Monetizer: Yodo1's Cavemania

hello and welcome to pocket gaming offices at monetizer feature this is where we play through the first five minutes or so of a free to play game and have a look at the user flow the um and the monetization techniques that our developers are using early in the playing experience so the game we're going to look at today is uh cavemania so let's start the stopwatch fire up the game see what happens so this is a match three game developed by us studio called bonus XP and it's published by Yoda one which is a previously has been a Chinese publisher that's been published in Chinese games into China sorry Western games into China and this is the first time it's a kind of published globally a western development game so uh well so straight straight away we've been given something which is always a nice thing to happen isn't it so um it says that's a good a good technique

for the first thing you experience to do something nice I'm not quite sure what a lighting stable will mean but that's nice so another nice thing to notice we've not been asked to do a push notification yet which is something I like like I hate to see push notifications before I've even got into the game um I think push notifications have been placed but um so now if you start obviously we can connect but probably most people won't connect to a game they don't really know um what it is yet or whether they're going to play it more or so let's just start see what happens okay so we go here okay so connect to Facebook see my friend's scores it's a bit of encouragement but obviously I'm going to say play okay Chieftain needs my help to reunite the tribe gather food so we need to to match three games I'm matching apples and smashed the dino dummy okay let's see what that means

that's all about okay so this is my little Chieftain guy and after every turn I make they'll do a move my inventory okay it's cool gameplay stuff nothing good I can move them up directly and you'll bash the dyno so this is my objectives here um and this is this one here is the amount of moves I've got 22 moves obviously first level it's gonna be pretty easy so I've won some gold okay pretty much the same just moved towards the dummy

okay you need to put in wood that's fine dog okay how much trees to get to work that's not trees um okay uh any more trees 100 people do that let's cancel that

okay so just over three minutes in four minutes in so I'm gonna kill a rat then I've got a match stones so obviously with the max 3 it's pretty popular kind of genre um this is actually putting obviously a bit of a mix on it so you're having you're having these playable characters in the in the game as you go on you get more playable characters so you're kind of using the naturals to build up your resources but then you're you're actively kind of moving in a more like strategy game uh kind of gameplay

um actually the guys behind this game the guys who developed it actually um did work on PC games like Age of Empires so they they try to mix up these two quite disparate um kind of gameplay elements so strategy and match three so the chieftain's got a slash power I need to get a four the four link match four first then I've got this this is powered up so there's movement tap your teeth and tap the wrap Right double damage right um let's move

okay I've got a new sword I don't think that's an upgrade upgrade yeah I've got 8 000 gold so yes Okay so I'm going for five minutes now so um we've got a good idea of kind of how the level based structures working and um as you've played this game before and it's quite a slow build off it takes a long time to to kind of uh feed in all different kind of elements of the game so you can see there's at the moment there's these different characters you get um which they're not unlocked which is not locked if they're not unlocked yet they're locked so we can't access them um so let's have a quick look at the store look at it if you've seen a little bit um that we kind of own this gold every time we finish the level and then so for

my Chieftain actually I can change the sets of achievement um and so I could when I get if I had seven thousand coins I could raise the attack I've got a health reason I've got a slash damage so it's super power up damage and also if I want to open buy elements so this is quite pretty expensive I would suggest um for a single item but maybe uh somebody's unlocked as well 30 colors okay we get the idea anyway so let's go back to that so if you go to the store so um as we've seen there's this gold is the currency so I could buy a reasonable gold so um but I guess on these kind of games it's kind of interesting of the Candy Crush

Saga and and the Dual Blitz uh Bejeweled as well um I've been games that have kind of monetized uh very well been very commercially successful um but they're not really just because the way the the gameplay is is level based and completing the levels the main thing so not really a resource based games obviously normally buying currency is resource type thing um so in this structure you actually see we've got quite a let me just showing us there's permanent upgrades and consumable upgrades so I mean opponent upgrade is a life so a size six live so the moment we had to get five I think we have five lives so look yeah five so basically that gives us one more kind of kind of go per session so if we if we fail six times if you sell five times what's another one in your life left I mean that's incumbent is that fair expensive that's two 99 pounds that's that's five dollars um bonus Crystal so every time we start a level we start with one of those basically a match four

um goodbye I'll look it up so this will be up we're upgrading instead of having three maximum Powers we can't go into four um get a bonus turn and the old favorite double gold so whoever came as seems as this one now so spend two pounds or three dollars and all the gold will be doubled up so basically your um progressing twice as fast as your others would I mean that's in most of these games this type of thing is the most popular one um just because it in a sense if you know you're gonna play the game it's a no-brainer you're just gonna be it makes things easier for you um so those are all kind of fairly cheap items these ones are consumables again these are so these are even cheaper but these are paying 99 Cents

um for things you're gonna use up like a little more stuns dinos and then we go so interestingly even at this level we're not spending much money so that's ten that's 9.99 for the most amount of gold you can buy so while there's lots of things you can buy um it's not looking like a game that's gonna gonna rank particularly highly in terms of our monetization ranking because it's not just at the high end it's you can't spend a hundred dollars on one item um so uh yeah so it's cavemania it's pretty uh I think you would say this is an example of a I mean it is a kind of a skill based game that the developers have come not from a free to play mobile background you know although they have done a mobile game before um so this is what we could consider a kind of a kind of skill based game

and it's looking really to get people playing um extensively before they start spending money so it's got plenty of kind of content in there um and actually I found it it's not it's built to be a big uh kind of discussion with the games like Candy Crush so I'm gonna let you let you play for a certain amount of levels and then really to progress any further you have to spend money or or spam your friends um looking like this game is while using these these sort of techniques is not applying them in anything like the uh the same level so interesting which will be having a look at that in our monetizer column later on