Monetizer: Frontline Commando WWII

[Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign welcome to pocketgamer.bizizz monetizer this is where we look at free to play mobile games particularly looking at their monetization and the game looking at today is glue Mobile's Frontline Commando World War II so uh Blue mobile I I always kind of find is a bit of a Bellwether um kind of company to me looking at free to play games it was one of the first of the big Publishers to go 100 free to play and has done so um in in a in a difficult manner because it's a publicly um uh kind of owned company so you can buy shares on NASDAQ and so it's always been very difficult for glue that it basically tried to change business models um very much in the public eye um uh and for that reason I think um I've always been a very interesting glues um games because they've always been um

I mean very forthright in their in their monetization um I guess when we talk to monetization we can very easily kind of fall into um kind of terms that are kind of um couched with morality which is not really um so certainly um my my view on these things but I would always say glue Mobile's games are aggressively monetized which is not necessarily a bad thing it's a way they want to kind of run their business model which which is fine and you could kind of an interesting analogy I guess is playing poker if you if you're going to play poker you've probably play poker in an aggressive manner or many people do that's that's seems one of the clearest ways of playing poker um and when you're in that kind of business model um what whatever an obvious thing to do is is kind of you don't gently encourage people to to buy currency in the game you you quite um forcefully say if you want to get through this kind of boring bit quick then then buy some currency and in some

ways you know for some audience it can be seen as counterproactive some people will obviously uninstall the game they feel like they're not making any progress and they're being forced to buy uh for being forced to kind of spend money um glue's interesting interestingly for glue I mean glues audiences tended to be kind of um kind of Teenaged or young 20s male audience so they're kind of audience who who potentially for the kind of games it does which are kind of 3D action oriented games um potentially that they are their disposable income um and they're probably more likely to monetize than lots of other audiences it's kind of interesting because I've just loaded up the game and you can see immediately here it's kind of um giving me it's not really necessarily A retelling thing but it's kind of saying if I play daily battles and I can earn gems I can get Elite gear it's kind of showing me that this game is about doing more than just playing the game which is obviously what all free to play games are and glue is doing this very explicitly so there's a few things I kind of want to show so um so I've just was playing the game when I first upgraded so I have this um bazooka thing I've just upgraded this fire rate

so um let's just come out of this so just have a quick look at the kind of like the the loading screen and again you're kind of seeing this is the game kind of loading screen and again you you're seeing it it's not just about the game so here we see Frontline Commando World War II here we're seeing there's lots of there's action going on here within within the kind of what we we would call kind of the meta game the kind of the bit that you monetize so I've got some standard we've got items so there's two days left of some countdown thing happening is weapons there's armor there's some countdown happening here there's a VIP event count down there missions is the bit we're going to go to the plane but even along the top we've got three items that's kind of like oh wow free items here we've got a um an energy kind of system going on here so you can see it's I've got 78 energies uh 78 units of energy out of a maximum 100 and it's kind of going to give me more in nine seconds one eight nine seven six yeah so we see that's something happening there it's kind of telling me wow this is kind

of energy system and here I guess more tradition in the free trade model we're seeing some currencies so there's there's three in-game currencies there's this gold one here which is zero so this is kind of interesting and then I think this is significant and why we would call this game uh one of the reasons at least where we call it a highly monetized game so gold is the hard currents in the game if I want to buy currency in the game I buy gold the game has given me no gold I've been playing this game I've kind of unlocked the first section which we'll come to in a minute even through that scenario I've not gained any hard currents um and that's basically um kind of glue telling me if I want this really important stuff then really I'm gonna have to pay for it a lot of games now it's kind of a psychological kind of trait that's called reciprocity and it's kind of like if if a game gives you something or not just the game but if anyone gives you something then you're kind of well disposed to that person or that company and often that's why in supermarkets while they give you like samples of their kind of I know the chocolate or their cheese or something because you

you don't really want to eat some cheese but then you eat some of this nice cheese and you go oh that's quite nice and there's a person there who's giving you the cheese and they go oh it's on half price and you go I'm gonna buy some cheese anyway I'll buy the cheese instead of the other cheese um so right uh let's kind of fire this up talking too much um so yeah so glue's not gonna be any of that so this one here is the kind of the cash so I've got kind of 21 000 of those that's something I've earned through the game and then there's this other one here this kind of gems thing again that's a um something I've I've learned through playing but not at the moment that's so useful so again we're kind of seeing kind of this this what we call aggressive retailing so it's a one-time special offer for if I spend five dollars in the game I'm gonna get instead of 100 gold I'm gonna be 120 gold and there's no ad so this is another kind of interesting thing that glue does a lot of and um yeah and we're seeing a lot more in now free to play games is it kind of in in-game advertising um whether using it for cross promotions to sell their own games the blue has a lot of games um but actually glue has will run the

