How does Legend of Solgard monetize?

hello and welcome to the in-app inspector with me John Jordan just finishing off hopefully a game of legend of soul guard which is the game were looking at today in the in-app inspector so in-app inspector is really about games the gameplay so much as it is about the free-to-play economy and the monetization backs up that sort of stuff that's what we're looking at today we're just to show you a bit of gameplay so this is a match three lane based kind of match 3 game we then combine units together and then a tactical position I guess we're calling it a mid call game it's kind of a fantasy style setting very different in some ways to Kings candy crush saga but as we look at the kind of main map here in somebody's kind of quite similar to candy crush saga in you've got this kind of the saga lines at saga is story in in Swedish Kings to use company and actually the developer behind legend of soulguard is a startup snow print studios although they're kind

of the people behind it fairly experienced in mobile games this is the first game as snow print studios so here we go so this is the playing area but what we're looking at really is the monetization and the kind of techniques used and they've got a retention so we can play this for a while I guess we can see a typical shop so free chess open every four hours we get some stuff going on it so this is that's some gem so these are the gems that each character has a gym you can see them going on oh there's dust so dust is used to level up some abilities there's gold for soft parity so you can see there and this is a free one so you don't get particularly great items but it's nothing I suppose so elfling gem boom limb gem scene see the bottom there you know I need to sum of some of these coaches have unlocked

some of my habits and some of them I need to kind of collect more so this one here the Sun drench need to collect more gems to unlock her gold and dust so here we go it's quickly go and have a look and show you how this code works in terms of the characters so there are I've collected five have unlocked 5 you can see of women this 30 in total obviously more coming more coming soon so how do you unlock them well typical thing here so the boom in boom Lin we can look at so I have 40 of those gems but I need 125 in tight also a few to go 85 to go on him so the ones I've unlocked the first four there you basically unlock them by playing through the tutorials they're the basic ones I'm going to too much detail in terms of the characters but quickly to show you so this is the rough poor you can see he's common he also has a color so go back to here each character has a color you can have only of one of each color in your team there's also it's not really confusing

but there's also each each character creature is a race so this one's a beast this one's the offerings of small folk grim top is a warrior and Knight costs also a warrior so the race doesn't link to the color because you also have find them here as a there's a worm which is another race in this as well so there's actually six races in total only four colors so anyway by the by so we can do some leveling up though so and if we look here go back to the rough poor so we can see at the bottom there's the stats as eight stats each character has and this is really kind of three different ways you kind of level up the character so here we have the attribute so special abilities you can see I have two level in you kind of level up under special abilities to level up in this case I need 75 gold which I have and I need a hundred of the dust the red dust so the dust relates to the color of each character of these creature sorry I've

only got 41 I need a hundred to level up so I can't level him up there and there's also these ones here these are idols so there's another whole system this is much later in the game where you basically craft these if to craft these idols using molds and then you get didn't reach over you can show you the effect of having these idols attached maybe bit like pets in other games I suppose but they're basically on boosts and there's another over here there's another special ability which is locked until I can rank the crank my rough port up but actually you can have two special abilities to idled and then you have these ones down here which are gems there's critical chance gem merge bonus gem because you've been doing match trees when you merge you get bonus and then a block a block so you're blocking so in this case so you can look at the bottom here isn't actually brilliant on this it doesn't really show me and particularly well what I can do but there I have a hundred and eleven gems

for the rough port I need 75 to increase my critical my creatures critical charts so the effect is gonna be plus 5% and I gonna get reward that real sunflower is the is terrifically HP so that's for my main character and we can see the top of the screen she's up here there's n blur that's the main character of the hero character he plays she's level six at the moment but she levels up by using the XP so you and that kind of XP pretty much no matter what you're doing the game you have some of that so let's go in let's apply that so though you can see he now has a gem attached I can't now through the next gems and he's 75 or when he got 36 so we can see kind of started to see the idea of how these creatures are the most important thing in the in the battle on where the units but then you have these this kind of layered leveling up process where everything is slightly different and use different resources obviously in a free-to-play mobile game you want to have really for a game to last a long time like years months and years get

