Monetizer: CastleVille Legends

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.business monetizer feature this is where we play through the first uh five to ten minutes or so of free-to-play games and uh have a look at the user flow the monetization techniques being used early in the game and just trying to get a comparison between what people are doing so let's get my stopwatch start it up off we go so we're going to have a look at castleville or the new version of castleville from zinger so it's far this up okay it's not very meaningful no what's it doing okay because of your legends okay so rick's actually doing some sort of download which isn't going very fast

obviously this is something with free to play games you want the initial experience to be even with a free game you want it to be good people don't like their own game and then waiting around not quite sure what's going on here whether it's a problem from my end where it's a game problem i think normally when you have these download things you might see a little bar moving at least something going on oh okay all right okay well we got there in the end okay so i'm gonna do my adventure off we go okay straight straight into the tutorial something i like no push notifications yet and it's good to see okay so something's gonna know some wizard chat we're gonna get him out onwards so colorful was

looking very exciting i'm gonna do some stuff right there okay so spiffing so far tap on the merchant actually see what you want to survive super matching okay i'll pay coins she wants some apples okay show you how to get the apples from the apple tree remorse drag the water to each apple tree

okay um i can sell goods to myra um okay all right so she wants three apples okay all over again are we okay so that's uh quite exciting isn't it so colorful kind of kind of noisy we're doing stuff um i guess this is this is kind of how tutorials tend to be now this is obviously that was fairly simple but um obviously some people will have problems with it everything is getting a very wide market with this um but i think the the training tutorials now is to get them done over very quickly um and then kind of just let the player kind of do what they want so let's see so basically i'm just being told to repeat

um doing what it's already did so i won't do that okay um that's my third one so yeah okay for some more oh goodness okay i'm just gonna say sell the highest efforts okay so i don't really need to play

through the tutorial i mean we're up to about four minutes can i kind of see what's going on with this and you kind of see there's these other characters who will be unlocked from that point of view the tutorial will continue again but um so it's quite nice i've not been asked to do anything i've wanted the game i downloaded the game um i'm playing the game now i've not been asked to sign up for zynga it's not after facebook i've been asked for anything so i find that a pretty kind of pleasant experience um i'm non-threatening just kind of getting with the game but um just for the for the purposes of monetizing now i'm just gonna have a quick look just have a quick look at the kind of store so also we've got this xp thing which is driven by game play these two things with little crosses by them you know um looking like they're going to be a store so let's have a gander to see what we've got okay so coins so very standard six bands starting at the cheapest 69 p

or 99 cents again but not the most expensive so that's 39 pounds 99 uk money so that's what's that going to be it's going to be a huge about 60 bucks so this has got another one okay so it's not gone for the maximum on that one and we have but on this one so we have two two hard currencies you have the the gold the coins and the crowns and this is actually now um you kind of see a differentiation you know you've got two hard currencies not a hard capturing and soft currency that you convert between so this one goes the most expensive you can spend it's obviously the apple um maximum 69 pounds 99 in english money or 99.99 in u.s but the cheapest um currency here the cheapest inter transaction here is uh not 19 not the 99 cents here so that is

uh one pound 49 in the uk and 1.99 in the us so slight differentiation there so let's have a look at special offers okay so as well as buying the pure currency we can also do bundling which is i mean i think it's kind of a it's a good way sometimes uh it's pretty at the start of the game for people to um well for companies to get people spending so in this one there's actually quite done quite a nice way i'm just standing retailing really so i'm getting the crowns i'm getting some bonus coins i'm getting some oats i don't know what oats are at the moment but obviously a resource i guess and it's actually saying here it's 4.99 but it's 15 dollar value so if you bought all those things separately i mean the trust that's the case i'll probably uh have a bit of research and see if that is the case but um and we're kind of seeing a lot more of this kind of kind of like spot

retailing obviously they can this is all done with html5 um so it can be changed on the fly so zynga can change this to make more expensive less expensive but uh you know whatever whatever they see kind of people want um let's look at the social things obviously it's what we know zinger for so we can connect with facebook we're not being asked to go to zynga dot com or the movie i'll sign up at some stage never post your permission obviously that's a kind of a throwback to the early days of farmville um not being not being kind of incentivized to do this though i mean i think this is something that um is uh probably right maybe some people just really happy to do it to see who's playing but um obviously this kind of currency is free to the developer so it's good to incentivize people to go oh okay facebook get 50 crowns or something

so what's this one then this is the something else completely different oh so okay that's going to be looks like a bit more of a farming element there a bit more exploring element there good so it's all all pretty simple we should be uh looking to see how how uh successful this is on a commercial basis but uh from a monetizer point of view this wouldn't be seen as a particularly home highly monetized game in the early stages at least looks fairly very standard nothing um nothing difficult going on so kind of a good a good example of how to create the kind of opening experience and free play game