Monetizer: The Drowning

[Music] hello and welcome to pocket gamer dot business monetizer feature this is where we video the first five to ten minutes of various free to play games and have a look at the different monetization techniques and just the user interface the user experience flows through the uh kind of initial stage of the game today we're going to look at uh dna's the drowning so let's start the stopwatch oh and load up the game put the sound up i was beginning to fear

[Applause] obviously this is a designed to be a cinematic experience so it's not often you get that kind of little other cut scene start the game but uh let's try something a little bit different here [Applause] oh yeah okay we're going to go for a tutorial tap two fingers bullets fibers in your fingers this might be a bit difficult to do with the um with the ipad laying down but i'll do the best i can [Applause]

[Applause] okay and then this is quite interesting um so that's just about controls that we just learned this is all this is what the game was designed to be used to use with this is kind of part of the innovation that the um the team wanted to kind of create without with their obviously first-person shooters not not easy to do on a touchscreen and they didn't want to do twin sticks which is generally not very good or certainly purist they don't give a very good solution um but they did in prolonged testing they

kind of realized um that some people just like virtuosic controls so so they spent a lot of time on this kind of um tutorial process um whether that's this is enough time for people to really understand obviously you can switch back anytime but uh anyway that's the uh that's the learning from here we'll stick with this one i think okay let's prove it he's gonna let it die so easy in that's exciting so straight into the game i'm getting good feeling about this okay oh so all right well i think i had him covered there but there we go so again this is this department tutorial a little bit a little bit hand holding

no it's no music i'm gonna bring it closer [Applause] there we go [Applause] [Applause] let's get out of here [Applause]

[Music] i got to die oh that's hard over time there was a note on the wall inside the house if you're reading this yeah no rescue please i guess we did the video i'll be good now in the basement there's a still it'll turn the black stuff into something that'll power vehicles speaking of which there's an old motorcycle guys needs repairs it's very helpful charlotte can probably fix it if you find the right parts oh one last thing take good care of the dog she's a hell of a scavenger and if you're good to her she'll be good to you there we go and i said set up

for now okay differently okay so this is kind of interesting so actually um quite like well i just get this right i did really dislike games where you load them up and then first thing gets a push notification and the first thing you do is you kind of like bombarded with logging via facebook and all this got this kind of stuff i mean clearly dna um a very experienced japanese company and the scattered team in sweden behind this um are i spent a lot of time thinking about the flow into the game and i would say this is almost like the perfect flow so you have a you have a a tutorial structure you get a bit of an understanding of what you're going to do in the game and very highly polished and you play that through before you're kind of hit with some sort of oh and now you need to do this and

this is this is kind of um other interesting is is so mobile is is dna's um social gaming network pretty massive um still pretty massive in in japan where most revenue comes from but now it's getting some revenue outside outside of japan so normally so on on this mobage login stream you have to log in so you can also have your own address sign in with facebook i mean some of the other games that's a hard it's a hard gate if you don't log in the whole point is it's a social network so if you don't log into the social network you can't actually play the game so this is particularly on some of their uh on some of their card games like regular booth and blood brothers and they have been very very successful but they really um have taken quite a kind of a hard-nosed view that um they really want to get people into the social side and they don't care if they're losing a lot of people because they're not not getting not prepared to log in in this case we can still play as a guest so um in this case i'll just keep playing as a guest

just see what the experience is like oh um okay so it's detected i've got a market account you're not getting this game um the first five minutes we've had so so now we're into the game proper okay so as the as the man said you've got this motorcycle system so this is quite interesting so we've been playing the game we've been killing monsters we're feeling kind of good about the whole thing um this is quite an abstract type of screen i mean the moment is good because pretty obvious what we need to do there's that flashing i mean let's see what we've got to do these parts so the whole point about about the drowning is is it's all about kind of collecting parts everything's broken in as well so you need to go around find a tire should um so on a map or go that's where that's

that's where i am that's where the tire is so you can find this location so that's actually this location is in various various kind of mission structures so there's a home base in attacking a fender on the beach so um so basically what we're going to be doing is going around kind of trying to collect these type things so we've got two of them this is showing the um the rarity of the value now the interesting thing is it kind of it's kind of like a terminology i think it's kind of use of what people say um because it's kind of a retail experience for them if you if you um look at the press releases and stuff from the drone they're all talk about rare and powerful it's kind of attendees they're rare and they're powerful i guess that's quite a good monetization thing you don't want to be spending a lot of time looking for things that are that are common and not very good so so these are going to so this is just starting this is a toxic beast um kind of a raid boss so that's a

week-long kind of timed event which is something that um companies like dna and griez um are spending a lot of time on um kind of getting people into these timed events for the particular kind of better rewards than you would get by just playing the game obviously driving retention okay in terms of like kind of stores we'll have a good look at this so we haven't really gone into this but from what i know so we have um we have a uh this is like the black stuff isn't it um we've got a fuel can this is ammunition you know some sort of health system oh that's a fuel isn't it um that's fuel can so so to get to anywhere we need this kind of we can convert that to that and one of those filters i've got gold as a hard currency let's have a quick look and see what we've got in a store okay so the black is used for crafting upgrading weapons gas is used for traveling flares for better rewards um and that's the only item you know okay so more flows so we're buying with

gold let's see how much gold costs okay so okay yes i haven't got any gold i'll get more so that this is a could be argued as a fairly abstract store experience i think we could suggest a bit more work that's done on this store experience um let's take a screenshot of that that'll be useful um oh no don't do that okay um no okay so pretty standard so yeah okay so what's interesting here actually is um so this is the cheapest one 99 cents gives us 100 gold obviously this is very standard to have a range of six um price points with two less than ten dollars and then one at um on a thirty one at fifty and one hundred dollars um you can see you get a hundred

and obviously the monetization kind of technique is how you what it looks like um yeah so if you if you spend one dollar you get 100 gold here if you spend 100 all right sorry cameras went off there um so you're not really getting kind of a vast um kind of extra amount of uh of kind of resource by spending the extra amount of money but these kind of things that obviously change over time i think obviously for the drowning is quite early in its um in this deployment it's only been out for a week now it's always just worth looking at that i think so so from the system we've got a hard currency and then we've got something that converts all the hard drives he converts into different items so that's something we can look at at a later point in time okay so i'm going for over 10 minutes

now so i think that's probably probably enough there are we don't want to spend too long focusing on these games this is just the kind of idea to look at the first um kind of early stages of the first five ten minutes of the game to see um and from that point of view um i would say the drowning is a a classic example of how to get people into a cinematic game and we've not been asked to do any anything in the store we've had a very nice kind of cinematic flow we've some quite complicated kind of um control systems have been taught to us the whole thing is of a very high standard so that's the drowning [Music]