How does Brawl Stars monetize?

oh and welcome to Pocket Gamer top this is the inner inspector with me John Jordan so the game we are in up inspecting today is of course brawl stars so the day we thought would never happen super cells team based top-down shooter has finally been released and it's time to have a look at the monetization look at the shop and also look at the kind of way the game tries to retain and also engage its players so I'll just mix the game you can see here flashing in the bottom left is a reward box so this is the simplest reward box this is a brawl box so you get these by playing the game if you win you get them faster so get some coins at the soft currency you get some power points for their characters to live up the characters okay so and some gems the

hard currency as well so that's not bad going so that we can see here and we can see here down the bottom there I've got 36 I need to get up to 100 again to get the next box to open there's a similar one here we can see here this is a big box so a big box has three times the amount of rewards as the standard broad box and you have to collect stars star tokens to do that by winning I pick a link so that's pretty clean we can see very simple reward structure it's very different to something like a clash royale where you had kind of loot boxes that you could you had to wait for them to open or use horrible currency to open them quicker this is very simple you just gain the resources you need to open the boxes and you just open them straight away so very different kind of kind of model here in terms of how players are being rewarded and potentially that feeds in the speed into the monetization as well so just at the

top of the screen we can see there's a few currencies so the important to see here is the soft currency gems used to buy boxes and skins other thing from the shop ok that's where you spend your real money to get gems coins used to upgrade your brawlers find coins inside brawl boxes so that's the soft currency you can actually transfer gems into coins if you need them and tickets tickets for different events so we have some different events to play so let's look at the shot that's the main kind of thing we're looking at today so here we are straight to the shop so pretty clean retailing so we can see here there is a one-time purchase offer only so it's kind of limited edition it's saying new flashing away level-5 pack I'm only available for two days I can get a mega box and 80 gems says it's five times the value that I would spend otherwise so I'll see this kind of offer happens just to encourage people to

spend not much money three dollars everyone has been three dollars but obviously once you get people starting to spend and realizing what they reward they can get the spending that encourages them to spend more so this is a very highly discounted offer so if you think you're gonna play brawl stars for any length of time worth maybe dropping some money on that unless you are ideologically opposed to spending money in games which is fine as well so we can see some more special offers here and these again counting down so we have some PowerPoint so I can get some power 35 power points for any brawler so that's kind of interesting normally you get the power points there they're locked to each Broadwater this is 35 for any so kind of like a more Universal kind of kind of approaches this you know a brawler that you want to level up and you don't have to collect those specific points because you often would get those points out the boxes and they drop in a you know random style and also a token doubler here so that's gonna double my token so I'm just gonna level up quicker if we go back out here we can see this

is Maya to actually look at that later I'm level 5 anyway so daily deals again these change every 24 hours so this one here I can get this is just a free one I get some event tickets yeah that's fine so here more power points so if I wanted to spend some soft currency and level up any of these characters I could I said maybe let's buy some difficult' now this is a bit more interesting here so this is a larger token doublet so this one times two doubles the next a thousand points and tokens that I get from battles so you look here you know that's spending 50 gems actually I've got 80 gems not spend any money in the game I was playing a lot in soft-launched so I've got some resources and why am i brawling my brawling leveling up is is slightly weird I'm going to that later we can buy that that's quite good that's going to speed

me up so let's just gonna speed up my leveling we didn't spend any money I just had that currency for free you saw we also get a few gems dropped out of loot boxes as well they go back to boxes we say it was always one before so if I didn't want to wait around to get my big box three times of goodies of a regular brawl sized box I could just spend some currency and get those or is a mega box so let's make a box click on it so 10 times the regular size so actually 3 times more than the then the big box well I've got 30 left why not let's go and spend some so what we get out of this one it's three times more than the originally standard box getting powerpoints for penny that's quite useful actually then I can unlike an upgrade penny bow and Colt so and one more and some more gems there we go that was not too bad it's only really

