Monetizer: DomiNations

hello and welcome to pocket gaming office's monetizer this is where we look at free to play mobile games let's have a quick look at the monetization and the kind of general flow user experience so game looking at today is um dominations so this is um from big huge games um who kind of have a pretty good reputation uh from the pc strategy kind of gaming scene it kind of started out from um from ensembl studios so we're known for kind of um age of empires and all that kind of stuff um and this is their first mobile game and it's published by nexon so um obviously again pretty well known uh pc free-to-play publisher so um kind of some big reputations kind of um relying on this one so let's have a look i've kind of started um a while back so but still not very advanced let's see i'm still in the stone age so

um in some ways kind of quite traditional uh kind of strategy game as we kind of understand them on on mobile so if we go in here let me just see this is my kind of the heart of my base now i've just upgraded it so see where this big three is going on so just press on that so my nation has reached the bronze age i've unlocked all these following items it's got a pyramid well gracious acropolis and hanging gardens okay stonehenge there we go some some good uh historical architecture there um there we go wow so there we go the bronze age brings it new weapons a new warfare roving bands of enemy players can now attack me okay so a bit of pvp is going to enter compete against other players in the league leaderboard okay um currently i have a peace treaty for 24 hours julie good i can use crowns to activate new peace

treaties when my current one runs out i expect to have to buy this this is my kind of a guide through the early stage of the game i'm going to claim the reward maybe we can see we see some goals as well okay so in terms of the kind of basic um monetization of the game we have as most of these games have so we have two basic soft resources so a gold and a and uh food so gold is my little gold mine down here oh no he's gonna tell me some other more stuff okay yeah rearrange my face so there's a gold mine so i've got only got six my massive empire only has six people around but i can send them also gonna do some mining so they're gonna wander around there and you can see here it's quite graphically quite nice kind of see what's going on there um and speed it up with um one of these kind of crowns that this is the hard currency

so as we'd expect um various options got a starter pack that's not bad isn't it um and going all the way up to a hundred dollars for the mountain of crowns fourteen thousand of them again a fairly standard um kind of exchange ratio so um the other thing to get is food so one way of getting it is i've got these fruit trees so i can send my guys to go and gather from the fruit trees what else can we see um the different units i've got some defensive units here i've got a tower and a level one um okay so interesting to see here so my upgrade is not just spending money and um in games like clash of clans i mean a lot of these strategy games is they've had building units and building units are specifically used for building um you can see in this game we basically have these these um they're not specifically building units are just people in my empire and they're used for everything so there's kind of a kind of kind of a subtle

kind of um tweak of the of the process here where we're not built having builders um we're just kind of having a more i guess holistic and more integrated um use of just these people in my empire and not even casual clouds it's not really that's really quite a military-based thing there's not really just people wandering around it was this game you know these guys have kind of looked at games like civilization and then that kind of thing that's where a lot of it a lot of their kind of defining dna is based on um so i've got some fruit trees and gathered again so there's a stag here you've got three of my guys and then go off and hunt him and actually you see them he runs he runs away and my guys whack quack quack poor old stag no vegetarians in this era clearly um so what's going on here um so this is these are slingers these are obviously attacking units this is something i researched earlier so it's telling me um they deal four times damage to foot troops low hit points vulnerable to cavalry

if we go here let's go to the research scene so i could research some warriors there upgrade my warriors if i upgrade my blacksmith i can get bowman horse riders you know up here get some ballista tactics um okay and some general units as well okay alexander she's a general top rate so clearly this is kind of sitting in between the kind of pc style very in-depth civilization research kind of based game and you know and a clash of clans so and i guess this is where people look at people looking at kind of games like clash of clans and boom beach um and thinking how you know people clearly understand how to play these games people clearly like to play these games how can we give them something that's different enough to make it interesting but not so different enough but they kind of don't understand or can't quickly understand how these games work so um what else we've got down on this there's some forest obviously you can kind of

clear clear this forest you see this is the outside world up there so by the end and i'm in the space age i've probably have rocket ships and stuff in here when i um so what's going on here oh yeah so this is a very pc thing so i've built a road fairly randomly but i get um gold for connecting these these these roads up and let's go and pick that fruit tree and install i can probably now build loads of things okay so this is this is a very kind of a typical sieve thing where i can choose a a kind of a wonder for my uh empire and they all have different different kind of options so i can make my defending army tougher speeds up troops spawning a pyramid will grant a boost to my field stone age will grant me a bonus gold from a caravan and increase the effectiveness of my road networks and the hanging gardens will increase the resources gained by

fruit trees i'm not really sure what to choose those ones for yeah um as you can see here kind of this kind of shows you kind of um very straightforwardly kind of more roads now i can gamepl another mill market farms store houses so let's build a farm then i'd like to start clearing some trees so let's see two of my guys there are gonna spend a minute building a farm so i guess we get the basic idea about how the uh the base is going um what's in there that's my starter pack there's a bit of monetization there so ten dollars i can get um 1200 crowns which is what i get those anyway and i get an extra house so that's a slight incentive i suppose so let's try and do a battle now my army's on i have to say i'm not very

advanced i'll probably do some slingers now can i but my capacity is only 10. well let's um i'm going to upgrade and we've got four okay so let's bend off now upgrading that but in the meantime let's lose a battle um so multiplayer now or i can continue my um the single player pve stuff so um last time i attacked babylonia and got whooped man let's try and attack the upper euphrates so for those who know who know your uh geography we're in it iraq and syria which is probably anyway probably some political point we made them let's attack see how we get on so i've got 10 spearmen and i'm going to attack this base this is two um defensive units there defensive

let's see we get on so they're all gonna so i can get them all here and attack that defensive unit and see this is on a timer so it's been i can't really control them anymore and again this is something a lot of strategy games is kind of looking at how how can we give a more because in a piece of game you'd be clicking and tapping all over the place games haven't really done that so now you can see my guys are not really know what they're doing after them taking this half of them attacking that base i can't really do anything about it um no there we go that's pretty quick um but um it's a different way of uh it gets provided more control but not providing a pc level of control and if we can see up here and it's obviously time-based again this is complete destruction so this is quite nice there's different bits of destruction so you get different stars for how much damage you do one if you destroy the town center and then it's a time-based thing so i did okay there got some loot and my all my troops survived i know they didn't do them a lot so this is um i guess a lot of games now strategy

games have been looking really not having this thing where you all your troops get um destroyed um i think they've all been all gone yeah so that's kind of i think oh no here they come back so they only only lost the ones that are that were killed i think that's that obviously encourages you to be um a bit more careful in how you use them so that's that's a good thing um so there we go there's um dominations um i guess the interesting thing to see with this game really is if it can find that sweet spot um kind of in between a very straightforward tattoo cleanse boom beach type game and a you know a pc type strategy game obviously there's there's quite a big gap occur to feel there are lots of people are trying different ways of doing it and obviously obviously these guys are big huge games know the strategy kind of a gameplay know the options that you can do and just be interesting to see if they've

found the right audience and i guess the other thing is their audiences tended to be fairly western and obviously now mobile games are a fairly um global um situation so quite whether this will appeal to um the big markets in korea japan and china which are three of the top kind of five markets by um by value um this becomes quite important obviously nexus is a actually a korean company to begin with are now floating on the japanese stock exchange should be able to advise on that um but we will wait and see how it rises up the top grossing charts or doesn't so domination from big huge games and nexon