ads from other Publishers in its in its um kind of AD slots as well because this is the retailing environment now so we can see here immediately there's still a lot more going on than just buying it I can I can buy things I can spend that you know we just saw that ad um it was saying I get 120 gold for five dollars with the standard thing is I can get 100 cold for five dollars I mean I mean as we'd expect uh we're going up all the way here to to 99.99 so there's uh what we can so there's six six different kind of um uh kind of purchase options it's a fairly it's it's the pretty much the the what is the standard um kind of setup so there's one at five dollars that's the cheapest one then we have one at ten dollars then we have one at twenty dollars and we have one up now this one's a little bit different this one's a um thirty dollars that we have on it fifty dollars I have 100 and there's the as you go up the rate of the gold you get increases um but equally it's saying and watch a video and get some free gold actually you're watching video you might get any free gold you might get some

items are quite um I've watched a lot of videos not many gold um and people get some more free gold here so this is something the glue has done a lot of over the years so this is like an awful wall um kind of not so not so fashionable as they want to work I don't think monetizing quite so well but you probably can't see this here if I get some business cards I'll get some 400 gold for free or if I do some surveys or I can what can I do uh I mean just 40 of personalized iPhone cases and I can get some gold so this is basically trying to get you to do something called just call it like an incentivized offer incentivized off all um some people like those kind of things um but I'm not gonna do any of that oh and we're gonna go there we go get that special time off again so could we see not even being involved in the game uh moment we've got to the game and there's quite a lot going on that's kind of trying to persuade me to spend money um you're just going to the mission structure it's quite hard to show this game because the first person shooter so it's difficult to show it kind of on the floor but um even going into the game you can see this line at the top is still there

um so this is the as I say it's a it's a kind of shooter game and basically the way it works is um it operates around different weapons um so here is the machine gun so objective kill all enemy soldiers as we might expect only see in a battle it's going to take me 10 of my power units I'm in the Bazooka limit all tanks and soldiers I've seen a lot of elimination sniper um kill all enemy Soldiers the interesting thing here is we can see and how the game kind of gates um your progress is a sniper rifle with power of 310 is required for this Mission my power is only 300 so if I go to the store okay that's my sniper's rifle here you can see the power is now it's 300 to 300 so I've actually I've upgraded it all the way through so it's 300 to 300. so I can't actually complete this Mission um with with this to kind of actually complete the that kind of mission you can see on this yellow line here I'm not kind of completed it so um to go to the store I can't use that

weapon because it's not gonna it's not gonna be pad up enough so to get the weapon this one power at the moment will be enough if I power it up but I've got to spend gold all these weapons ah so this one this one I could buy um but and I can use my my soft currency on that um but you can see the the kind of the kind of the um oh what's downloading that um it's uploading on HTML5 um but you can see you can see the kind of the force of the game is to encourage me to to use hardcore machine and this is kind of something um so I've actually unlocked this is the first set of missions and it's even here on this flamethrower so I haven't even got a frame blower um so yeah again I can't even get any of these flamethrowers um come on you're gonna come in almost

um so none of these things none of these items like I can I can yeah I've got 25 of these gems this is I need 5760. so we can kind of see this is why we're calling this this highly monetized game um so this is the second level I've opened um you can see I'm not not really not done anything here yet um and immediately you know I've kind of progressed I've unlocked this level and immediately I've got to go to the store tank okay I need a tank with 300 no I don't have a tank yeah I can't there's no way at the moment I can get it I can get a tank um obviously I want to play as a tank at this at this point um but the the my um desire to place a tank is be engagedy by the fact I've got to spend money which is not as I say I'm not saying this is a bad thing um but I'm saying that this is you can um certain levels kind of go through um so on this one here this is my kind of um I can buy a grunt pack which will give me sufficient um

kind of Weaponry to go onto this it's kind of second level of missions so I actually need 21 900 actually I'm actually a bit short so hopefully I have to go back to the first mission and learn a bit more um kind of currency you can see in some games you would just kind of swan through these kind of just completing the levels and basically again we'll be focusing on retention and keeping you engaged and this is not for this particular game which is one in Us in the sequence gate you know glues down a lot of these kind of Frontline commander games it's done previously I know um the D-Day one and it's done to some other ones that are based more um not basically World War II and it really knows the numbers on its audience so this is why it can kind of take this kind of high high end approach and um and as we as you kind of say it's I think I think a lot of people in the free to play Space they still don't kind of actually monetize kind of kind of um aggressively enough really I think there's this kind of idea that um yeah if you give people kind of options to to buy they will spend money and it probably you know glue is a company that every three months has to show its financials

um kind of has a certain type of export portfolio at least taking this aggressive approach and been fairly successful at it I mean I guess the ironic thing in the face of glue is its biggest most successful game has been Kim Kardashian which [Applause]