Monetizer: Clash Royale

hello and welcome to pocket gaming business monetizer i'm john jordan so the bouncy lovely menu screen we're looking at today is of course from clash royale the clash royale has been ripping its way up the top grossing charts everywhere in the world pretty much so it's uh supercell's fourth game and looking like it will be there these are second most successful kind of hard to say that it's going to be clash of clans which has just been um doing the doing the do for three and a half years now um but certainly i think boom beach and heyday are on the rack in terms of the um the revenue that this is producing on a day-to-day level so you know monetize we try to look at monetization really um not just monetization in terms of hard money but also kind of soft power kind of monetization um and a lot of that is psychology so it's why i kind of started with this screen looks a bit dull isn't it the menu screen move that way a bit um but i kind of

think this is pretty much when you start the game up and one thing to say with with clash royale is it starts super fast it's something i'm amazed game developers don't spend more time on look at all supercells games they'll all start probably in about 10 seconds at most 20 seconds obviously depends on your network connection but they just they just start if you want to play a clash a supercell game you can just get into the game straight away these games where it takes 30 seconds a minute to load and just kind of downloading new assets every time i can work for the kind of hardcore rpg guys but if you're looking to attract a mass market that's just not going to cut the mustang it has to be this kind of launching straight away and i launched straight away what what do i get to see this kind of happy menu it's bouncing around it's going wow there's a stuff um for me to open isn't that lovely um so the free chests are the the uh the things you see most of and they are basically worthless but let's go and have a look at them so free chess wow preachers i'm gonna get three more

cards in i got some gold the girls always useful i got some gems no gems are always not very many though too i've got some arrows i hate arrows don't use those at all and i got an archer oh look at that common card but you can see not actually very useful at this stage not super far into the game but um to get to level five i've got to find another 43 so basically i didn't i didn't get anything at all there a bit of golden [ __ ] moving so oh another free chest so you can see the three chests are basically this exciting thing it looks like you're getting loads of stuff but effectively just encouraging to keep playing my minions card where i've got two you know three three extra yeah but even on the level four i've got five dollar 17. valkyrie red card that sounds cool but there's still another two on that so you know i'm not going to be too ridiculous about this so the fruit the free chest you get them every four hours and you get to maximum um so that is kind of the first clever thing that superstar does it's basically as soon as you load up a game obviously if you if you've not if you've

played it within four hours you don't get one but basically every time you land up a game for the majority of people each you'll get something free and you go lovely so crankthat's a bit more useful again very clever though so crown chests um when we go into the game you can have a quick look for crown chest every time you destroy an enemy's castle so there's three castles in the game there's there's two secondary ones and one primary one every time you get that even if you lose a game um but you've destroyed destroyed one of their enemies castle you effectively get a crown there's ten you need 10 crown chests to get this new crown chest crown chest is actually like a pretty much like a progression um kind of uh resource uh grinding kind of option so we open that again it's going to get something decent here hopefully i've got some gold but a lot more gold you notice there than the um the free one uh got some resources twice as much again gems still not brilliant though minions well my minions are starting still fifteen to go though now that's a bit more interesting i

unlocked a rare tower a bomb tower so that's an unlocked thing i didn't have that before i still need another uh card to actually be able to use that but i've actually kind of so even that even unlocked is a psychological sleight of hand um skeletons i do use skeletons actually but um oh there we go we've got something good there so my skeleton army um again not a particularly great card but graphically quite nice when they'll drop on the screen and attack a giant so now that was quite useful so i've actually done something and i can do an upgrade so look down here you can do an upgrade so these are different cards that you've got um so we can see here i don't care about arrows so i could i've got 31 cards and i only need to use 10 to upgrade it so i could upgrade it but i'd be using some of my coins so i don't use arrows i think arrows arrows are for losers probably not probably very high level players use arrows but i don't use them um but skeleton army there we go oh i can't do it so i was so excited and i don't have enough gold so there we go

