Monetizer: Codemaster's Boom! Tanks

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.viz's monetizer column this is where we video the first five minutes or so of a free to play game and just have a look at the initial user interface experience and the different kind of monetization techniques that developers are using so the game we're looking at today is uh boom tanks from codemasters so well known for its rally games not done a lot of mobile stuff recently but be branching out more into the area so let's start our stopwatch let's fire up the game see what happens not much nope okay

okay audio it's all happening finally so it looks like we're going to go for a bit of a tutorial type thing we'll be logging for tank neighbor amazing move your finger under the enemy lining up the sights okay i feel the enemy meter okay murder for fire excellent aiming lets you fire early and gives you cash rewards okay i've seen the monetization technique i think so fire when the reload bar is full i don't have anywhere to

fire successfully oh i'm waiting for that okay right i should wait for that same thing so you've got a bit of rhythm action going on right tutorials well so far the titan has been fulfilled involves tanks will go boom try a little bit harder this gun is okay

hmm it's one problem with this type of gameplay approach is you're spending all the time looking at this small moving things on your hud rather than looking at the actual kind of battle but uh maybe if we get better at it and it'll get a bit more intuitive another thing obviously we probably not actually controlling our tanks we're just controlling the turret okay oh it's interesting free with your first ah so this is quite interesting so this is something i i um we don't see very much of i think we're gonna see a lot more of so

obviously we've done the tutorials that's quite nice i at least get an idea of what the game's about and now i'm being offered a vip tank with camo and a paint job and um it's limited it's limited by time so okay let me do it right now it's got like an hour um saying the usual price is 20 gold things how much it is no government let's view the store it's free elite tank oh affiliate time with any purchase okay right so this is something um in the kind of monetizer we've come up with with some kind of metrics of um to try and kind of rank on these games and one of the ones we look at is um the amount of time it takes for a game to get us into the store and try and get us to buy something and actually perhaps surprisingly um a lot of games don't do this i mean very few a handful

of have done this um so kabams of plastic juror six is is one example that does exactly this kind of thing as soon as you play the draw it tries to get you to buy it by a car so from that point of view i would say this is i think boom text is going to rank very highly or you know monetizer i'm going to check out the article um i'm probably going off is to see exactly what we're saying so i'm not actually going to buy it at the moment but we can have a quick look to see so traditional so our cheapest this is one pound 49 it's the smallest in that purchase uh 1.49 is 199 so we're starting to see again something we look at is this what we call our currency discount ratio so there's how much how many kind of units in this case oh in this case how much gold we get um for the smallest in that purchase compared to if you spend the most amount of money um how much we get on a per unit basis so this was actually helpful this game has actually told us

we get 151 free um gold we spend this but again this is interesting so going back to our monetizer um it's kind of score um one thing to look at is there is the minimum in that purchase also the maximum now most games obviously because this apple's maximum take take the largest inappropriate interaction you can do is 99.99 or 69 pounds 99p so codemasters although they've kind of tried to get us to spend straight away we can't actually spend i mean that's three that's a third of what most games will get you to spend so that will there's do you think we'll balance off in our in our calculation that's the hard currency um we can also looks like we've got a soft currency cash oh and that one is 99.99 okay so i think this game is going to score fairly highly on our monetization metric um so we've got gold and cash two hard currencies

and we can order some free gold by doing some um probably incentivized videos it tends to be popular at the moment okay now so we've got the entire tap joy um off a wall here yeah attached right there so um it used to be pretty popular say 18 months a year ago not seen so much now um probably because apple has tended to stamp down on it um see more on android but for these things i mean these are these are quite hard cut off awards in the sense that we're entering a competition to win a trip to disneyland paris or we're ordering a o2 a sim card a removable phone so we're kind of doing kind of real world activities in order to to gain um gold this one be the first to get gear dear hunter

2014 so that's actually that's a glue game download but to get any decent amounts of gold i mean 22 goals so if i subscribe to evo a car magazine for 12 issues for almost 50 pounds i get 22 gold it seems a very good deal unless i obviously wanted to subscribe to evo beforehand let's see what else the game's gonna give us the arm did has this tanks future tank here okay so again this is something um i i think is a very good move i mean partly i'd like to see this before i get thrown into the store so um the game's giving me fifteen thousand uh dollars or whatever these things are um to buy a tank and i think that's kind of better than just giving you a default

tank to begin with to give you some sort of option um and then you can be taking a bit more fluidly interest into a store environment um so let's have a look somewhere in here i'll find what it says reciprocation obviously yes that's the one reciprocation so i will reciprocate because the game has given me 15 000 of these dollars that i will like the game more i mean this is kind of why supermarkets sometimes when you go in there they'll give you a free block of cheese or a small block of chocolate then um you feel then kind of obligated in some way to go and buy something

so um i can buy a tank um okay see my tanks here good old british tank yeah oh there's a good old bridge it american m103 uh so these ones are locked how are they okay so we've got different so these are the c1 how many is that that's six five five in the c1 class and c2 class and c3 they're locked and then these are actually these classes are presumably coming updates to the game so i've got a british tank to american tanks a german tank and a russian maybe this is a flagship anyway

okay let's go with the good old-fashioned british buy this tank there we go that's the camouflage selection okay oh so i haven't got any gold i haven't got any i spent all my money um so i could get this camo job on time offer i want to get so i get a bonus 150 for every battle i use it again this is very something very similar that um the uh kabam uses in fast and furious six where the camo you've got a camera job but the um the paint job on your car the better the paint job um the more kind of a kind of currency you earn during each race at delivered free again this is something csr racing popularized when you buy a vehicle you can say that you might have to wait some time for it to arrive if you're upgrading parts if they're import parts you might have to wait some time for them to arrive or spend um currency to get them obviously this is the start of the game no point it

trying to make us wait for for our tank to arrive so this looks very um influenced by kind of the csr racing fast and furious six type type games which i guess i mean this is okay we're shooting things rather than racing things today so it's a vic a vehicle collection game as we can see here upgrades so actually we're gonna have the um so upgrade the attack defense aiming reload that's just on the gun we've got our ammo armor tech so we can see how this effect so a lot of the updates seem to involve involve a gun um

okay and also we've got a okay this is interesting so we've got a fuel system again pretty standard for these type games so people if they want to play continually they have to pay money i don't want to take a photo of it and also this um the key thing that's interesting status okay so if i buy if i do any purchase i become a vip member now this is something i hadn't seen a lot of and i've saw um sorry one of glue's games um the other week which is the korean-made gameway it kind of like gives if you it gives you a like it's like another incentive to spend money um you just spend small amounts of money because then you kind of get some kind of bonus items back on a regular basis um it's kind of interesting kind of psychology um maybe i don't know whether that [ __ ] thing is beginning it's quite big in japan and korea not

seen it very much in western games but maybe you're going to feel like oh you know if i'm not sp if i spend very much i'm spending like you know 69p or 99 cents and they get vip get these extra things that could be quite a powerful mechanic i'm afraid um okay so this is just pretty much going into the into the game so this is showing us difficulty this is my rewards this is the threat and it's gonna use one of my fuel so um so yeah so that's shut down a uh so that's um boom tanks from from codemasters i think they've obviously uh been doing their homework um game out fairly recently so um it's kind of hard to get an idea really about um how successful it's been but um certainly there's a lot of different kind of lead

monetization techniques um so uh we'll we'll keep an eye on over the next month or so whether what the downloads are like and um if it gets anywhere in the top grossing charts