Monetizer: Compass Point: West

foreign monetizer this is where we look at free to play uh mobile games and have a look at just kind of how they're operating and how they're monetizing the way I'm looking at today is um called Compass Point West from um startup finish developer called next game so as you can see here um there's some bass there's basically a base element to it so I guess kind of following the theme of strategy games like Clash of Clans is a base building element and an attacking building element to it um some kind of a differences um obviously the theme you can tell it you can see here zoom in nice 3D Graphics so this is all about um kind of the Wild West so you've got kind of Gunslingers and saloons and stuff um very similar in kind of underlying resources so we've got two sets of resources got goods and gold it's in filling up here got diamonds again fairly straightforwarding by these this is the hard currency these are used to unlock

um various boosts you can see up here um or to speed things up so there's some boosts here so the other kind of interesting thing we'll come to in a minute is is kind of um the hybridization so a lot of games are using kind of Base building and attacking and then trying to put in different gameplay so there's something that they've tried to do in in this game is is have kind of card elements so instead of having you have the base where you kind of have some defensive units um and obviously you have this kind of you have the storage for resources um you have the courthouse is basically like the um the town hall so it's basically it kind of tells you what level you are really um and how much your units can be leveled up but um unit wise you have um it's all based around cards so you're not really based around training units in the same way I did a lot of strategy games and obviously people have seen card based games are very um popular in in places like Japan a career in China and monetize very highly um you know particularly depending how you set up

the monetization um so what they've tried to do um for this game is is use card based elements but not monetize in touch a kind of aggressive manner so if we go into the car based element I can see here so there's a so the basic pack so this is time based so yes every two hours you get the opportunity to uh get some more cards from the basic pack than the silver pack so this is a better chance of rugged and Veteran cards so as we're expecting car based games the um cards have different um kind of levels different kind of um that shows how kind of powerful they are so rugged is the first is um basically basically in his rugged and Veteran um also here we've seen notorious so do the gold pack I have to get myself into level five before I can do that but um the interesting thing is is I can um for the silver pack anyway I can just buy these with soft currency so here we go okay so I can't so um I still have to so basically what I've done is now it's swapped out so um instead of having the basic pack it's gonna um let's wait two hours

um obviously you're not gonna wait two hours so I can spend 29 diamonds to get it now so let's in the process of showing you how it goes let's do that okay so open the deck so so three cards which one do I want so these are all these are kind of different um you have different um you have attack basically attack cars and kind of um resource cards so so William wealth he's the gold card the Tin Man is a is a kind of attack card um what should we have let's have a rugged William wealth okay um so again there's a gunslinger um or there's two regular cards here um so let's have the rugged ones sorry higher level and because I've I've paid um normally you'd only get two hands um to choose from but I've paid some diamonds earlier on so I get three hands on this we'll see that in the booster so again um let's have another William wealth those are the three cars I've collected I could buy if I want to um I can go in and this is the booster shop so I bought this extra draw permanent booster and I could buy um so this grants me an extra draw so I get

three draws into the two and this grants me an extra card from every draw so if I bought that one I get six cards um I don't think I'll do that though um so done so oh are we gonna I'm not gonna rate you at the moment no get rid of that so now you can see it's gone back to um in case I'm counting down to a basic pack or again I can spend more to get the um silver pack so any one point there's a pack so presumably with a gold pack that'll be the same thing there's still count down so if we go here these are my cards so we can see I've got three William wealth cards one goody good card and a James Spencer James Spencer um speeds things up um so you can kind of instead of just kind of buying winning the cards you can also merge them so if you get four of these you can merge it to do one of these um so yeah if I get my Saloon to level five I can merge four of these into the next um kind of a high level of cards um if I want to use them if I activate it it'll give me 3500 gold so there we go

and with the Gunslingers all right so let's see if I do this no so my salinity level four but I've got five of these Tin Man cards so if I can get it up to that let's see what I need to do for my Saloon so I can yeah I've got enough so we can upgrade that um so I can use it for the purpose of this demonstration let's use 10 diamonds to speed that up okay so let's go he's telling me now I can merge merge four regular Tin Men for one rugged tin man it's gonna cost me a bit probably I've got money never not enough currency I'll go on so there we go off they go so we're gonna get one of those now and I've got I can see the difference in the uh Graphics there okay so now I've got all these uh units let's go off and do some of the um action part of the game so this is the this is very much reminiscent of supercells Boom Beach I think so there's there's um a few diamonds pick up that's very very

reminiscent of Boom Beach as well you just randomly find diamonds always nice to see it so these are different areas I can attack um so I'm going to Gold so let's see give me some gold um okay so this is obviously kind of a PVE scenario so that's what I've got to attack and you see all these enemies I find actually the um this bit at the moment not very good at it but um quite difficult um so I've got six of the basic cards um two of these Tin Man cards and two of these Dynamite cards over there's only about a certain amount I can deploy at any one point so I can at the moment I can deploy all six of those and one of those

so if they're gonna go I can kind of have three of these um kind of uh flag card so I can kind of tell them where to go they have some basic AI as they destroy things I can I can get to unlock more deploy more units so let's see how they get on I'm just gonna leave them again on with it really you know this guy's going the wrong way it's gonna be a gunner I think this proved a good good diversary tactic so let's try and get them all down feels like we might do it there we go victory they've got some injured car too because it's a car basically not a unit thing your car's your units aren't killed um they just basically um kind of uh tap out and just need to and so again again it's time based so oh it's a little card nice I got a

h so now that's um my perspective that's basically going to provide more gold for me um so if I go back here this is kind of the hospital you can see the medicine wagon so I can speed them all up before now but um they're basically being healed and I can't really do anything with those characters um for another minute and a half um so there we go so that's um Compass Point West um kind of a I guess an interesting hybridization lots of people are trying different weight different things in this kind of strategy genre whether they're kind of a the card based element I mean it's very different from a puzzle and dragons type game it's much more casual but with a casual a casual audience like card based games um difficult to tell really there's not really been any big hits in the west of of card games um or even games that use kind of card games obvious ones like like Hearthstone which obviously is not because you're not really a casual game um so it gets interesting with this game is is it's designed to be the first of a

series of four so it's a couple of Point West this is this one then there's obviously north south and east kind of plan I guess that obviously it depends on how well this one does um it's only been out a couple of weeks they're kind of quite hard to tell but it's not it's not shot to the top of the charts but I guess the charts are not things you shoot to at the top of at the moment um there's some nice little elements here so there's this as well you can traveling shows that you can kind of watch your video advert and get some diamonds or or get a gunslinger um so I think it's um yeah and kind of say nice 3D and kind of nicely put together so as a debut kind of game from from these guys kind of pretty good going um so I guess we look to see how well they managed to uh get out of the charts and whether we see any more games in the uh in the compass point series foreign