven't actually got anyone assigned to this once you can see this - there's two two people I could assign there to make it generate faster but you can see at the top of the screen if you look I've got hundred and sixty 160 energy so I'm not really found energy is a big gate for this game this one up here where I've got some pickups some resources and then let's just move over to the other side finished off the tasks that have been going so I've been training some of the characters the

heroes again cause them to Isabelle has gone from level 12 to level 13 we got here how many it has gone from level to level 13 and that's cuz I just my play level went from 12 to 13 and actually gonna go to 14 quite soon obviously as Hatton's happening these games your characters can only be the same level as you are so every time you level up you can live up the character's final one up here is I've got some research and training codex that's what you used to that's the resource used to level up those players so there we go so we can kind of see here there's a few buildings here of spaces right that buildings could go so I could build a room various things I could do I can't in the moment because I have done have a sufficient level so there's living in quarters I can extend that when I get to level 20 he has an apothecary again level 20 a storage room again level 26 and all these ones I've built the maximum of weaponsmith library workshop

so that's kind of the basis for the kind of how you manipulate the your heroes let's go and look at the heroes so they're down here as I say the game has two very discrete elements as there's the kind of Base building which is very it's not base building in like a clash of clans type thing both on the base building kind of meta stuff is but very much going to the meta leveling off these heroes so you can see I've got 12 of 46 unlocked so unlocked and we s kind of kind of expecting a free-to-play mobile game with RPG elements this is the unlock these is very much based on collecting shards or as this game calls them DNA so you see here have flora Delacruz she's pretty cool character she's an epic shadow stealth character a lot of the game has been built around stealth of being Assassin's Creed if I want to find the

DNA to unlock her go here find DNA so very similar to what we would see in terms of a Gacha loot box system there are some free rewards i that's free rewards that ever before as you get free rewards as free wards that you you kind of get as you kind of play through the game and then you have ones that you have to pay a hard currency for which I'll see that kind of the better ones if you want to get the high level stuff so nothing new there from a capture point of view let's just take our free cube that we wait it will get every four hours so just encourage us to log in every four hours get some soft currency get some hard currency and get a small codex so nothing particularly exciting there I mean it's the free one we get before us no surprise here this DNA cube get some DNA fragments we can see here possibly what I'm going to get so it's all the way from your typical legendary epic rare common so let's see what we got is

it any use to us oh but new recruit he's a common one Alonso I think common one another new recruit here we've got this time and today it got des in common and we got some shards for luciano whose epic so i need 20 shots got five for him so there we go we see how that one works again i don't think is anything we haven't seen before I mean till the monetization the one interesting thing here is if you have games that are built around superheroes or Star Wars you have these kind of epic characters that you want to unlock like you want to unlock Darth Vader or you want to unlock their Paul Wolverine or something like that in the in the in their Marvel games in this kind of game it's less kind of clear because a lot of

these are yeah like a grey Lea you know is in the Assassin's Creed game but a lot of these are kind of currently here at filler characters that's not like you really want to I mean Enzo I suppose is co well known you might want to be no really Ken the same way that you might want a Darth Vader or a certain kind of Luke Skywalker character in it in a Star Wars game so there's I think in terms of the monetization to unlock which is a really key thing for these free play mobile games it's just less dynamic here because these are their interesting characters there's really they're really good have really good features in the game but they just don't have the same obvious appeal obviously the other thing in terms of once you unlock the character then you can level them up so you can see here again you're looking for DNA so I guess here Matteo I have 22 does it show you here so I have 22 25 I need to get him an extra star so there's a typical kind of star system in a level system it kind of works slightly

differently whereas a GUI Lea I've only got 7 and I need 50 now because these two stars already so is that typical thing was so I might not really care particularly I'm looking at certain characters but once I've got a character who's got particular DUP in a particular way and who has attributes I like I might really care about right I want to get I want to get more DNA for him so I might want to you know in this case go to this mission and and and that's gonna give me a guaranteed drop chance to get his shots that's kinda the monetization works from that point of view other things to do actually go into heroes again kind of leveling up stuff you do is you have a gearing system so it's kind of pretty straightforward so yeah there's a sword and armor an accessory and getting a different kind of characters so so Hamid here just has one star for his gear Isabelle has a 2 star stiletto a 2 star roba Fieseler fine robes that con levels dropping another way in order to get those we're going

back into the crafting system here so I'll go here to the weapons Smith craft a weapon so if I wanted I say the fine stiletto that we just saw there I need mustard and to make a stiletto first as I've kind of base item and also contacts I need 40 iron I'm only or 35 iron so I have to go and find some iron ore again missions or combined crafting pen so we can kind of get an idea nothing anything we haven't seen in games before I don't think but it is quite what's interesting it's quite layered it does take quite a lot of time actually I found to work out how the game system works so it's a little bit confusing to begin with just because of the way kind of stuff he's laid on so look at the shop I guess obviously that's kind of a monetization the hard end of monetization how it works so we are here offers so we can see here this is this is a very typical hard currency kind of kind of shop thing so I've got a

