IAP Inspector: Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes

hello and uh welcome to the inapp inspector where we look at free to-play monetization from the players perspective um this week we're looking at Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes which um is the latest um card battle from EA um so been playing this for a little while as you can see just just to the right of my ugly mug uh level 16 so which isn't immensely high but um definitely enough to get a general gist an idea of the game and how it monetizes um so if we start off with um let's have a look at how the game plays um so as you can see we're um full 3d looks very nice um and what I did there I just pressed the auto button in the top Corner um because although you can play

this as like a turn-based strategy style thing from the start you're given the option to just press a button and all your battles will automate themselves which is um quite unusual for a western game especially um but but that's because the um the game itself isn't down to skill particularly it's just about whoever has the best Squad will win essentially and um in this instance I think I'm going to strug struggle but yeah um so the actual game play this battle aspect isn't really what the game is and it isn't what it's about the the real meat of the game and the interactive element is getting new cards or new characters um and building them up upgrading them things like that that it's definitely focused around retention

first and monetization second especially playing this the week after mobile strike so if you're interested in that I did a video and an article on that last week but compared to that it's night and day in terms of how that bombards you immediately with ads and it's a very hard sell whereas this is completely the opposite it takes a long time for it to start rolling out its um starter bundles and things like that it wants to make sure you're invested and interested before it starts selling you things which I think is is a much better system but yeah so here we go this is I've just lost and this is what the defeat screen looks like so um directs you straight back to here which I might as well show you show you what the squad looks like so as you can see it's not the best Squad so this guy count Count Dooku he um he came in a um starter bundle I bought which was a dark side starter bundle so it's quite odd that it's called a starter bundle actually because it doesn't get dropped till level 11

which again is complete contrast to mobile strike which tries to monetize you straight away as a genuine beginner whereas by level 11 you have an idea whether you like the game whether you are actually interested in spending on it or not um but a lot of it just just seem to be about getting you to come back um making you know endearing you to it almost so here's what I was talking about so once you have once you fill all of these slots around him here then you can upgrade him but if you go on find tap on find then it tells you where what is isn't actually in this one but um here we go this is what yeah and it tells you where you can find the relevant items so if I went there and fought it I'm not going to but if I went there and did it then there's a chance that it would drop and then I could go back and put it into his character things like that so there's always um Solutions

that don't involve paying money basically which is one of the great things about the game um so just go back and show you more about the currencies so this so from left to right you have energy credits which is the soft currency and then these purple things are crystals um so this is what they look what they look like in the store um so ranging right up to sort of $99 territory from very low this is what I thought was interesting and sums up what I was saying about retention key here they've got the daily Crystal booster for seven days which obviously works for you and the developer because it's almost if you paid for that that's a 7-Day guarantee that you'll keep keep coming back and um especially in the early stage that's um quite a large guarantee by freet to playay standards to keep coming back for a week is um

you know it's a big deal see as a lot um a lot of players are lost literally in the after the first session so um EA is obviously really keen on on making sure that it's as sticky as it can possibly be um so so this is the squad as you saw before uh so I'll just show you a quick um upgrade process of this little Ewok fell so if we go train here and these are um upgrade droids I think they're called or something along those L but um so you use one of these I'll just use this one you assign them and you can see there that's going to level him up so with the cost of credits which I never run out of either they're the soft currency but they're given all the time as daily rewards and rewards for objectives things like that but um yeah you go on this and then we get a or we will do yeah a freshly

upgraded Ewok so he's not a massively powerful character but that was just as an example to show you um what the upgrade process is like and again um you can add things but you need you need to um completely fill all of these slots before that has any impact on the character but those are all randomly dropped or or dropped during missions which you can then return to and so I'll show you for example um off Sima Mission which I already completed so once you complete three stars you need to master it first and then you can hit that Sim button and it uses one of those green tokens and then you get all the drops for that um so then you can just keep doing that until you get what you're after which is a pretty good system as well so again it's all um it's taking away the emphasis on the actual the core of the battling which

you can do if you want but there's no real need when the auto buttons there so this is the um Energy System here as well which you can purchase if you run out for 50 crystals um which isn't too exorbitant especially because crystals given out quite readily as well but it's also um also just playing through the light side or the dark side battles I've never run out of energy the only place you might run out of energy is here in the um Squad Arena which is as I mentioned before the PVP component where and basically I'll do a quick one here because I'll beat them as you can see their power is lower than me they're ranked 4,669 if I but yeah if I battle them and beat them then um I take their spot essentially I just Leap Frog straight into their their area so um let's battle that here we go

see so as you see here this is mixing and matching as well I've got heroes and villains in this lineup this is just the best of the characters I have there's no um no separation at this stage but as you see Power will usually win out and I have higher power than this guy so um you'd assume un unless I'm going to be forced to eat my words you'd assume that this should be a fairly straightforward Victory but yeah anyway these are the um only only really strictly energy gated sections um that you can only play one of these every 9 minutes or pay hard currency in order to continue without waiting so that's a um it's a it's a lot more harshly gated in this section um which is which is fine because um because of the Light Side battles being SU and hardly costing any

energy um you know you'll always have something to do which is the the main the my main issue with weight times is when you're completely locked out of playing the game at all whereas here there's always something for you to do there's never um and here we are as you can see we're just about to finish this Victory and we did it so um so this SE a sleep frog um jump places there you go ranks increased from 5,356 to 4,669 so that's good and you get rewards based on your rank so you can see the obvious incentive for ranking up so um let's go to daily activities as well because this is another great thing about the game there's lots of these you're unlocking them all the time and achievements and things like that and um as you can see you get XP a couple of crystals and some materials you're all and I leveled up as well but um yeah it's always giving you free things like that and like with crystals there's

really I really felt no need to ever spend spend for them because um they're just given out so readly which is great and whether that will tighten up towards the end certainly as I've moved forward I think at level 16 there was like a a much more expensive bundle that got offered to me for about $40 but that's like the most extreme that I've seen and even that wasn't pressured it was purely optional optional purchase so we'll look at achievements as well I don't think I've got any of these lately but again just more places that you can earn and currency without having to spend money so it's all it's all adds to a very sort of player friendly experience which is very similar to um kabam's offering was a bit harsher but very similar to um Star Wars Uprising which I also liked earlier in the year so good year for um for Star Wars games on mobile

so yeah um I think that's about it just showing you around the monetization and how the average player will respond to that um we have a three- tiered ranking system on the in inspector that we use in the Articles and on this one uh we went for Approved which is the top purely because um because I made it so far in a relatively short amount short period of time I mean not that play it like level 17 is anything to particularly write home about but um it's a relatively strong position to be in for the amount of time and to have got there with no restrictions which would have been utterly impossible in a lot of freeto playay games um so yeah it's just a lot there's just a lot of ways of progressing without spending and even though I did choose to spend it was on a dark side stter bundle with um Count Dooku as I mentioned earlier that character and a few materials and some

crystals and credits but um but there was never a point where I run out of either of those there was never a point where I felt I need to spend to progress and even with the energy system which is often a worrying sign that things are going to be tight and the player is really going to be pressured um in this instance I didn't find that at all so um yeah really like it and think it's um very player friendly and I'll probably play it more which is um quite unusual for um games of this series just because I'm always moving on to the next one for the next week so um yeah highly recommended okay thank you very much for watching