people playing it for a long period time we need these quite in-depth multi-layered economies where you gaining lots different resources in some cases you're playing particular levels to find certain resources so here if I want to find more gems okay it's telling me kind of where I need to go to kind of collect these these gems specifically for each individual character so for the elfling obviously again i need 75 of his gems in order to unlock his sync bonus I need more dust if I want to do his improve his ability his his barn Bash Multi nowhere near doing idols on him yet so the the night cost I can do something is telling me there so I've got 20 of the gems that I need so I can unlock either the merge bonus or the sync bonus Jim they're both the same so I'm gonna use some gold and I'm gonna use 20 of the gems so up she goes

I stand he or she up it goes and gains the gym so we can kind of start to see now and building up the gems across my characters are leveling leveling them up but awfully there's are the big things to be done like I'm looking more characters so what else have I've been doing what what else what other kind of rewards the game have we can see it daily quests so I've actually done all these I think yeah so I've collected the bounties that's basically just playing a different mode I've won five battles campaign battles the main kind of story mode I've opened some chests in the shop and I've gone to the treasure cave which is another in another mode we just get treasure so I can claim all these you see I'm getting gold and XP so nothing particularly valuable and then I complete all my daily quests so I get the full set and I open a quest chest try saying that quickly and I get some more gems so we kind of see the process

that cost gem so you see any activity really or build just building up all these these rewards I don't think that helps me in terms of I can't do anything oh I can okay so the knight cost now I've got enough so I've got enough dust that I have enough gold I don't enough gold to level up her special fire ability so that's annoying but let's not worry too much about I think I have a login bonus and I'll claim my login bonus the other thing I was going to do actually and while we're here let's look through so I've got daily deals these things change every same every day every day 15 hours it's gonna change so I can directly buy more rough pour gems if I want to by spending gold nobody gonna help me I was gonna get me 25 but that's not enough to get me means 75 I need to do another gym I'm looking at the gym I can buy some green ability dust but that's gonna cost me hard currency I can buy again this time 30

grim chopped gems again it's gonna cost me hard currency the hydroxy I really expect at the bottom here you pay with real money this gold is the soft currency which you can buy using the hard currency I mean that's all various to end up now for future mobile games some nice and retelling going on here so there's a limited offer time pack here so in this time pack gonna cost me seven bucks I get an epic chest I get some diamonds and I get this I get some Valkyrie gems not enough to unlock her but I'm for 7 bucks kind of okay the other thing is it guess we all with all the mobile games or in pretty much all all games now is we have this kind of chess system a loot box system I can spend some money we can see the more money I spend the larger the chests to have a look at the large massive chests kind of weird English their level 27 large massive chest and see the weapon guaranteed some certain contents in terms of gems number of gems and dust

and gold and also at least of those contents at least 68 will be rare gems and at least 13 will be epic ones so you know we can see here we can see it's held at what the drop can I drop rate is which you know have to do tell us all fairly standard you know it's a randomized things I guarantee what you're getting some kinda encourages people to spend more I suppose there's this nice option here so this is because the games just launched case you have these introductory offers this one's a subscription offer so these are coming much more to play now so in this case I pay seven bucks I get a hundred and eighty diamonds + 60 diamonds every day for 30 days so I get almost get 2,000 diamonds in total and we can see here compared to what I would have to spend I'm spending 7 bucks I'm getting almost two thousand diamonds or I can buy them hundred and 1250 diamonds for $14 so we can see this is a really is three

