How does Star Trek Fleet Command monetize?

[Music] you hello and welcome to get game whaddup bizzy's in app inspector with me John Jordan enough inspectors when we look at free-to-play mobile games and look at the in-game economy look at the monetization also have a look at the retention and techniques they're using so basically how does the game kind of work as a economy how does it kind of a practice as a player to keep playing come back every day and maybe spend some money okay so Star Trek fleet command is from scope Lee that's the publisher developed by digit game studios in Ireland being a soft launch for a few months and now being released so I've been playing the soft launch version so I've got quite a lot of kind of currencies so it made it like him I've been spending money I haven't but I just got rewarded with a whole bunch of stuff because I was playing the soft launch release so

that's typical with a free-to-play mobile game when you start a session this kind of stuff that's been going on while I've been away so I'm gonna get some rewards for that that's obviously a good retention technique when you come back into the game you feel happy that you've got stuff to do so I've waited my titanium manufacturing so I'm gonna get some stuff there we go upgrade the warehouse and I've got the tasks to go and do awesome loot boxes to claim so free-to-play mobile game unsurprisingly we have these kind of chests so this is interesting so this game which is quite a surprise I think it's clearly inspired by what we might call the Forex kind of genre so Forex was it was a term invented actually back in the 90s for I'm a certain type of PC game but for mobile games male games really kind of taken the Forex game play and and meta

game to a new level particularly games from MZ like game of war and mobile strike very popular all very very well monetized games you'd say that's very very popular in terms of large user base is compared to a candy crush saga but these games have a very tight design loop that has you always kind of doing for doing things and kind of waiting around for things and so we just saw what what I won was some speed ups that's kind of a clue that this game is very very heavily forex influenced I would actually call it forex game although it is much nicer than a game the game of war in many aspects but that's kind of what it's doing so this is my space station we can see here so graphically very nice and playing this on an iPad pro so good interesting for a mobile game this is played in landscape mode not portrait mode so even if you're playing on a phone most people play on a phone you have to hold it in different way how you would normally hold it so I

can go into the interior here there's different there's three different levels of users and the interior view and exterior view solar system of you so this is very much what we'd expect for forex game where I'm building things like says base building but you can come see I can't just build wherever I want to not like a clash of clans I've built in the areas I can build so I've done that building got some XP what can I go and do now probably do some leveling up so production has halted because my warehouse is full so it can upgrade my warehouse let's see looks like the warehouse off an upgrade this one you can see I take 42 minutes 43 seconds or I can use the gold hard currency do it straight away I've got loads of this because I was gifted some tokens just like that I've leveled up my warehouse to level eight straight away but now I can't level it up to level 9 because I have to level up all the other buildings

in that kind of tech tree to do that kind of up that one yet can do that so a different way of leveling up is you can see now it's times counting down but we have these speed ups so I've got I've got 19 of the 15-minute speed up so I can use one of those speed it up and now anything under five minutes I do for free so just one of the quirks of these games that in beyond the 5 minute to do for free so other stuff going on so this more building so this is my operations I'm gonna take it to level 8 by looks of things yeah it's gonna take almost five hours or I'll sit and do it instantly but in this case I'll let it go on I'm getting rewarded for everything I do so it's very much the kind of this engagement model where you do something and you get a bit of reward and this game is very good at that you really feel like wow I'm getting all this stuff

it kind of keeps you coming back I think the other thing is I'm getting actually quite a lot of this because I played the game before they did an update I think I'm getting actually extra rewards so on something else I've done here this is my tech tree so I can go and do some tech tree stuff so this is you can see here research have research building good by research the tech tree stuff I've got combat and stationed the galaxy one is not open yet I can speed up my construction speed that would be useful thing to do so I'm going office Lee again I could done that instantly updates with the speed-up thing but basically no matter what you do you always waiting for stuff to do so we can see here there's basically two main things I'm doing in this interior thing I've got buildings and I've been doing some research so we can see at the bottom here what's two spaceships I should probably doing stuff with them so let's go back to the exterior view could

always go here and see what I should be doing so this is kind of my mission structure telling me why I should be doing some things I can't do like this is a build a certain type of spaceship but I need the blueprints so that's kind of a long term kind of mission and this one here is I've got to test my skills in battle defeat some speed the hostile captain I know finally rewards could upgrade my shipyards to gain access to more powerful ships and then this one here which is the white showing talk to landmark system so movie try that one you see his daily goals as well as we'd have really free-to-play mobile game daily goals kind of give you an idea about what be doing obviously you do them you get kind of mean see the reward here resets every four hours but that's if you really want to maximize your play that's what you do and probably end up spending the money to get that kind of stuff done

let's go and visit this system and see if I can work this out today's takes us to another view so she's asking me if I'm enjoying it so yes it's pretty nasty trying to review yeah I'm not gonna not gonna write the game am i it's gonna take me to probably somewhere no okay yeah okay that's a good thing to do though it's good to encourage your players who like the game to give you good reviews so okay so the Isle of noise I can go there so you see one of my spaceships is now on route it goes I can zoom in a little bit I want to so graphically not a lot goes on in this game this is much more a kind of menu basically we expect that you know in a 4x I wish do you wish to engage in business must pay a tariff okay so I'll donate that another job so you know kind of in

