Monetizer: Empires & Allies

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to pocketgamer.biz monetizer this is where we look um at free to-play mobile games and just uh kind of see um kind of what the flow of the game's like in terms of the gameplay and have a look at the monetization um so the game we looking at um today is the new one from Zinga which is um Empires and allies so um a bit confusingly this was actually a Facebook game about kind of probably four years ago now there was a game released under the same um name which is um this is not related to at all completely different um but for some reason they've kept the same um game I guess all they got all the trademarks and stuff already sorted out for it so um um so to some we look at this um so it kind of looks a little bit like a a um

well it is a a mobile strategy game so it's kind of following along the lines of of Clash of Clans to a degree so that's what it looks like there's been plenty of mobile games that do this kind of thing um so this is still fairly early on I'm think I'm what I level level five overall but my base I think is just level two HQ so um so you can get a good idea of kind of the starting kind of process of the game so pretty straightforward we got a headquarters which you normally have um which all the other kind of um upgrade uh up put upgrades kind of work off of I've got some um some troops down here so I've got um some I guess kind of RPG type things and some just normal troops two resources so we got these ones here I'm going to collect um and this some oil one and there's like a kind of um that's a tree no um supply drop so there we go that's where my supplies are given so um they're kind of pumping away

um giving me some resources um and I guess as we expect there's a hard so there soft currencies um there's a hard currency as as we would um expect in these games so this is just gold I can buy this for real money so it's pretty very standard in fact kind of ratio so we've got 500 um gold I can buy for $5 um so that's a ratio of um $1 to 100 and at the end here we got um 14,000 gold for um 100 bucks so ratio of 140 gold to a dollar that's pretty standard that's what we call a what I call anyway discount ratio of 1.4 so you get 1.4 more um Golds for each um kind of gold you buy at the high end compared to the low end um and then there's kind of a um five bands of of of buying and they're all pretty straightforward so you got um you got $5 $10 $20 $50 $100 so all all all kind of well and good to degree a little

bit of kind of um um not not that um Empire now is doing anything different here but has we have see here one Builder so an engineer so obviously in Clash of Clans you had Builders you got two Builders to begin with you could buy the third builder that was kind of what became the third builder kind of a monetization issue where um you know you could you could buy the that was a lot of people would spend like $5 buying the first Builder the third builder um and then just make stuff quicker um that that kind of fashion has gone away a little bit so in this case you have one Builder one building kind of one build process you can buy another one if you want to but that's the most you can do um in a sense I always think this is quite a good thing um if you think you're going to play the game a lot okay you're spending um a hard currency there so you're spending $7 half dollars effectively um uh to do that but you're kind of doubling your efficiency at this stage it's always in the start of a game it's always efficiency of building is always um the thing that kind of sled you down the most um don't think I can upgrade

anything at the moment to to show that but um what I could do so if I wanted to upgrade this at the moment obviously I can um it's going to take me 5 minutes to upgrade I can do the instantly using my um gold hard currency um have I got I could do with this so I could upgrade it take take five minutes so now if I want to upgrade something else um at the moment I can't do it because I've got a engineer um I need only my one engineer is doing that um so when you have what a one build process is just a way of kind of adding different like monetization um uh so you just kind of forcing people just to spend their hard currency um to speed things up um interestingly this so this game um I've got 270 um gold to begin with so um that's fairly generous so it's kind of given me effectively like two $2.70 um that's something that's kind of known as reciprocity so the game's giving you something in this case hard currency which has a monetary value so

hope that you spend that quickly um to kind of pro progress through the game and then obviously you can start to understand the value of the gold and where you would use it and then obviously encourages you to then spend money so this is a something most people are kind of doing now um so get an idea how the base is going I mean this is It's a fairly standard and one thing you can see here so there's a wall um built around here but one of the things they tried to do in this game is not have it so wall based so you'll see I mean not this early in the game but later in the game um they kind of try to have a bit more tactic in the way you build your base and you can have um kind of stealth tanks that the enemy can't see until they attack and you have these kind of weapon systems that are on domes and you get reinforcements halfway through so it's not radically changing it obviously people understand how play these strategy games they understand Clash of Clans is the most one of the most profitable mobile games or one of the most profitable games in the world so people you know know how to play it and game designers want to kind of create a give people what they know but obviously innovate as well so this is obviously what they're trying to do guys are trying to do and interestingly the the team behind this um as you expect from