times the value is really good then the question however with this these color ones these subscription offices presumably you have to login every day to get them so if you miss a day you don't get your sixty diamond so there is a retention kind of element to that as well which makes it probably not quite so valuable because quite difficult to log in every day for 30 days I find it difficult so anyway um any standard in terms of the monetization I think bit more complex in terms of the how the how the creatures level up but that's not really it's not really direct monetization in that I mean that's based on on the chest capture system so I don't think legend of soul guards doing anything particularly different to what we've seen before just a different implementation in terms of the kind of meta game on the creatures generous in terms of things like this subscription offer and actually the other thing I should say is you can see at the top of screen I thought spent any money so I've got two hundred and two hundred fifty five diamonds which equates to the value of something like three over three dollars and those have just been given to me so two hundred and I got given two hundred and fifty dollars by just by

going to the shot that was like a pop up knows he said you want to go to the shop get to fifty dollars to three 200 250 diamonds so given that we've been given that let you go and see what we get for a large chest so a large chest here let's actually spend some this hard currency I'm gonna get at least thirty three rare character creature gems I'm gonna get seventy gems in total I'm gonna get a whole bunch of dust and some gold to probably off of this I should go to do something so there we go see how he goes so L flings something do some elfing stuff there boom links no because obviously they need to take home a bunch of those nightcast yet it's going to do something there Raven and one no posted I'm looking him eat or whatever lots of dust so dust is quite important but it was read that only read dust there so your sliema tada way so can actually go and do anything now what it's telling me yeah because all these things are lit up so I can it was like I can do that I can

add a bonus gem to my night cast so let's do that so now okay that's cool to know because I put all those three I guess I can rank him it up again this is costing quite a lot of gold so this is gonna limit me to do other things but it's gonna unlock the Moonbeam which i think is the second big ability and it's gonna get me XP saying see there we go not changing the aesthetics which you might see in other in more RPG type games so it is a she yeah so now I can unlock this so now I've got two ability so that was quite a good use of my resources to do that and now I can well I can't get enough money now but if I have more gold when I get more gold I can level up that second ability so probably now it means I can't do anything else for these other characters I don't have enough let's see yes I can level up actually the the battle draw of the rough pour what else can I do I can I do I have enough yeah okay good so let's add the sync bonus gem to the elfling there he goes now you see I basically not going any more gold

so I can't redo anything else I'm saying I can't level up my back more so that's that's kind of that's what we expect with free-to-play mobile games you know you get a lot of they they are generous thing give you lots of rewards but obviously the point of that you need to resolve measured you have many more decisions to make then you have ability to do so in terms of the resources unless you really want to spend money which I generally don't do and neither there's the most people Sam so far quite enjoying legends of soul guard I think in terms of the energy inspector it's a well-developed system sorts of complicated is not for a rip anyone off it's you know good value for have spend the money but you don't need to spend the money at all Sony I felt any need to spend the money not like massively people into the game what level am I on I'm on level 28 at the moment and the first kind of Midgard the first this is the first kind of campaign is 40 levels because plenty of content there is should put out there is a ng system but I mean I'm not really felt the need to

use to use to spend money on energy so this is other modes as like a bounty mode which is he timed out for me the moment there's treasure cave as well also timed out so there's quite a lot of things to be doing those you can see this game is in portrait mode as well so it's very much a mobile game although I happen to be playing on an iPad it's pretty much like a dip in dip out game it's not a game designed for you to play for you know an hour of time he's very much that kind of snacking ability so yeah I think there's a good job here for King and snow print studios definitely if you're into mobile games I would suggest trying this one out I think it's pretty well polished it's quite good everyone knows match-three this has a bit more depth to it obviously it being a mid call game shoot point is while there are guilds are not only going going to the Guild's thing either and so there's plenty of depth still to be looked at but um we're definitely yeah from here perspective point of view definitely definitely a recommended I think for this one they've done a good job all over in this game and be

certainly be interesting to see how it ranks in terms of downloads and top-grossing as the time goes on so anyway thanks for watching this is the in-app inspector from Pocket Gamer up is where we do its kind of analysis of interesting free-to-play mobile games so don't forget to subscribe to our channel if that's something you're interested in thanks watching this video and hope to see you in soon