Monetizer: Kabam's Puzzle Trooper

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.biz's monetizer video column and this is where we play through the first um kind of five minutes issue of new free to play games and try and look at the um kind of the user experience flow um and any monetization techniques people are people putting kind of early into into games so basically we're trying to replicate what a new kind of player will experience so uh let's start the stopwatch okay so this is my monetizer uh folder here unfortunately now i've forgotten what some of these games are so um let's have a oh we can see this this was puzzled this is puzzle trooper so let's start this one up so this is uh from kabam as we can see i'm gonna have to uh right we're gonna have to fill this so let's just turn that round

okay so um as we can see uh the first thing pretty much every game does this now is the first thing it does it waters in a push push notifications i think this is a very rude impolite thing for game developers to do um particularly with free to play where people are maybe downloading games for not knowing much about the game um i think in general people are happy to have push notifications if they know they're going to be useful to them and they know they're going to play the game a lot um so most people i don't think allow this and i think push notifications are not becoming a very useful um marketing tool at the moment but in this case i am going to keep them on because i'm going to i'm trying to see how people use push notifications so we'll go yes for that so it's downloading a few things we're basically straight into the game okay so it's on the splash screen this is a game published by kabam which has been uh obviously very successful in the free-to-play world itself and now is is

heavily looking through publishing on a web and mobile um so it's a match three i'm sure we're gonna get through the tutorial here okay basic training yes sir six seconds to move the ball in any direction okay okay notice that the red balls we will shift let's try that again watch the ball shift is the glowing cross system

overkill that's our reward i guess all right anymore let's bring five together and your trooper will attack it so we assume these colors are matching the colors of our troops yeah that's the green one's fire six for a bomb strike turn base you don't have the symbols in the code from the other patterns too

combos special skills so just gonna take number terms okay

okay so leveling up our troops we're getting some experience getting some what it's looking like uh soft currency looking up we've got a fuel meter here and we've got a hard currency there again squad leader um awesome air drops give you chance so we'll see now so this is kind of um something that i think games will be doing a lot more of is obviously we've not gone to a store experience yet or anything like that but we can see now we're being gifted basically 50

um hard currency diamonds or whatever these things are gems so games are kind of getting people used to you use this currency to get kind of better items or troopers in this case okay and it's got us like a slot machine thing which a lot of people are using as well adam loving it's got a little overpowered in there tap the radios over my menu okay troops level evolve or sell so we've got a squad of the leader and four of the troopers okay so these are not the ones we have during the tutorial these are different ones add the add button so this will be my new guy

good job what's your name mega blah blah blah blah mississippi mississippi oh that's awful isn't it you need to ralph denise okay so obviously gone through the tutorial um it was quite showing us what the game is are we doing max three but we're kind of pulling things around to match for you rather than swapping them over so it's quite a flexible system um i've got my little tutorial achievement so again it's not the game's not formally told exactly what i'm doing with these diamonds but um i continue as a guest which i think is kind of important even at this stage i play through i think i particularly like this when you play through the tutorial and you understand a bit about the game in a very small amount come and see if you're going to like it or not because i think people performing with facebook i know certainly certainly me i don't like this i mean loads of things with facebook i'd love to end up kind of

still kind of spamming people and not exactly sure what the game's going to do on your facebook feed so i think it's good to have these two options and obviously encourage people to go through the um incentivized route so let's go into that okay so there we go i got my should have my 50 50 units yeah there you go there's a new thing yeah nice job basic training kicked up okay i'm not getting 5 30 didn't tutorial as well okay that's good and nothing else um okay so this is okay so this is the mission structure so this is as a menu screen it's pretty clean obviously they've got the kind of map and all the kind of ui around it so obviously we've got the soft currency hard currency my name the rank um

well that's the name is putting this as a mini thing here shot okay so that's the arena okay so it's a multiplayer so there'll be some lock missions there's five okay so um so we've been playing a couple of minutes oh five five minutes now so we've got a rough idea of what kind of what's going on so let's have a quick look so the game's not really taking us it's not asked to pay any money let's have a quick look at the store anyway just to see because i like to see how these things work so hard currency is diamonds pretty

straightforward so we've got six kind of um kind of bands of payment which is now pretty standard with the most expensive one being 70 pounds or 100 bucks the second one being that's 35 pounds or 50 bucks and then the ones other ones being smaller um so basically by signing in with facebook i got given two pounds worth or i guess that's that that is that's three dollars worth of um diamonds let me know what i can do with them i know i think so i do i get any troopers with these all right so i'm here dropping those ones in or get five star troopers five plus one okay so i'm doing that to get five of those so i'm getting one free okay or 200 for some

so that's interesting um i think that's for this game so that's quite interesting so the free to play games a year a couple years ago i used to see a lot of kind of in-game advertising releasing game kind of cross promotions this isn't a crosstalk promotion although presumably it could be at some point but this is encouraging encouraging us to to do this air drop kind of retailing he's gonna do anything no i guess it's not out at all it's not taking itself okay maybe something for the future so there we go that's uh a quick look new game from kabam will i'll be playing it a bit more see how we get on obviously kabam

have been very successful with its replay games so far i guess the the the trick for the company will be as it publishes more releases more um it's going to have a slight dilution of its marketing effort um whether it can it can all be successful as successful as the hobbit or kingdoms of camelot is open to question but um we shall see okay