942 of these hard currency units I'm spent I'm bought any with real money so here's stuff I learned and we can kind of CER spend time in a minute we can see here kind of stuff we can get we can look at encrypted cubes it offers so this is in pounds playing in UK app store moments we can see here this is kind of interesting actually that is not not massively different from what we've seen before but but um we have these kind of subscription models so a DNA cube daily pack so get five instances plus one every day for 30 days so okay I'm spending whatever that's gonna be like 40 give me $50 maybe 35 DNA cubes in total but I'm getting them every day helix daily pack a hundred in hundred instances plus 30 every day for 30 days again so you're kind of seeing this kind of more subscription model and then there is this premium access Monthly prescription model which obviously come Apple and Google are incentivized for

developers bike by giving them 85 percent of the of the car rather than 70 percent something see here and the benefits are these basically increase rewards 20% also renews the problem this kind of stuff is it's kind of difficult I think for players to know exactly what they're getting 20% increased daily logging rewards is quite abstract I feel and you know it's not it's not super expensive until PayPal 14:9 what's that gonna be in dollars for ten dollars I suppose maybe a bit more 13 dollars but I think that's hard the people were certainly less they started playing the game I think in general people are unsure to have monthly subscriptions unless they really into again so a bit more direct combination here so you can see here I can if I wanted Magdala McDonnell Lena sorry I could buy how am I gonna get five shards for seventy-five of my hard candy but it's not gonna help me coz need 32 in order to lever up Bartolome I can get also five fragments

for hard currency but that's not gonna help me either there's these rift tokens and with tokens or a new thing the rift tokens are these events like tickets really mostly could buy Intel which is the intelligent stuff the energy system medicine - so characters can heal themselves and then these training characters these these resources which we've already bought these actually are bought with the soft currency here's a typical more a few more as or sings it so these are the Codex is the coins the woods and the stones which other resources you need these wood and the stone the resources to doing the buildings so that's kind of separate kind of story so you can see is quite complex there's quite a lot of resources and quite a lot in ticket system as well but when you kind of on pick it all it kind of works in kind of the way you'd expect so what can I do

so when I could do this these these DNA tokens let's try that again so I spent 200 of my my hard currency to get the this unlock it's kind of actually the same unlock I had just through progression so you just come speeding stuff up you spending that spending that soft garment that hard currency you can see I I'd opened it but I didn't know I didn't get anyone to recruit so it still didn't really help me very much there we go so in terms of colonization the game doesn't really push anything at all it's actually pretty lightweight in terms of how the monetization works I mean that could be a good thing could be a bad thing I think maybe to be interesting to see how well the game there's monetized obviously I think people will download it to the Assassin's Creed I think it's a nice game if a bit complex but I can't see it monetizing particularly highly partly because of the game type and its appeal and part because the monetization I don't think is very aggressively spun

up into the into the game which can be a bad thing awfully because you want games at least to make money how does the game actually work well it's going into a mission so easy one level one here actually let's go in here so we can see here let's do this one through some reason so this is um I can choose I choose my setup of characters are going to edit my team if I want to actually this one I need to is recommending that I use certain types of player some types of characters and see here these are like a different types the assassin type in the yeah different types anyway got remember exactly what they're all called Hamid is he's really good at disarming traps so here we go

it's gonna cost us some energy to do that so mission objective do that so what you can do is you can play it through I'm not going to do that and it's not how I've been playing the game and this came in fairly late into in terms of updates not to play so I'm multiplying at three times of spewing kind of see what goes on there it's kind of if you want to play it mainly it's turn-based you basically turn by CD using special moves which obviously then have a cool-down period or you're just using kind of the basic basic attack movement that the character has so we see he lost the initiative that's pretty much about stealth and kind of creeping up on people he's just disarmed that trap because it's what hammy does he managed to get through that trap disarm that one he's unlocked that box he's also good at unlocking boxes because that's his skill so my bears quite

leveled up is making this kind of look easy which is quite an easy level I quite like just watching the game actually it's kind of funny quite um quite joy we just watch them doing their stuff so they did that quite successfully that's what the gameplay as much as it is looks like so he can go in and do it men if you want to like he can with most free-to-play mobile games now but I'm I don't really see much reason to do that at the AI take the strain and all say if you want to go even faster if you have three stars a mission already you can just do a rush so Russia's is guessing from what we see in most free play mobile games is a rush is just basically you even see anything graphically you just get the resources out of it but you use up energy and you use up in this case you use up the characters health and so if we now go in gonna show us on here well he's have a bit of his health can you see his health will be full in

31 second no one didn't use that much health Isabel we fill in 14 14 minutes so yeah so there we go that is Assassin's Creed rebellion say I enjoy it I do wonder how easily people will pick it up but I think it is interesting enough in terms of a game combined with the license I think it makes for a quite satisfying free-to-play mobile game but monetization is not really doing anything very very different to what we've seen before and it's fairly lightweight so that is the conclusion I guess from the point of view we kind of have have it recommend it for the players and there's no hard sell there's no kind of big-time gating particularly you can pretty much do everything you want to do and then come on come back in four out of time and do it all over again satisfying from that point of view whether you be something make enough money from it to call the game are successful that that's another

thing in Pali I suppose depends on how many people play anyway thanks for watching so the in-app inspector is a regular feature from Pocket Gamer top is where we look at a new free-to-play mobile game and look at how it monetizes and retains and engages plays so if that should kind of think they'll get subscribe but thanks for watching and hope to see you again soon [Music] you