Zinger games they've worked on stuff like fville um few of them have actually come from kind of PC RTS games so the lead on it is is from EA Westwood and worked on games like command Conquer generals which I guess we which is inspiration for this we'll see this a bit more in the attacking phase and and there's another team who worked on a um a MOBA that um that's zingas it's quite a kind of um a well uh kind of well experienced team that have tried to do this um another interesting thing to kind of point out is it's a proper this a proper kind of 3D it's not 3D camera but proper 3D game it's actually fairly small it's about 200 me which is um um kind of good to keep the filze down anyway so we kind of understood how the base Works a little bit so let's go and have a look at attacking so this is the world map so this is the um the I'm not in the PVP bit yet I'm not attacking other people's bases this is the single player um PVE kind of part so I've finished the first bit I've uh

conquered or taken back from the Terrace or whatever the conceit of the story is um South Africa that southern Africa and now we're moving up so I'm going to be in Zambia so if we go a have a scout to see what's going on so we can see here's the enemy base see some guard towers there um some resources um and some troops so fairly um not as we expect at the start fairly um lightly defended base so you can see my I got 18 troops and three a um apcs so it's going to attack so something they tried to do to make this kind of um attack give a bit more control over so I can drop drop the guys into this space off they go so they're just going to go and do the usual thing going attack these guys but I can um use a flare to of kind of um that's using one of my action points and that's going of get guys more the same direction so I can use as many of those

as I want as action points now you can see you got four action points I got this A10 so I can bring this A10 in do a strike it's going to come and take that out so say this is fairly straightforward you can see now I've got 15 points so I mean doesn't really do now but as I use it up um and you can see as I use these up they're getting more and more expensive so essentially um the early stage in the game it's doesn't really matter so much but you kind of want to be careful when you use them and as you kind of level up you kind of get more powerful things so you get a health far missile that you can control and get nukes um the other thing is you build up you can the enemy will get reinforcements into the base so the whole point is what they kind of say compared to Clash of Clans is Clash of Clans is a game where you basically go into a base that's got loads of walls in it you bash a hole in the wall and all your troops go far flying through so it's like a breach and breach and flood kind of um attack strategy in this game they they they talk a bit more about kind of you have rolling momentum so the they're not long battles they're like 3 minutes um kind of kind of limit but they kind of want you to um

they want to be a bit more tactical or have a few more kind of tactics in there so let's go do tanzan there and obviously this is very early on in the game so i' not really um got very far but there's the usual um kind of guilds alliances kind of system see this one's a bit more complex we've got three um uh kind of uh defensive Towers it's probably a bit harder so I lost some guys but should have enough to keep it going so let's send them all over there got to see what's going on so when they destroy that I'm going to get some more of these kind of command points I think they're called so I send this guy in I'll take that out got more got three more points but need 13 before I get do the A10 again so we're taking out all the enemy defensive positions oh one

more looks like it's going to be pretty a pretty easy um Victory go yeah OB I'm I'm collecting loot from that um so lost five casualties so that's a game where if I if my guys haven't died I kind of I kind of keep them again which again is something the most games are do now but slightly different from Clash of Clans so I can kind of reinforce these um so obviously you can when I get level four HQ I can put tanks so the this is the kind of the armor you can build up this it's not a massive selection the idea is to kind of have keep a fairly kind of tightly defined kind of group of of units you can see it's kind of cont they called contemporary um military so it's kind of like kind of modern stuff now with a bit more this gu with rail guns here guns with the tank the old Command and

Conquer Titan tanks with two barrels not particularly useful in the real world but fun in computer games so there we go that's um so this is the new the new strategy from Zinger so that's Empires and allies um so I guess we'll see over the next couple of months whether whether it's something that uh uh kind of Clash of Clan type players are um are interested in it's interesting because I think because Clash is still a very popular game obviously still number one top grossing so lots of people know how to play and you you are seeing just kind of more um kind of kind of I guess old school RTS designers um looking at how to kind of reinvent the genre I guess the other kind of classic one that's currently um or just come out is is a dominations um from Nexon and big huge games which is a very kind of similar kind of take using the same kind of foundation and tweaking different elements I guess that comes more from a kind of civilization type type background but they're all kind of shooting for the same audience um I'm sure one of them uh will kind of will crack that uh goal okay than

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