this space games of what happens and you get these missions so I could go off you can see I'm a I'm level 8 here something could go off and attacks and people if I wanted to so just to show you how that works it's not very interesting you basically just tap on attack and if you're stronger than the other one you blow up so I need to do actually three more of those to do that mission so you know don't be there me getting yourself excite that it's gonna be these massive space missions where you gonna be controlling loads of stuff nope 4x games not like that they're very meta game @mo already continue to use how many order need to do for that one

more to do then I'll defeat the hostile captain's who's just give me an idea about that kind of a gameplay meta game of the game okay so there we go defeated that combat veteran mission complete now some of the rewards I've got um Haas let's go and have a look at the the other part of the game which is obvious a star trek game you can kind of see that a little bit in the design of the ships but it's more important in the offices this is another kind of key meta game loop so these are my officers we can see kind of who they are though from the JJ Abrams film we can see here obviously this is kind of it's not really an RPG from that believe it has more RPG elements for X Games tend not to have this at all they're quite generic in the unit's you get this is quite a nice way that Star Trek fleet commanders kind of combined the kind of

meta heavy metal game building resource mission structure with this more RPG element because obviously these characters a bit more appealing and you kind of want to level some of them up more than others you want to maybe unlock particular ones politically for a Star Trek fan there might be certain characters you might want to unlock or certain races you want to focus on I'm not Star Trek fans that doesn't really bother me at all so but we can see here so there's a who she's actually deployed on a ship we can see her stats strength health detect and she has special special abilities I can't promote her at the moment I need I need three more shards although ever they you would call those elements and also she's on a ship that's doing stuff so they have to recall her to do that so there's kind of a nice little feeding in I guess to the how do you expect like a Star Trek game to work if you're going to promote you can promote a backup base I suppose that's the idea there

as soon though I've got loads of these promotion things that I comprehend because he's he's there and also there was a compliment before yeah I need new different resource to do that I guess I probably got enough now so that's also how the item system works we saw an item system before where I got some speed up items we also have Explorer parts let's just look at the store that's kind of the key thing for you know inspector so we have on this one this is research boost pack pack officer pack station pack I'm satchel of plutonium wherever that is there's II not for expensive five pounds they're going to be probably mainly five dollars but there's not a large sum of money I mean see if it's good tell us what we're gonna get gifts so typically

in a free-to-play mobile game we get every every kind of duration we get some free stuff I mean past deal is not particularly useful got those enough but we can see here we need to check back to get my free chest so the recruit one is the interesting ones this is where I kind of recruit different officers so the best one is the ultra recruit and I need 800 of this unit or to get that I don't have any so I click on that it will say get some from the store so we get to see an idea about how they connect them how the kind of monetization kind of flows through that's a true one so Alliance I'm not actually in an alliance of talk so light is very important for these games nice token yeah obviously if I want to buy any more loot a Neum

Satchel that's a fact buying the hard currency so there's kind of four different currencies you have unlocking different sorts of boxes so yeah oh sorry the three different sorts of recruits so you can see here this one uses the blue one this one uses the gold bronzy one and this one uses the purple one being see here and this is a loot box sort of scenario we can see here got a chance of winning these kind of higher value characters so here we go other things we can do from this door so the speedups these is my inventory so these are speed ups I've got these are the materials I've got you can see this gets quite complicated I don't know what these do

to tell you honest there's a lot of game shield so she also know what shields are stop you getting attacked xp for the ship and the officers before the recruitment Akins and alliance credits and the federation credits as well I'm not replaying there's Klingons or Romulans or so it's kind of a lot going on there when Luke chest defeating people line structure say I'm not in one at the moment but alliance is it's been interesting actually this game it's not doesn't really heavily push you into alliances whereas a lot of these Forex games tend to do that because they know you much much more sticky if you're in an in an alliance thing I did try and join our alliance and didn't didn't didn't get accepted see if I can create your own

and so look at this one so it's just a leaderboard so there we go so Star Trek fleet command it's interesting game is much better than I had anticipated it was gonna be a surprise when it's a 4x game so not particularly a big fan of Star Trek games there is a lot to be doing most of the time you know it could be argued it's you know it is kind of limited in this in the sense of what is providing for you it is very meta game focused you are not kind of exploring in some kind of deep way the Star Trek universe but you are kind of in the Star Trek universe if that makes any sense you have the characters which i think is

quite a strong element than most 4x games don't have and that kind of adds its of engagement the ships kind of again have kind of common ones rare I mean the typical when you're going to the more exotic type of ships in order to get those safes a complete Federation events or missions in bars unlock this ship some people I just think think it's kind of a well-put-together game it's not particularly is it surprising for a Forex game it doesn't particularly push the monetization in any strong way really in any way at all which may be it may be a downfall really because of the games need to monetize in order to collect survive so be interesting to see the combination of the approach is taken the large amount of meta game and and I guess the the appeal of the license

which would you get people kind of kind of playing it or downloading it because I think it's quite enjoyable game even if you know it's a Star Trek people will play it for a while so but then yours gonna kind of point in again where you kind of go and we're gonna keep playing anymore there's kind of like after a couple of weeks people start dropping out so I guess that's always the difficult thing for games and particular games with their license involved where you go beyond but kind of the the first-fruits of playing the game and getting the initial enjoyment happy how long do you can I keep keep hanging around for and that's really the crunch point for games particular ones with a license so anyway thanks for watching the enough inspector is we just play FIFA mobile games everything get interesting for some reason and go in and yeah talk about the aspects of monetization another thing so if you're interested in that they better subscribe thanks for watching the video and hopefully we'll see you again soon

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