Moneti$er: Comparing the load times of F2P mobile games

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.busy's monetizer video feature this is where we look uh or typically look at free to play mobile games have a look at the way they monetize and some of the social interactions and um kind of user experiences i'm gonna do a bit of a special thing or different thing today um specifically looking at uh boot times it's something i've kind of been looking at more and more now these are games i've been this is just a random selection of games i've been playing fairly um constantly over the last couple of weeks um and i've noticed kind of more and more the the difference in variation in boot times so we're going to be very very simply just going to kind of fire these off and we'll see how different they are so the first one we're going to look at is supercell's boom beach

so there we go it's a little bit of a hold up right at the end um just don't often get but pretty far so it's under 10 seconds i'm straight to my base i can see what's going on something's building okay don't worry too much about exactly what's going on but basic idea is very simple if you want to play a game of boom beach and actually the game's pretty much designed um to encourage lots of short sessions because um unlike a lot of these dr building games you only can build one thing at a time if you want to build another thing here oh no oh that's not exactly if you want to put nothing here another bad example so if you want to build if i want to upgrade this somewhere we'll find something like an upgrade okay so if you want to upgrade this it will say can you build up build one build at a time i can't buy another builder so um so basically unless you want to spend money you don't want to do going to come out this game um so fast boot time is is is pretty important

um the to the gameplay and how supercell want people to kind of experience this game okay so let's look something um different this is uh ea's mythic's dungeon keeper so as we can see already this process is a little bit slower more than a little bit slower really maybe we'll get to play the game okay something's happening okay almost there uh last ten on ten percent of one really minions are needed time to organize themselves so i actually quite like this bit

so i'm sure there's a technical reason for the reason they're doing this to probably reduce some sort of server overhead but at the moment we're still not into the game so we've got to swipe this foolish which is nice but clearly why they've added that in is odd so as we can tell that's probably is that three times longer four times longer i don't know so in to the degree this is a different kind of type of game to boom beach so i mean you can see here these are my so this is a traditional kind of building queue i've got three imps they're all building and if i want to build another if you want to add another one i can spend money on it so this is potentially this is a game where your session times are longer because you've got more things you can do but when i'm kind of looking to see which one do i play i always play kind of boom beach first because it loads faster okay what other games have you got okay so look at adventure town from super solid

so not getting um any any any status thing i mean that's kind of coming until something's happening yeah so this is not a particularly good experience okay let's go straight in so again another traditional farming building game um again i guess session times would be longer than boom beaches you don't really have builders in the same way you kind of um it's more kind of doing resources and so you can plant things you're not using builders not using builders in any essence to upgrade these these elements um so slower than boom beach faster than the dungeon keeper so i find i kind of play this more than dungeon keeper just gets a bit quicker

okay look at this one non-stop games these heroes of honor is a kind of a strategy game of an mmog type thing so against traditional workers we've got this splash screen status update it's not a bit not flashy really there's no little limps to mess around with i mean it's fairly quickly very quickly into this there's my bases collect some resources so don't worry about that so this is you're building a base and then you go off into the world and attack things there's some demonic things that's me there um that's fairly quick obviously graphically it's not very just connecting to the server really not loading vast amounts of stuff so that's fairly good um okay royal revolt too scary i've been playing a lot

so there we go a little loading thing there we go so that's quite kind of cute we're doing it i don't really like loading bars when they get stuck there we are so we're kind of straight into this well we've got a pyromancer whatever one of these so there's a little base up here so it's pretty pretty fast loading so i play that one a lot this one family guy this is traditional anyway so we've got a status bar it says game underscore loading underscore tip one so that's really odd so it loads really fast as you kind of might imagine it's graphically pretty straightforward no not going to see l harrington um so there's not a lot to be loaded here um so it's not it's not

a bad example you know it's kind of nice you just pop in do some resource management put back out again i think it's compared to maybe something like kind of raw revolt which has i think a slightly nicer way of doing it and we can't where you've seen underscore game loading tip but there's obviously something always going on there um let's have a quick look at some other ones so farmville 2 just came out from zynga let's have a look at this one so this is traditional you can see we've got a little loading bar here that's stuck on two percent there's something's happening you can hear the audio loading for some reason 31 gets stuck on 31 a lot so obviously it's starting to load something there at 31 which i don't really like is these 100 things because it seems like any percentage would be equal to any other percentage but clearly it's not what it's doing it's loading various parts of the gaming

so it's not a percentage thing so this is effectively a lie and particularly when they don't they don't load cleanly or smoothly then it just seems really odd why is this always getting stuck up 31 percent anymore so then it loads it and then suddenly oh oh oh oh there's my oh and then does that so this is i think this is the prime bad example of how not to load a game it takes ages it loads it in stages then by the time i get to it it puts some i mean what was that all about obviously it was connected to the network already so that's just some basic lighting it's doing there obviously it's farmville so i've leveled up um haven't got any money okay um so and particularly for the farmville which is a game which is you know designed for a casual audience they just want to get in and play they don't want to hang around for it i mean just odd odd why zinger who obviously this whole thing is kind of online

kind of casual games has this quite convoluted loading system when oh no this is a game that graphically is more complex what's he doing he's gonna forage okay go foraging so graphically this is a lot higher resolution than the family guy game nope sell some blackberries there we go she's happy but it's not the highest resolution kind of game in the world so that might take so long to load anyway so so unsurprisingly farmville two is not the top of my list of games just to fire up straight away finally we look at game of thrones ascent i mean this is clearly a a game um which i suppose you could argue it's um has broad appeal game of thrones being a broad appeal but it's based on a web

game so basically it's a web game they've taken to ipad basically um so you can play across platforms um and so and with an rpg has a quite traditional um kind of loading screen but at least it's telling you what it's doing loading characters or you know maybe that's a lie as well okay we've got promotion daily reward so as obviously we can tell this is a very um kind of core thing going on it's very um text heavy i mean there are obviously graphics there but it's more um kind of static graphics and you go into menus and this is my where is my village center where i've milled some something rather so there's not really lots load there so there we go but your game sessions and gamestones are

actually quite long so um so yeah some examples there so i think having played these games a lot as i said boom beach is the blue mix and raw revolt 2 are the ones that are kind of like pretty much load immediately and the ones i play the most obviously dungeon keeper and 502 are the kind of worst examples of taking ages to load what i like the little imp it's just a pain um particularly the way i play dungeon keeper which is just i don't know i just pop in there um and i might see my sessions are quite short so something to think about clearly all games should load as fast as possible but there's technical reasons why they can't load as fast as possible um but within the bounds of other constraints loading fast is something you should be working on