cost me 25 gems in them so into the hard end of the monetization so gone by gem packs this is fairly standard as we've seen with any free-to-play mobile game I can spend money and I can get gym packs I can use those Jam packs then to unlock boxes and buy other things but mainly is this kind of what we called getcha random loot box mechanics you might be wondering why the most expensive one is a hundred and fifty nine dollars 99 and I'm actually logged into the Australian App Store long story so this is actually showing Australian dollars if you were wondering because of the I'm playing on our iPad so normally you would have the maximum of 9999 but this is Australian does this one and also I can coin packs I can transfer coin so if I need more coins I can transfer some gems into clothes so that's the basic kind of shop so some standard kind of things we've seen here some daily deals nothing too kind of exciting or nothing like nothing too different here I guess there's one saying and is actually I

would say quite a light to monetization approach here and there's nothing there's no real hard sell it's very clean that's not really a lot of complicated stuff going on here's not lots of different currencies it's pretty straightforward if you want to spend money you have to buy gems and gems can be used for other things but the main thing it kind of boils down to is the is the brawler so so like a obviously this isn't an RPG but it kind of has maybe some light RPG elements so we can see here so there are 22 brawler's in the game at the moment so I've unlocked 15 of them as I say I've been played quite a lot in soft launch and then there's these ones down here and I've not unlocked so I have to unlock them from brawl boxes by gaming the cards or shards or whatever they turn they use them to I'm not these ones these ones here as he's interesting so because I was playing such a lot in soft launch a lot of these ones I can now upgrade I've probably got more upgrade potential than

I've got a soft Couric's actually so I'm talking I think in which ones I should probably upgrade we can see here I mean some of them so there's a rank of the of the character so I've got some rank 4 characters Shelley that kind of typical kind of new kind of good characters to start with kind of good good shotgun range after getting close but you get kind of good power kind of bull and el primo go around bashing people but a lot of health harness use dynamite and barley throwing kind of area-denial weapons really and then it says penny so penny you can see is just a rank one so some of these donut bomber just rent ones it's okay going upgrade her that's gonna cost me 20 that's fine I got that I can keep going and now I have to collect more to upgrade her to level 2 power level 2 yeah 3 sorry so she's palpable to mortis never really got the hang of him yet I'm not played room much with him that's

Barley's kind of quite useful for a rubbish play like me so miss upgrade barley so you see here I had loads of there's an upgrade potential for him who else should we do yeah do you like the little the little gun that's kind of fun so there we go that's enough for the time being and I could go through and do all probably so this is really this is although the kind of soft part of the monetization this is really I'm sure when people stop playing the game a lot you know 22 characters or even 15 is quite a lot people tend to have their favorites how they would have played they want to play really aggressive using bull and getting people's faces they want to be a bit more kind of action at a distance Brock or Colt had that kind of range and powers often as you get further down there's different kind of mixing up ones poco is a really interesting one and of the easy kind of he's healing stuff yeah mortis as well

with it's kind of like a speeder speed attack so um this is really I think we're going to find when if one station works I mean not anything with brawl stars is gonna have a very the main approach which monetization is just is gonna be very successful in terms of downloads lots of people gonna play this it's a very high quality game it's gonna get loads of push from Apple and Google it's really kind of simple to use typical simple to use hard to master kind of kind of mechanic going on there that as people get into it they're gonna go will I really like I really want to level up I don't know though some of these more kind of outrageous ones so this guy donated Leon the stealthy assassin he's pretty cool so you know you'd probably wanna level him up and then he'd probably wanting at some point get some get some skins for him so people will be spending money in the hope that they kind of getting getting those those kind of characters that they like kind of leveled up that's the way I see the monetization going we're not doing anything clever really they say the games been yourself like for a long time I think the monetization in the early stages like a year ago was

a bit different I think over time it's it's it's become much more streamlined and super so it's just really going for making this game as widespread popular as possible so the ARPU the money will take Perth average user won't be particularly high compared to like a like a Japanese RPG but it will just have you know millions of daily users so if it's monetizing them even at a low rate there's enough of them to go around which is kind of how we see you know candy crush saga helps he has a massive audience doesn't monetize on very significantly on an individual level but there's enough players that the accumulation of that kind of fairly low spend per player is pretty big as in billions of dollars a year so anyway that was the in-app inspector for brawl stars thanks watching don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you want to see other in-app inspector so we play new up-and-coming free-to-play mobile games and have a look at how they trying to encourage people to play and encourage people to spend money if you're interested in that please do

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