Monetizer: Dawn of Steel

hello and welcome to pocket gaming up business monetizer this is a feature where we look at various free to play mobile games and just have a look at the monetization they use and some of the user experience kind of techniques and tricks that games are currently using so the game we're looking at today is as you can see a strategy game it's called dawn um of steel and it's published by a german publisher called flare games and developed by a u.s startup called superweapon who they're kind of as these startups tend to be these days kind of a veterans of console pc games they know what they do when it comes to strategy games um so these two companies have been working together um for quite a long time actually them in the game has been in software it was in software for a number of months as well so as you can see i've just started off so

if we zoom out a pretty pathetic little base really to be starting off with but um uh as we know from games like clash of clans so so mobile strategy is a pretty big genre and if you have success in this genre you can make a lot of money um so let's go through some of the kind of gameplay and some of the monetization that this game has um so we can see as we expect with um strategy games i guess let's start from the top here um so there's some resources it gets four different resources so there's um this is battle point so you kind of earn these by doing battles you have two soft currencies um so soft currencies are ones you don't buy but you kind of like earn them during the game in this case fire resources it says plasma there's pink stuff and credits and so you can see here i've got a plasma that i just clicked that's going up and then i've got these credit these ships go off and do things to get you credit nice little animation there so you can see the game 3d model it's not a 3d camera but it's um certainly a step up

from unplugged glass classic lenses you know how many years old now um so no surprising there um so we've got a little base here um we've got resources so we have a hard currency of course that's where you spend money the influence in this case so usual situation so we have different different amounts of influence we can buy ranging from where are we that's his four pounds um so i guess that's kind of getting for five dollars isn't that the yes that's the cheapest one then going up to um 100 80 pounds um and we can see as you as typically happens as you spend more money you get more for your dollar or pound so if you buy the then the most you buy the most you get 40 more than if you bought this equivalent time multiple of the cheapest one there's all that stuff's pretty standard um so far um so let's kind of see what we're doing in the game

so um it's kind of nice with a lot of these strategy games they kind of they kind of the issue a lot of them have is control really so we're in a touch screen um we haven't got like a like a mouse keyboard control we can't easily control a large number of troops kind of successfully so many games like like um okay it's more by the clash of clans you kind of have to basically have a tank rush a wool rush and you just have you build a massive army and just let it go and it kind of does what it does you don't have much control over it this game is pretty different in the sense that it's much more um kind of granular so let's go and have a look at our mechs so it's a mech game um so obviously you can have more unlock more but um it's pretty it's pretty um the units are impressive but you have a few of them at the moment i've only got two um they've been they've been out on a mission so i need to repair them so there we go so i can repair um different times it's going to like a lot of these games uh let's do basic repair using my plasma it's going to take a

minute this guy had it obviously didn't take any damage at all he's a bit of a bigger one but of course with these kind of mechs we can customize them so we can buy spend some of our um this is hard currency to have a pink one but we want to do that that no um um but what's a bit more interesting is research so i've researched i can upgrade to my weapon let's see if i can research a chain gun so that's 60 000 battle points not even quite not even close to that um not even the third this one is an ability slot so i can unlock a rig for more customization so it's 20 000 let's see i can do that let's get that started so that's going to take 10 minutes um so we kind of get an idea about kind of what we're doing how we're kind of upgrading our um repairing upgrading customizing our our units that will make them more effective in battle but these things are taking the soft currency or half currency and they're taking time to do as well

so load out um so at this point i can unlock an ability but obviously to do that i have to what i've just done with the other rig so that's kind of a nice kind of a user interface to show me what i'm doing so that's in the hangout this is in this building here um another nice thing you can actually do see if i can do it um obviously you can up you can uh move things around you can upgrade them again so upgrade it's gonna take um certain amount of soft current so it's gonna take battle um high currency or soft currency obviously i don't think i have enough i haven't got enough resources so do i want to use a hard currency to fill up the gap that was a typical monetization technique it takes 15 minutes to upgrade but it's a nice thing little thing i can test my defenses so this is very early in the game my defenses are not very strong at all so um let's see what happens so this is if another player i presume

he's going to attack my base or uh all right so i'm actually going to attack it this is actually quite nice some other games have done this but um so i'm going to deploy and attack my own base so this gives you a sense of the gameplay so i've got these are my two rigs so off they go these are big lumbering massive things i've only got two turrets and you can see as i move them forward they each have a special ability so this is the special ability this one has so when we're in range like the blue cannot see it's going to far off its laser so this one's coming up let's see it's suspicious ability is specialty was used that's kind of turned down it's timed out so this one can climb up for missiles so let's get them all in action as you can see my base is not very powerful at all all my rigs are more powerful than my base depending on how you want to see it there's these little drone guys coming out to um don't really do much damage but you basically get the idea um so i can probably just end that to

retreat from this battle yeah okay so we're gonna go back so that's quite a nice thing you get an idea of if you're when your base is much stronger um bigger kind of any any weak points so um obviously to do a proper battle we have to go into the battle mode i'll go into the the map mode so here we go um it's quite nice kind of um the way you zoom in so it zooms in into so these are these are battles i've won it's gonna obviously if you attack the bases you kind of um gain some soft currency so you can see that is not particularly strong base either i'm not much stronger my best friend's got these two these two kind of guns so if i attack

i'm gonna use up a bit of a bit of credit but not hardly very much at all uh i can see the available loop i'm gonna get um so get the idea that the the actual the gameplay i think is is um is pretty nice um for this game the monetization i think is fairly standard um so they're not trying to kind of reinvent anything um it's kind of kind of you're gated on time for for update you know upgrading things um and doing some research so i've upgraded my actually i've got this upgraded my rig so i'm gonna get a bit of um a bit of hard currency bit of earlier this achievement kind of kind of system um again here i can't really do much at the moment but these are as i as i get further in the game i can have missile launchers and tank spawners and um different kind of um these are different uh buildings i can put in my base obviously these again are kind of gated with my command rank

because i've just started out my command rank is pretty pathetic it has to be said i've built i have two credit docs and two plasma extractors where he built this i could build some more so she really i'm not very keen on walls really but i can build 50 walls at some point probably have to do that to protect my base so you kind of get the idea of what's going on on on with dawn of steel in a sense not radical not anything radical that we haven't seen before but um a kind of a well put together game i think um obviously you go further in you can do the whole kind of clan alliance type stuff as well which is where a lot of the long-term benefit or long-term retention of the game happens um i guess the interesting thing to see is it's a very competitive genre there's loads of games always being released in the in the strategy genre so if you're a strategy fan you're probably overwhelmed with games and there's only really one or two you're going to be playing um probably in the long term so um i think this is pretty interesting i mean i'm quite into strategy games and i'll give this one a whirl i think it's a bit different just having a few units having kind of lots of units um it's a different approach um so uh

hopefully you'll find a some sort of audience um obviously on the site we'll be we'll be covering it in more detail and seeing kind of if it finds a new audience but there we are that's a monetization monetizer for uh this time come back uh we'll be doing some more games plenty more games to be um to be checking out so come back and stick with our youtube channel see you then bye you