Monetizer: Frontline Commando 2

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.biz's monetizer video feature this is where we play free to play mobile games and just have a look at the kind of the user flow the interface and particularly the monetization techniques that are being used so again we're going to look at today is from glue mobile and it's frontline commando 2. so i've just been playing it and it's popped back up again so i've not really seeing the loading screen but um doesn't really matter okay so let's go to the main menu so this is front line commando is pretty um successful game for glue um are you kind of first person shoot your third person shoot i suppose but um shoot a game this is the sequel and this is the main menu so we can kind of roughly what's going on i think it's pretty um pretty smooth actually the user interface so you have one player this is me

i have two guns so i've got a assault rifle and a sniper rifle so pretty standard kind of things upgrade so it gives me some stats for the for the gun so i can i don't actually have any of these but has a game has a very straightforward um kind of currency system so it has gold here which is the hard currency and then kind of some cash cash which is the soft currency don't have enough wall cash so any upgrades typically um spend either hard currency which as you go further in the game will upgrade immediately soft currency which sometimes it takes some time to upgrade so it's my sniper's rifle same thing obviously um there are more guns in the game like this all about guns pretty much so you can see what i've got at the moment let

me see how they compare to the other things on offer my so at the moment is let me see what the moment is when every moment is that is the low level number 158 but if i upgrade it will go up to 218 so that's the metric there so this one if i buy it now it'll start you know obviously it's going to go up a lot more but even if i bite now be 50 odd higher than i've got now um but um so again buying stuff this is just a hard currency purchase this is a soft currency purchase early unlock i don't quite know what that means but as we can see as we go kind of further down some of these will be probably locked here so i'm only i'm level six at the moment i need to get level eight to even unlock these but something that suddenly gets quite expensive so there's 900 um gold bars i've only got 24.

um so okay so we can buy guns and then kind of level up the guns as we go it's pretty standard kind of a technique so something glues done a bit differently so we have these supplies now you can kind of um earn these in the game or kind of like kind of by completing levels um there's a bit like the three star system there's a kind of three um objective system for each each mission if you complete all three objectives the third objective will be something like you'll win a grenade or a medikit um so it's kind of quite it's a kind of consumable kind of boost but a pretty powerful one if i just want to buy them if that's purely hard currency choice um i think kind of a year ago maybe companies would have had would let you use software high currency i think there's a tendency now to make the choices pretty um or certain choices in the game a bit more

kind of i'm strong so um if people in a sense this kind of falls into the play-to-win thing which is um people who who pay obviously are going to progress faster i mean making that is what you will um but a glue clue's always been i'd say fairly hard on monetization um it's a commercial company floating on the nasdaq so it needs to make money um so anyway so any of these things they're all just hard currency purchases um you want to buy them and then some promo things so these are kind of interesting um techniques we've seen in various games over the years coming in so this one is a mystery crate um so it's cost me 15 so it's not that much money but i don't know what i'm gonna get i'm gonna get um two times damage an infinite ammo or a max critical chance um each time at 30 minutes so so basically i'm going to get a

kind of consumable boost for that period of time which i'm playing the game or i can buy an elite spec mystery crate again not that expensive 20 um so i'm gonna win one of these cool items or another prize okay so kind of cool gun or these uh extra squad members and of course squatters are actually quite nice in this game because it's um going to it now so this isn't something that i control these are my squad members i don't really control them at all i level them up they kind of do stuff for me but i don't even kind of almost notice them when they're in the game they're just kind of around doing their own stuff kind of ai controlled situations you can see they've got different um they each have a different attribute so if i had a grenade um dutch would far off the grenade um so i can train him up or sell him and find you only have three three is the maximum you have any time so this guy's rpg guy this guy's a uh healer guy so they do these kind of like i said kind of like boost elements

um instead of you throwing a grenade those guys will do it for you but um so again we go back to the this is a supply screen for feeds into those squad guys um and if you see here we can just kind of like rotate around there's quite a nice graphical kind of interface thing and they look pretty cool and mean and there we go kind of nice um also there's an energy system again that's pretty standard in these kind of games um get a certain amount of goes and then you have to wait for it to refill or pay for it to increase so another thing we can see some retailing around here so i've got a special offer so it's one pound 49 which is two dollars i can get 80 gold um i assume that's a special i can't really see what the other things i'll go into that in a minute and then we've got this one here which is a limited time offense i don't see that catching down so i mean this is expensive so this is like seven or six nine nine gold so i'm getting these kind of high damage

rifles for me and i'm getting these leveled up squad members and i'm getting 20 grenades 10 drones and uh five health packs for this one i'm getting an ultimate pack of pretty high up guns tricked out squad members so how much does this cost let's go and have a look um so it was 2 900. so you don't really you're not going to earn from 1350 to 2900 so basically if you want that tricked out pack then you're gonna be spending 69.99 100 um so again so this is our special offer so now he's interesting it's a one-time offer you're seeing more of this now i think it encourages players who maybe would go am i going to make it am i going to buy anything it's not a limited edition it's not going to not it's not times like that other offer but this is a really good deal so i'm basically getting double what i would get in any other purchase i'll do the math on it later but um