supercell is not the most uh generous when it gives away hard currency or soft currency in its games actually which is kind of interesting so i guess um that's how you make billions of dollars a year not by being too generous okay so that wasn't so good um let's go back to the menu screen so what else what else so we can see here the crown chest now i've opened it so um i have to do another 10 get another 10. so that if i was brilliant to play which i'm not that could just be that'd be four games and i could would have earned 10 because i would um obviously every time you win a game you get three chests and if you lose a game but destroy one of the only ones you you get something um so what's this thing here down here so i actually did some sort of good thing here and i won something a big super magical chest wow that's pretty good in it start to unlock it a day a day i mean if it wasn't superstar making this game

people would be up in arms um about i've gotta wait a day now as i say i'm not a very high level player you can see i'm level four which is quite pretty very embarrassing but um i've got a day or i can use i could use like pretty much all the gems that i've earned i've not spent any money and open it now i'm not the kind of player who does that so um i do find this super interesting so what's super interesting is when you play a game of clash of clan uh that's freudian isn't it clash royale and you win you get one of these chests and then what happens is you have to wait to unlock it so the basic kind of psychological loop of winning a game going wow i did really well i won a game what's my reward supercell then puts its monitors main monetization loop which is basically waiting for stuff and speeding stuff up with gems places it within that it's like that kind of psychological reward loop which if it wasn't totally 100 percent you know um proud of its game i'm proud that his game was always stronger than

your psychological um your love for the game is almost you know stronger than your psychological demand to get the reward straight away that it actually puts his monetization loop in there which is it's kind of staggering i think the more i think about it the more stagnant it is it's more staggering that people haven't kind of come come to this conclusion more often i guess the issue is there are very few developers who can polish a game like supercell can so if if you did put this monetization loop if any other developer tried to put the monetization loop within the reward loop then basically it would have a day one retention of zero because everyone would go i just won a game i want my reward and you've made me wait or pay for it but the clever thing about supercell you know almost their genius is they can turn those things on their head because the quality of the game is is sufficiently good and and obviously the quality game is not in and of itself the issue is the kind of hype around it it's the the platform support it gets from apple and google it's the press support it's all that kind of wider kind of soft power that supercell

more than any other games company let alone mobile games company can bring to kind of bear on its games so should we actually do a battle um i don't know let's get a look at what we've got down here actually so we looked at this this is card so i can actually um again another one station things i can actually buy cards so i could that super magical chest i had i could actually just buy one or if i spent the money you can see here i can spend the usual thing 100 um 80 pounds i can transfer the gems to gold that's very standard as well um i can kind of upgrade cars this is a pretty minor thing but kind of makes gold a bit more valuable so i could go in and i could spend to do gold or four gold you can kind of see if there was a a card you particularly wanted to level up then this is this is kind of like as you see the top says new cars will appear at this level so not only will new cards appear after 42 minutes 50 seconds also it tells me that well i've only got a certain period of time if i really love

minions i wanted to buy all 20 cards or level it up to 20 or keep going then i have to i can't just hang around i have to go and get that gold now and spend that money so that's that's kind of an again interesting retailing retailing is all about limited edition sale ends tomorrow yeah that kind of stuff superstar knows all about that these are just the cards you can just see how you level them up there's loads of cars i haven't got um battle we've seen that before here's a little um clan stuff not doing any clown stuff but uh that's that will be a video for another time and then the other clever thing they've done here is tv right now so you can go and watch the 35th player versus the 21st player or the 7th 40th player 7th player or you know this is kind of you know this is his esports street kind of 101 really very clever technically that they've done it kind of within within the app so you're not going to youtube to find that but the people probably would still do we want to go to youtube whether this is um it'd be

interesting to know how useful is this for me as a low level player but very interesting i guess when esports is becoming seen as becoming a big thing will mobilize past esports take off who knows but obviously you won't take off if people aren't kind of creating the personalities so to have that in the app is pretty powerful so let's go into a game just so we can see um because actually the game itself there's no motivation in there at all um i'm going to be i hope this is everyone be laughing and embarrassed at me but basically so i'm blue down the bottom he's red at the top or she that should probably hear as well so then my lips is full i shouldn't do that really so i'm going to place some units down there he's put some units down there we're going to go attack each other's castles oh easy he's keen on arrows um so i'm going to assume that my costume can destroy him and i'm gonna have a big

