Monetizer: Mobile Strike

hello and welcome to pocket game. bus's monetizer um this we look at the freeto play uh mobile games and look at the monetization and there we go so we're playing um mobile strike from machine Zone actually technically it's a epic war is the country it's a company but it's a machine Zone really um the first thing we see and you always get this with uh this game and as soon as you far up the game you see advertising of retailing I suppos really so it's not Black Friday anymore but we're still I guess we're still not even s Monday anymore but we're still getting this kind of retailing situation and not for these kind of games what we would what we would say actually with uh machine zones games is they are heavily monetized or aggressively monetized not that those are negative

um descriptions that's just the way the the games are set up they are designed for people um to play them and those people are heavily incentivized to pay in those games so if you're playing um a game of war or or mobile strike which have pretty much similar mechanics um and you're not paying money you're probably not progressing um probably not having a great experience they are set up um to encourage people to pay money and that's not buying $5 of of $5 here and there this is hundreds of dollars perhaps even thousands of dollars a month um to get kind of the uh full enjoyment um anyway so we see this we can kind of see what what the G game is kind of about really mostly this retail um retailing here so we can see it's a see at the top there's a clock ticking down so this is especially an offer that is

will not be available for more than half an hour or just over half an hour you can see um it's a holiday special we were going to get 1,200 plus 8,000 bonus gold so we can see why this is supposedly such a super sale um so we're getting uh the we see the speed UPS now so this kind of quite interesting that um like like game of war um mobile strike uses um individual kind of speed UPS so you can see here it's a 3our speed five you get five 3 hour speed UPS 50 60 Minute speed UPS 50 50 minute speed ups and 50 10 minute speed UPS there not like other games where you kind of use high currency um so you might be building a building and it'll say speed up now and it would use it will seem like a random amount but a programmed amount of of hard currency to speed things up this context is complete opposite if you really and you buy um or given in this

case or um items that will speed up um your build for a certain period of time this is kind of interesting because often you're not you're not speeding up and completing those buildings in using these or the sometimes if you got a 12-minute build cycle you use a 10minute one and then wait 2 minutes or use a 15 minute one and and kind of in lose 3 minutes maybe that's not how people think about it but it's a very different kind of type of mechanic you see here this food oil IR Stone so these are the hard soft sorry soft currencies in the game resource currencies really is these various crates getting a PE Shield getting a Teleport and the other very important thing about um all games from machines is very Alliance focused so you can see I'm buying this but if I'm in Alliance I'm not in Alliance but if I'm in a lights my allance gets all these things as well that's one of the key things that drives monetization in a game like um mobile strike is getting people into alliances very quickly in the process almost in the tutorial you ask to go to

um to join a Alliance and then the alliance structure is very social in the sense that people are maybe not expected but by buying stuff for yourself as a player you're also powering up your alliance um and all this you know seems like a lot look at what stuff we're getting it's only4 that of $6 okay but let's go into the game so this is again very interesting to look at this type of game and we could kind of say this this is not a high graphical quality game I mean it is what it is I suppose um but it's not you it's not in 3D it's kind of tile based there's a lot going on you know animation in there it's not it's not um graphically terrible but it's not obviously pushing the boundaries of what of what mobile games can do now and that's not the point that's not what these um games are there for okay so we can see we can tap on a few things we can see on top of the screen um I'm

level 10 moment not very high at all oh I'm a VIP um level four so um VIP is again something you earn or something you can buy it's my power my gold it I've got 100 gold um it's not so much but I can um purchase 900 gold to get a free gift go we tapped on that we gone back into that sale thing I can buy gold with real money so obviously go up toally 20,000 gold for 100 bucks that's the hard currency we know all about that so you get across top of the screen there's five these soft currencies which they use when you're making stuff and there's of other flashing things this young lady here Scarlet she's saying there's a sale Black Friday tail so again we got the countdown still going on there encouraging us to all that lovely gold again we have this one here this isn't a sale on that so this is a but still

getting the the this is a challenge but we're still getting we can see how much gold we've got we're still getting the retailing in there these are challenges particip that earn free stuff see there um everything is kind of um counting down you know we kind of s in we realize we're in a system where just stuff's going on all the time um it's kind of funny down the bottom here always funny this this one gold again wonder what we're going to get okay so if we join an alliance we can get 500 gold so um these all these alliances I could join get an idea about different what the languages are when you're when your chatting type chatting please welcome in this oneone to join um I've got this one here this oh wow I've received a supply Crate so that was good I've got 100 VIP points so you can see let's go into here VIP so I'm if I get some more points points to

20 120 points I'll get to BP level five what BP useful see in a minute but I guess what's interesting is we go in here this is the mission structure so missions are basically I'm just doing some stuff and collecting them this something to do um but basically the missions are tap here you this is the type of game it is it's very menu based um not actually doing anything there's not no gameplay starting can't do any l Miss so not in Alliance VIP okay can I activate my VIP so I am a VIP level but um it's not active at the moment so you can see here I've not spent any money this is just stuff I've so I can get four VIP day passes to degree or 231 so maybe I'll use one of those and now I can go and access some VIP missions so I can clict the last one I did of course um

I'm not going to be a VIP long enough to collect that one unless I speed it up guess so I can speed it up okay 10 minute speed up you see now how the kind of flow of the game is happening and again it's interesting that that I'm not in the game in terms of doing anything in the game I'm there is no you know there is no game I'm um tapping on things upgrade my trading place to level six so I'm still you know I've been playing this game for about over a week now it's still almost like it looks like it's inor these big flashing arrows you know how can I how can I you know um as I can't make a mistake he's treating me like I'm stupid maybe it's not a bad thing to do we can see you know that's now that mission is underway so I've got I've got a building underway Mission

underway can speed those things up but basically this is is the game with the if I had like an alliance there' be more kind of stuff I do do raise on other people as I say I'm not massively Advanced really let's another mission here the St mission go there um and we can just see everything we doing there is very time based and then the mation is based around speeding this stuff up and just um in a sense it's kind of you know a very pure experience experience that a lot of people you know won't enjoy because there's no kind of skill element as you can say not even any graphical experience really um it's very uh abstract almost um certainly until you get into level you can kind of see Type move it down here there's the um this is the chat it's very good kind of chat so we can see all this uh these guys see this one so this one was translated from Spanish

a very good translation system that of encourages people um to to stay playing the game um at the moment you know the level I am at not very powerful level certainly that's pretty much all I can do now I can speed things up um but that's my session kind of over with and I think it is um you know the one thing that's interesting when you play a game like game of war or or um mobile strik is people have very strong opinions about it but the one thing to remember remember is these games are certainly game of war is one of the most successful um mobile games in the history of mobile games just it's it she and profitability is is absolutely staggering and that doesn't happen by chance that happens by very um honed design and very honed um uh kind of operations you know day on day operations of how how the game developer is is giving um what the players giving the players kind of what they want driving them onwards um

particularly through this Alliance structure let me see here you know we get end up with loads of menus so look this kind of menu situation going on here all the kind of detail stuff you can do um okay so hopefully that gives you an idea about the monetization of of U mobile strike it's not a game for everyone certainly but already it's kind of racing up the top grossing charts already top 20 top grossing on iPhone in the states and we'll probably do similar to Game of War which is's now um neck and neck um with uh with Clash of Clans actually beating Clash of Clans in North America at the moment um so well done well done machine Zone um don't forget um come back to pocketgamer.biz subscribe to our Channel we do a lot of this kind of analysis of Mo fridge play games so come back and see what we're up to next week yeah cool see you then

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