Monetizer: Gameloft's Despicable Me: Minions Rush

[Music] hello and welcome to pocketgamer.business feature called monetizer this is where we play the first five minutes of a new game and have a look at the uh the flow in terms of user experience and monetization features the game looking at today is from gameloft and it is despicable me minion rush so start it up and start the stopwatch put the sound up uh [Applause]

here we go [Applause] [Applause] [Music] okay so everybody using that cutscene can't skip so i can download a bunch of stuff in the background which they seem to have done it's taken us about a minute and we're a minute and a half now we're going to start soon

i think those had their last last one percent it always takes longer doesn't it okay so long as most games the first thing you get is a push notification uh prompt which i think is really kind of impolite really i don't even know if this game's any good if i like it or not i can see that's why developers put it there but i think in terms of retention and actually pretty much as far as i can work out every once which is pushing the notifications off these days so i think people need to think a little more about how they um have actually put that into the flow of the game and it's pretty shocked much much faster after the tutorial off to be played for five minutes so i'm not gonna allow that okay so okay so we've got um obviously this game is probably going to be more aimed at kids i guess so um gaming says this has this particular way interesting um i guess it's an in-app purchase kind of prompt kind of an education thing it's

saying um you can open up bonus content for even more fun um by purchasing bananas and tokens um i thought it was at least telling us it's not really i don't know i think it's a way that could be a bit more um for um heyday does it in a lot better way but at least there's something here most games don't even have that so that's good i suppose so here we go we're actually in the game now there's a little minion uh playing with friends that's good pushing us to facebook that's kind of quite nice not only our friends are kind of suggesting these are the characters from the film um 50 our score multiplier um but you see we've got no bananas and 50 goals this is 7 500. and this is a timed one as well so available for three days and look see what free gold we can get

then oh we can watch agree video that's in the wrong aspect ratio yeah it's not that's not really going to work is it i can't even skip it lovely yeah that's a really really great experience this is just counting down here i've got i have to watch uh certain 15 seconds where i can skip it can i skip it now i'm just going to end it i mean to go from despicable way to crime city hd i mean it's kind of odd isn't it now we're gonna do it again okay [Music] no don't want this at all no

no go away a little pain well we should just play some of the games no no no no no no no it's not gonna download it okay okay so um yeah let's just play the enjoy this sort of flapping around so this is like a 3d endless runner so um kind of thing we've seen before this is the comp this is the tutorial

yeah so very temple run subway surfer running with friends type thing going on here yep so badly it's pretty terrible these games but maybe it's helping me a little bit it's the rocket thing okay good boost oh yeah okay it's gonna be a big problem [Music] oh

okay so mess that up so again we're getting the revive option so i got 50 goals and this gives give me the option if i wanted to play longer um she's not somebody's a standard um kind of a kind of approach for these games i'd like some bananas i went this distance so my next multiplier okay so these are for the get multipliers i have these kind of mission structures which i can skip them by playing for

currency um don't worry about that okay i can unlock a freeze rate 150 if they haven't got enough okay have a quick look at the shop don't have enough bananas let's go and buy it do you want to buy bananas yeah so just get this shot that's weird so okay buying bananas i'm buying soft currency with hard currency uh let's see if i've gone by that okay it's not actually taking okay so it's not taking me directly to the shop but it's giving me kind of options just kind of so i was gonna buy think it's kind of slightly an interesting approach that was good one that offered me six thousand and it's gonna offer me various options so i guess it's um that's quite a lot of money we built for 35 pounds 50 bucks okay let's get this let me go straight to the shop and see what the shop options are against this thing this is i mean i'm not that's why that's just for bananas isn't

it so that's bananas it's offered me in gold so in gold it's offering me so the minimum isn't isn't the cheapest it can be that's um two dollars is the minimum i'm not going up to 100 bucks going up to 49.99 i guess again this is a game probably a more children um so what other options do we have so first different suits cost customizable things and oh and so we also have items um so this is happens in a lot of these kind of games now we can buy a a multiplier um item which basically is like a double ball supply which is basically started out um by jetpack joyride um and now pretty much everyone does that and it's it's always the most popular item bought basically well that's kind of again fairly expensive that's uh is it going to be it's going to be that's three pounds it's five dollars

for their for their probably their most popular item and then something like this and that's a permanent item and then golden shield that will say that well every time you have a shield it'll make you invincible um whereas these ones look like more like leveling up type um kind of power so they guess they're kind of permanent powers but they're kind of the ones where you're paying more to kind of get more features in it and again a mixture of bananas and gold let's have a quick look back at the menu light so my best score these are gonna do missions to get to these other locations costumes are seeing gold so friends obviously that's that's again

50 seconds look into facebook and it's just using that's just a game center and it's got an ad in it as well that's interesting so it's got it's cross promoting other other game loft games and i guess this is going off live is it no that's not so gameloft live is gaming loft's own social network which um it doesn't seem to be using very very much um so this is interesting it's more free games but i'm not it's not really encouraging me by giving me you know not giving me any uh any bananas or anything to do that which i think you probably should be doing it says you want if i want free it's going to take that horrible video again yeah sometimes okay well i think we've all seen the video um thanks uh connolly so that's um a quick look at this before me from [Music]