Monetizer: Rival Fire

hello and welcome to pocket gamer not busy's youtube channel i'm john jordan and this is our monetizer playlist so in monetizer we look at free to play mobile games specifically looking at the mechanics the techniques which they're using to try and persuade people to spend money in games so the game we're looking at today is from glue mobile it's called rival fire it's interesting because glue has made quite a few half a dozen of these kind of semi-fixed position uh shooter first-person shooter games um generally they've been released in its franchise frontline commando there's been a number of frontline commando games there's been frontline commando kind of world war two um kind of versions um there's other things but this is i guess the third kind of generation you could say of the frontline commando series it's not called doesn't have frontline

commando as a in its title it did when it was in soft launch it was called frontline commando fire rivals that's right and now it's called rival fire and the reason for that is it's also kind of uh using the experience of chinese mobile company or chinese games company tencent which has a very big uh mobile free-to-play shooter called we fire so it's kind of taken the um the wii and the rivals and the reason rivals is in there in a big sense as we can see here so there's a campaign thing flashing away but pvp is a very big element so as pvp is in head to head shooting against other players and also there's a co-op mode as well so um the gameplay doesn't really matter so much we will just show you some gameplay like many um asian developed games just a lot going on a lot of flashing things a lot of

kind of subtle movement if you look at top of the screen they're kind of like the currencies they're kind of like like flashing off them and such like um you can see the bottom there's an open chats someone asking anyone to speak english um there's just a lot of kind of over almost like overwhelming information which is done done for a reason not just to confuse you but done so the game can kind of pull you around so obviously we're seeing this big this big campaign error there's a lot going on so what does my brain do it doesn't know what to do it follows the big arrow so let's go into campaign and quickly go through some stuff so i'm failure in the game i've actually played further in a different um or a different account but um there we go that seems to have been lost um well done game center so we can see we're using some energy but we've got quite a lot of energy we use a tenth of our energy to do this so we're going into kind of a loadout mode screen we can see i've got two um weapons not not high level weapons um like assault rifle and a sniper's rifle we can see here on the right hand side there's items that i can

kind of um either buy um if so i haven't got a battle boost but i could if i've got enough money i have so i could buy a battle boost um buying it seems to be doing something else so am i getting a score bonus um on on the probably can't see at the bottom there but there's grenades focus fire to focus your squad mates fire so you have ai controlled squad mates med kits rpgs anyway that kind of stuff so go to next so this is i have a battle friend so i don't actually have any friends in the game i have these random guys who i could um add as friends or cat captain mcclaney's sister you can see i've got him for another five hours he's a just a ai control guy and there's also a young lady called natasha quite what she's doing in her skimpy outfit you can see her there with a funny hat on so basically um just a kind of pretty obvious shooter game so we've got these guys grenade everybody's gonna throw a grenade at me if i don't

shoot him quickly i can move around a little bit no it's not a very realistic um there's a sniper guy probably gonna come in a minute another sniper there's a grenade coming so yeah just do a bit of this and this i think at one point glue not really as as time goes on as the game the gameplay has become more arcade-like but at one point i think blue i think about whether this was some sort of tactical kind of weapons based thing um and got a bit realistic and then over time realized it just doesn't work in this kind of situation so what's interesting now is we um completed it not very well you got one style got my score bonus and then we can see at the bottom um i've got some xp i've got some gold and i've got these like uh some items things see kind of

components for a gun and this is kind of the key interesting new monetization that glue's done in in in this in this game so we can see here there's a whole bunch of stuff that i can claim there's things i haven't claimed over the last few missions i've done i don't quite know why it's still loading but um anyway so um i got some kills in the you know my internet speed is not great screw you when the speed's fine um i think your server's down um so um what we're looking at uh so going to task here we go that's where it was so i can claim i get fame xp and just for his stuff and this is very much um inspired like a uh an old hate space an rpg so so basically they've taken effectively rpg monetization elements and brought it along to a shooter and they've effectively the um the rpg elements now i've seen in an rpg game based around characters in this

game based around guns um so i'm just claiming stuff as in if anyone's played a um particularly an asian rpg that's just your claim pretty much whatever you do in the game you get to claim stuff it's all about um my hero i've been on i don't have 60 minutes there's any of this stuff i can claim this is just stuff telling me what i can do so going to my squad so you can see here very big red spots tell me what i can do there's me and here's my um kind of permanent squad member because that's what you when you're going to into a modern armed combat that's the kind of person you have by your side so we can see here we can go into her armor you can see all the different elements so even her armor has a helmet or vessel jacket boots gloves so i can level those all up um enhance i'm just following what the red button does oh so add all my xp so xp is

an element of xp she's flashing away she's leveled up to level five but look at it see stats have gone up meaningless but it makes us feel good doesn't it in our brain um and we can see here that the individual helmet equally has i can max enhance that as well so we can just see this exactly no i can't buy that exactly as you'd expect in a it's a element this is like something trying to sell me now um i can purchase this one time only yes i don't care um so i can go in and each individual thing now i'm leveling up so again this is like just a bit of a kind of excitement kind of thing for my dopamine level i'm not saying this is a bad thing at all this is what i'm what particularly um asian rpgs chinese japanese korean they're all slightly different but they have kind of very heavy in this kind of expectation of grind expectation of spend and expectation of reward so the tash is all leveled up um