push on his castle basically you have to destroy the castle in the middle which is like the king's castle this chess is a sort of kind of um inspiration for it oh they got rid of my uh that's pretty hot um so your elixir just abandoned just um pull up the photo as you can as it feels like you can um goblins as you you can spawn different units and so it all becomes a little bit of um kind of uh souls of spy but it's actually not paper scissors but i use a unit he uses a unit that's better against my unit as i say i'm not really a good player so i'm just throwing units into the mix pretty much and they're very very they actually do the smartest thing about oh dear um the smartest thing about clash royale really is even if you're a hopeless player eventually you'll win something it's not just because it doesn't have its ranking um algorithm so you're playing against you're really good you're playing for

the good players if you're really bad you're playing three bad players and there's enough people in the world playing it that eventually you know a randomness kind of element happens to it so um everyone can think they're better than they actually are because any good algorithm will have you winning 51 games out of 100 i think so look like i'm going to get that get that one there oh am i gonna get it yeah there you go so i got so even if i lose the game i've got one crown there or so um so there's everything safe so um 30 seconds three minutes again so we can see now the elixir has gone crazy because we're minutes ago so i get double elixir so i'm in a pretty strong position now because basically just using it you're just spraying out units and if i can stop this giant

so with these games i thought there's lots of strategy with all these games like basically ends up in a tank rush which is certainly what happened with the battery plans um i'm not making much impact on his tower though but it won't matter because so i'm gonna get it i'm genius i take all that back about it all being random i'm actually very very good players you can see my my tactics were incredible i don't want to feel the test because i've played rubbishly um terribly badly so we can see there so the really clever thing now is um this is probably the other the not as clever as the as the loop stuff for the um reward loop monetization loop um interlinking but the other clever thing that supercell has done is you can see here so i'm waiting for 24 hours to unlock my super duper super duper magic test but i've got i've got i just my this is my reward here oh i want my silver chest

so i can't do it because another unlock is in progress that's taking 24 hours but i could spend 18 of my gems oh less than 10 over 10 slightly over 10 but i could spend that now to get those rewards now um but even if i didn't have this super duper chest spending a day unlocking i'd have to wait three hours um and then the other clever thing is obviously there's four chest slots which is completely meaningless apart from the fact that people wouldn't would you talk to people play clash royale they go well yeah i make sure that all my slots are full my chest lots are full when you go what why the only reason you would do that is because you're going to be spending gems i'm not going straight away there's no point having four of them because three of them you're waiting on because you're waiting on time so it's kind of interesting in many ways you know clash royale's success is a is something not to be um kind of copied by anyone else because no one else can put put the quality of game together that allows you to get away with these or in any other game would be

awful all awful monetization loops and weight loops and and and time gating and it's it is a testament to supercell what's up can do you kind of swim against swim against the current um you know to that degree it has proven itself as an outlier but this i think certainly clash royale is you could say certainly kind of heyday was was a better farming simulator than we'd seen before but was basically in the in that mould clash of clans exactly was it was i wouldn't say necessarily a copy but there'd been lots of other games that certainly on facebook um that had taken that kind of that strategy um kind of genre template and obviously it's changed a lot in it since it came out 2012. boom beach was a bit more interesting i don't think kind of really was panned out to be as interesting a game although again that's changed a lot since it first came out but clash royales you would you put on the pedestal as being supercells

um prime example of of free-to-play mobile gameplay and monetization in in in something that could not be covered by anyone else which is obviously competitive advantage and when you can when you can do that globally with spending whatever they're going to spend 1500 million dollars on marketing um you have another billion dollar success so there we go um the the good the bad and the beautiful of of clash royale monetization um hope you enjoyed watching thanks for watching at least and don't forget to subscribe to our youtube channel so we do a lot of this monetization of mobile games we do a lot of first-time user experience which we play a mobile game for the first time and give kind of first impression comment on so um if you like that kind of stuff do please do subscribe and um and then you won't miss a thing and hopefully you'll find some games that have probably not been quite as well advertised as clash royale that you might find interesting as well so thanks for watching hope to see you again soon