Monetizer: Plants vs. Zombies 2

zombies um but this one is different in that it's designed to be free to play from the from the bottom up so loading up nice and fast it was good to see nice and fast okay yeah but new content downloading so if there's anyone that we've done before uh welcome uh connect with friends what we're gonna do put my name in perhaps okay let's see there's some push notifications I really hate this I think push notification should be something that you obviously have a path thing to be used but I think that people developers always ask to do this straight away which I think is is kind of like slightly and polite it's like inviting something into your house and then I'm asking for a bottle of whiskey first thing it's not like that okay um so let's go into that obviously you

can see there so I've just put in like it's like a username I'm not really connected to um to any to anything I'm not connected to Facebook even though the option was there um so that's interesting so there's generally new content but since we're doing it in a background doesn't seem to be uh I probably can still play the tutorial I hope which would be a good thing that's the case yes so this is exactly how to do it if you're going to download new content I mean actually EA Simpsons is the worst example when you when you um download the game the first thing you see is a oh before you do anything else you need to download another 300 megabytes um this is of a much more fluid way of doing it okay let's get to the game um let's play through the tutorial always worse in the tutorial I think so this is Plants vs Zombies we kind of gonna well because we played the game before you didn't understand the same gameplay

the case let's try to see perky yeah let's build one of those okay oh okay I don't think there's zombies and reached my house at this point here they come obviously the important tutorials is there incredibly simple in fact there's a philosophy of tutorials which is always I always quite like from king.com who obviously the Old King has a noun and who are of the enormously successful when it comes to Casual games and they always say make a tutorial and then make two tutorials even simpler than the first tutorial that you thought was simple enough because uh I guess maybe not for this audience particularly but

maybe if this audience this is potentially quite a hardcore game but can go quite casual as well it's very easy to assume even that your audience has much more idea about what's going on you know in the game than actually it does um may not be for many people but for some people for some games even now potentially the first game on mobile that is some people are playing so you can you can't really judge it kind of anything that they even really know how to come interact with the game so this one's you know you must say it's too simple but you know it's very restricted you've only got one bit of Law and there's only you know you can't there's no confusion there's three things basically happened you know you've planted these and you collected those and the zombies are just very simple very simply what's going on which I think is um is what you want I suppose I don't want to hit that one okay so I've just played through another

um we're kind of in the game proper now but it's still um kind of in this in the Egyptian level in the early stages there's a lot of tutorial stuff being given out so um podcast EA have done a pretty good job hearing in a kind of passing up tutorials as as kind of proper proper level so you can see this partly we just unlock this cabbage plant so when we play the next level we'll be introduced to the garage part in the previous level we were just introduced to um to kind of one of the power up so you can kind of like make your peashooter into a like a machine gun peashooter for a short period of time there so now we're kind of seeing these are the parts we've got we just got House of cabbage

okay let's sort of see this for zombies upgrades so now we're kind of um obviously um we've not been asked to do this we're not talking to the plants but we can kind of see now let's start see how the monetization is coming in here so at this point in the upgrades obviously these are your paying cash but these are single um effectively level based consumable so start with 25 Suns put onto plant food getting digital 25 of sun cost back when shoveling up plants so so that one looks like it lets you choose another plant type every level so that's a permanent upgrade so we're kind of getting mixed a bit um you know the expenses as expensive as it's cheap so that's you know kind of like sets two pound two pound fifty in English money which is kind of three kind of three dollars four dollars

that's not the uh the shot proper we can have a quick look at that we can see this different kind of currency types here as well there's there's this Crazy Dave money I suppose um which we're kind of earning as we play if we go direct to the store so these are the coins I'm crazy that coins so instance that's pretty standard interesting obviously doesn't it's not starting at the lowest price it's starting at two pounds um so two pounds is three dollars um and often actually we've kind of found that there's six um six currency uh options but this game obviously we've gone to eight currency options um as tennis happens with with EA they they the more money you spend the kind of better deal you get so effectively the per dollar price of each one of these um coins goes down considerably

um so the five thousand for for two pounds the times fifty oh no it's not 50. anyway we'll do the math on that um but equally so these are these kind of items foreign so I mean this is kind of kind of I guess we're kind of generally we're going to see this with free to play monetization where we're kind of seeing I guess particularly because it's been been demonstrated by King um and its games which don't have all their monetization and some of the most highly monetized um top grossing games in the world so it came across Hardware is number one on number two globally and that's all that's not done for currency that's all done through items so basically you keep using items to complete each level so obviously um if you can combine that kind of monetization with with a currency um virtual currency system which is obviously been proven in other games you're kind of hoping to get the best of both worlds because these are these are not 99 kind of kind of items

so again these are ones um we kind of saw before and then this is quite interesting because this is um and you can see this in some in some game some of the strategy games tend to use this kind of bundling thing um so you're getting some coins some permanent bonuses some um kind of a consumable item bonuses um and in terms of kind of retailing strategy these are quite interesting because it's much harder um for people who just look at you know who are just looking at this to go oh is that is that a good deal I mean is is I'm getting this this and this is that worth that and obviously um for Jonas like maybe we can look into that and kind of work out the kind of cost basis and but but kind of for I think for companies you do tend to give these quite good deals because people like the idea of bundles and obviously I'll put a bundle to get more and they're not that expensive so it's kind of 10 bucks um

and it's a way of kind of getting people a bit of everything so um so as we can see we're not kind of being aggressively monetized in terms of the gamepl it's kind of potentially available within the app so um well I'll play on this level I think we're not we'll switch the video off and then come back when there's a bit more um to to point out guys I've been playing um Plants vs Zombies now for about half an hour um kind of uh kind of just playing through as I say the um they're not really tutorial levels but the first kind of um 10 levels are kind of this kind of showing you new things um uh kind of unlocking the gameplay for you really um so we've had a look at the