so let's go and this is me so we can see here i can upgrade my weapon so here we go so again i can like level up i've got an xp left so i've got special xp for that gun so i'm going to spend some soft currency level up so boom my guns level up two levels come back out but there's more to do so i can level up my components so i can max enhance my site's gone up um business part magazine there's the so that my gun you know most of those small things don't really make a lot of difference but um a little bit of a difference i can also again do the same thing with my jacket um it's just those stats going up so so it's not just the gun i suppose there's these elements of the kind of player base basically this game

is kind of all about guns so that's what it is again there's it right okay so i've got messages from the various people so um there's another um keep up the practice captain this this young lady is your kind of tutorial leader so again just claim it all and getting more stuff they've got all that stuff is but the other nice thing the nice thing about these games is whatever stuff you get is always useful somewhere you can do something with it um you can see here i guess across the top of the right hand uh the top of the screen on the right hand side with energy so i can spend gems to buy energy but as has been pointed out um clues games normally quite tight on energy this game is fairly generous on energy so the soft currency so today's gold purchasing limit i can trade three two gems and get a thousand uh gold i mean i've got a lot of gold so i don't really do that and i've got been given this is the important thing gems is what you really care about 10 gems so how much have been been given not very much 20 cents or something like that really another thing to notice here is vip a vip

system is very characteristic of asian rpgs and um vips are generally expected vp system in the real world um the higher up you are the more just stuff you get for free to get vip level you can kind of kind of grind but basically you end up buying stuff so it's a real um kind of situation where really encouragement to spend a lot of these things in the games is yeah you can grind it out you can you know you can just play this play this level 100 times or 50 times or whatever and get what you want or to spend some dollars vip thing tends to be a bit of a harder sell you can also see on the left-hand side i can watch your video so the rewarded video ads which is very common now and that's where that kind of comes in and the store let's go into the store so the store is very much about guns i mean this has always been the case with the frontline commando games these guns have kind of been what they've sold them on so as the main monetization option whereas now it's a bit softer because

now you have this guns and the component side so the components are equally um kind of soft on the the the sail but we can see here you know these guns are expensive we're looking at 500 um i mean these elves it's just showing me the top of the range ones it's a sale as well so it's not going to last forever um but you know if i'm if i'm right down here so i could i could buy it like these are kind of ones i've got actually the sea level snipers rival really um if i wanted to buy the big what on earth that thing is i'm not a real gun but i look a bit the sawtooth so i don't have enough gems so if i'm getting home jim's going to cry so that's getting on for yeah it's not massive it's ten dollars if i want to buy that as an individual item um equally we have what we what we kind of see as what we call gacha so catcher is pretty much all games do this certainly rpgs have crates so i can um look here really i can buy get some stuff for free so that's

cool and it's all about the chart so if i say the rare chance crate if i open 10 i will get a guaranteed blue gun quite what blue gun is right now the epic chance crate if i open 10 i will get a guaranteed purple gun let me see the bottom i can buy 10 for 72 000 gold which i don't have or i can buy 10 for 5 000 2590 gems which is obviously a lot of money but if i do that i am guaranteed a purple gun which is obviously a cool thing but i can just do that's what tends to happen in these situations they give you like a taster so what did i get open the red crate and i received gun xp and owner five focus five um now you can see that's gone from three to eight thousand don't get an epic one but i'll get out of that i get i received a gun xb2 and focus far again so i got a lot of focus fire didn't get pretty good um again there's a store

so this is kind of stuff and that was getting into the component stuff so there's the helmet gloves all the kind of components that we've seen and then here we have gun components again kind of done in a kind of randomized way so i can buy white ar components i don't really know what i'm getting in there but i know it will be useful because i need to level up my gums so this is kind of the real i guess conclusion from from rival fire what we see is the gameplay is pretty much the same they in later levels it becomes a bit more arcadey it's almost something like space invaders it's not really a very realistic game pvp is a big thing that's a technical thing and that's just a good retention tool people like playing against people or certainly playing with with their friends um obviously guilds are a massive part of strategy in games but what's really interesting about the monetization here is glue has gone from what basically was very small

hard sell on singular items i.e buy this gun some of their level some of the games where you can't you can't play this level unless you've bought the compo you've bought the kind of um necessary items to level up your gun this is much more componentized now everything's broken down there's like five different components on the gun the individual character has five different kind of armor components each of those can be leveled up in different world multiple different ways and you're going into a store you can buy like getting to splash out ten dollars and buy like a big shoot a gun but a lot of it is all about buying crates and much more subtle and much more broken down a much more kind of psychologically nuanced and sophisticated monetization and that's really i guess what not just glue in this case it's glue very much learning from from it's now a strategic partner and shareholder tencent but we're seeing this across the whole range of western developed games i guess the best example in the rpg genre is uh ea's star wars galaxy heroes which is

probably the moment the best example of a hybrid kind of traditional western game taking on some um asian components in terms of kind of gatcha and and card based elements but doing it in a you know more western way there's always that kind of balance to be to be brought so anyway that is look at glue mobile's rival fire so thanks for watching our monetization feature don't forget to subscribe so we do this analysis of free play mobile games and if that's your thing if you subscribe you won't miss any of our content thanks for watching hope to see you again