so obviously just encourages and once i think a lot of the developers are realizing they'll refreeze but once you encourage someone to buy something then you have quite a good chance that they'll you'll get them obviously playing the game longer the longer they play the more likely to make purchases again um other than that we have a pretty traditional five dollar ten dollar twenty dollar that's a fifty dollar that's a forty dollar um and a hundred dollars so there's a pretty standard kind of um in-app purchase amounts i'll do some as i do some maths on the monetizer site to have a look at what these ratios are like but glue glue's fairly good at um very standard on this kind of stuff it doesn't do anything really um unusual so i think blue is very good on so we have this that we're seeing a lot more games now so if i watch a video i get one for free i mean obviously one's not worth that much so you know one's well you can see

five cents that's not very much but um or i can go here and this will be an incentivized download like an incentivized action thing so this is from tap joy um they've been around for a long time they've kind of gone out i've gone out of favor just because they're odd really um and again you have these things i can watch a video to get one gold or i can um that's this one's kind of interesting this this knows that i downloaded this game legacy of a thousand suns um it says come back and join an alliance but i'm still only get one goal the same's watching the video um this one says come back to dawn dragon which i've never okay so it doesn't know i played that game um so if i get an xperia credit report i get 231 gold obviously i'm actually signing up probably giving my credit card details so a lot of these again are watching video or as skype credit so these tend not to be

um things um that generate a vast amount of money anymore and there was a point where they did okay follow glue mobile on follow blue metal on google plus or become a fan of glue on facebook get one gold so probably if you went for all these and watched a bunch of videos you could maybe get 20 gold or something i'm going to give some people an option we're going to see an advert as well okay it says new game from uh published by backflip plunder naughts i've actually have downloaded this so it should obviously whoever's put up this video doesn't realize that i've already got it installed on the device so it's not so good don't want that okay so let's have a quick look into the game it's probably a bit harder to show um okay very quickly as well there's a social um element which haven't really because i've not played again that much i'm not getting achievements that's a quick look let's get into that as well um it's pvp element so i can i'm a rookie i'm very highly unrated

on the global leaderboard um he's asking me to buy some power-ups i can just go and attack someone but i won't do that so go into the campaign so um episode one is pretty easy so it's got this kind of three star three skull system so i'm not quite completed them all um episode two again i've not completed all three styles on this one these elite ones are actually pretty hard to do as well even though quite a little in the game boss boss level i was attempted got whooped so this is kind of interesting so it says download free content i've downloaded the next episode but obviously can't get to it until i complete this one um so let's quickly i'm going to quickly show you just show how the game works so this is my kind of like loading screen so i can see my weapons if i want to add grenade we've seen all these screens before but just makes a nice way of doing it so

once so just to complete just kill everyone coming he gives me one star target i've got target time and use only the salt rifle look at me that'll give me my three so i'm going to pick this up now it follows all that focus oh do i pick it up um um so this is my chat here so let me see we've been fired at um okay so let's go down there there's a sniper up here there's a helicopter coming in oh i'm not gonna do this very well lying down more reinforcements so i can actually kind of move around from kind of set positions you can see this guy here next to me is my buddy he's just doing his own stuff oh i'm gonna snipe up i can actually switch to sniper's rifle we've got in there so you can see i've got health packs these are my kind of um by the grenades and the rpg

and switch back to the machine gun okay so i didn't really do very much in that many my squad members helped me out because i've played this before i don't get many rewards really um so anyway so there we go that's frontline commander two let's say i think um this is a good example of hopefully it's a highly monetized game but um what's interesting about it now is kind of the user interface and the flow's very smooth um and i was playing glues um eternity warriors three which is i mean a fantasy rpg but um that kind of game is almost like an online kind of rpg very kind of quite complicated menu system quite complicated different things you're trying to do obviously taking a lot of inspiration from asian um kind of online games whereas this is a very much more kind of western game very high-end graphics i guess people might argue game plays is quite contained but the same way it's

like a csr racing is a racing game where you tap a couple of times to kind of change gear so you're kind of seeing that the kind of the game structure is there's a skill element which is the each individual kind of mission but there's a lot of kind of other kind of meta game type stuff around it and obviously monetization feeds into that which i think in this case is in quite a quite an integrated manner um whether you play the game more i imagine at some point it becomes quite difficult to gain enough kind of currency to to level up sufficiently quickly and you get into a grind situation um but i think i think with this kind of game i think the game play itself is kind of fun enough that you can just potentially just play and enjoy just playing every day i'll kind of go online and fire up the ipad and play a bit of um frontline commando i guess the thing that will be interesting is the pvp so that'll be um something that will be worth investigating more but i'll certainly be keeping our eye on frontline commander 2 and see how it gets on