store before let's go back to it now I've had a quick um done some quick kind of maths on what's going on here so look at the basic coin system so it's pretty straightforward um virtual currency that you're spending real money for so we've got a the lowest level so we've got a 299 three dollars for a five thousand um Crazy Dave goal here and then going up to the top um 100 dollars for 450 000 and that's his best deal um actually it's not in not not entirely the case so this thing I do now I'm looking at the um the discount ratio of currency so basically looking about how much for each dollar how much currency you get at the lowest um kind of a real money transaction compared to the the coins you get per dollar spinner the highest level and for a lot of companies um what you find is there's a normally ratio of kind of um kind of 1.5 so you get effectively 50 more if you go for the the top most expensive in-app purchase compared to

the the cheapest one that's roughly the range um EA is one company that's complete kind of outlier on this one so for um for The Simpsons Game it has a ratio of four so hopefully you get four times um more on the on The Simpsons Tapped Out game um if you spend the most amount of money so for Parts Plus it's obvious too we've done a quick calculation and actually um in this case on the cheapest in-app purchase you get one dollar by you 1 672 crazy day gold and on the most expensive if you're spending this you're getting 4 500 crazy days gone so effectively the ratio is 2.7 so you're getting 2.7 more um if you spend the most amount so this is correct and it says this is the best deal but it's only just about the best deal so even even if you go for the the second cheapest which is obviously spending you're spending kind of half the money um compared to 1 672 Golds for this one you're getting four thousand so you're still getting a pretty so anything even and even if you're spending this

the second most uh kind of cheapest one you're still getting 2 000 so anything over the cheapest is is pretty heavily discounting so um as I said we looked before these so these are these are actually kind of plants um so these are actually permanent plants so I got this one before these are actually kind of new plant types you can buy to kind of speed up the process so these are permanent items um ranging from two dollars to three dollars similar thing here but for upgrades so these are permanent upgrades increasing your platform slightly increasing your your seed slots and getting more stuff to start off again these run from 299 to 399 so but the interesting thing here I'll be looking at was bundles so looking up I'm saying these are quite interesting because they're mixing currency and items um in a way that's quite hard for um for consumers to see if that's worth it so I've done a quick bit of maths so the stats for the starter bundle you're getting a squash you're getting 5000 coins on a shovel bonus so if you price those up all individually it would come to a nine dollars

so the price here is um five dollars so you've got a 44 discount on that one the torch bundle you're getting a torch a plant little torch zombies you're getting 20 000 coins an extra plant um so that's coming in at that price there is eight dollars if you price it all up it's 17 so you're getting 53 discount on that one and the power bundle you're getting a burn plant you're getting 40 000 coins and um additional some um that individually price comes up to 28 you're getting that for um for ten dollars so that's a 64 discount so quickly I don't know why this is what's this best deal it's not the best deal it's actually the worst deal but they're all pretty good deals they're all getting pretty much you know 50 discount if you're buying these things the argument would be do you actually want those those things maybe better buy them I don't know a la carte faces um but um from basically from what we're seeing actually it'll be and it's already happened so EA just announced today that um uh Planet Fitness Zombies 2 has been downloaded 16 million times already um on iOS in two weeks

um and so you're seeing this kind of like this store monetization which we've kind of it's using kind of uh items permanent items and um currency in quite a sophisticated manner but the other thing is um you've also this is interesting is you've got the the Dave the Crazy Dave gold you're using these to buy um consumable items in the game so if we very quickly um let's see how easy it is to show this if we go into the um the next level just to very quickly show this um so these are being used okay yeah get on with it so okay so just quickly uh we'll choose my plants um okay so I've only got a certain amount of slots I can obviously there before the other slotties I can buy one let's rock off again so let's pause that so

you can't pause it um so it's basically I'm set up Ready set go okay so if we pause it now so this is my gold um that this is what I won't have not spend any money yet so I earn these and this comes into this these areas on the bottom where these are uh physical um sorry kind of direct gameplay um power-ups that you use um just the basically time so you get a bit better two seconds so you can kind of pull the heads off zombies and kind of throw them out and just kind of Zap them using these so so we have this very consumable kind of Base basis so and also with this as well so this is gonna that's a thousand of these coins if I want one of these power up to basically kind of kind of speeds up um the it will kind of upgrades my my one of my plots I've replaced for a specific period of time so in a sense you know we're looking here on a very sophisticated um kind of layered monetization proposal and I think we've seen that um as I said

we've seen 16 000 or 16 million demos already um it's not quite in the top 10 grossing us charts which is kind of what I use as my barometer for um kind of success but already we're seeing um it's been it's been in quite pretty much gone top 100 in in um coming about 50 countries and it's and you can just see from from grass on that panel rap Trace that the um the the games kind of top grossing charting is is is is is going to hit the top 10 quite quickly so um so uh um they pop cap and EA have done a pretty pretty good job and obviously there seems to have been um as you tend to find me some games that haven't been free to play and have gone free to play some kind of journalistic Kickback but I think it even um some of the some of the more kind of virulent anti-free to play um journalists have uh grudgingly kind of just started to enjoy um Plant vs Zombies too um because it kind of pretty much is the same gameplay just just the way and you don't have to monetize of course that's the thing with all these

free to play games if they're well designed there's no there's no um kind of hard Gates it's just a it's just a way that if you want to kind of um don't want to grind so much or you can make a mistake you can kind of quickly spend money and kind of get through levels so anyway so that's a rather prolonged and slightly bitty but nevertheless um interesting uh monetizer on Plants vs Zombies 2.