Warcraft Rumble: Deep dive into game's complexity, spend depth, systems, vectors, UA, creatives(#84)

uh kind of looking forward how this thing is going to get like this whole kind of unique way of progression because now they're combining the kind of clash Royale progression with bits of Marvel snap progression bits of like the usual core like Star level progression if somebody's going to copy it I'm I'm kind of very very curious because this seems like literally custom tailored to this but still I don't think so it works that well in a way because for me the biggest grib is the faing this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast two and a half gamer sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our day-to-day user acquisition game design and AD monetization jobs we are definitely not discussing the latest industry news but having so much fun let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously all right welcome everybody this is session number 84 uh welcome my name is mat Lich I'm Felix braberg and I'm yak

we are your hosts and also we're working working as a Consultants to help your gra Game grow so I'm the UA guy Felix is on the admon side and yakob is a well game designer so thank you very much for stopping by and asking us like if we actually do something else we do yeah we do this is not job Yeah we actually do all right enough [ __ ] no no wait not enough [ __ ] uh we still have few things so today we are actually talking about Warcraft ramble and Global and review well it's uh not too many things to review but we we'll get get there uh I'm I'm going to talk about a little bit of a soft lunch point of view and then like how it changed into the global launch but then I think we need to talk about the ignite thing uh we had last week which uh was actually quite good everybody was

very positive yeah very positive about our presentation about unlocking the success of hybrid casual uh games people said 10 out of 10 the best presentation and also a few people said uh it was almost like a standup comedy connected to sharing knowledge bombs so yeah great energy we had t-shirts um we don't have any t-shirt left so I guess it was quite good thank you very much for for coming and sharing ing all the feedback for for different things so yeah that's great there's also Berlin happening this week sadly I'm not coming uh because my daughter is sick but uh GNA go to South Korea next week so that's why I'm staying at home so everybody's healthy to be prepared for South Korea because we have a party which we are throwing up with h complet yes complete G so see you there okay Let's uh let's let's start I

guess it's going to be a lot of uh game design stuff we need to we need to get through don't sound so annoyed no no no no no no no actually like uh this game is quite better than I expected yeah it's better than expected but it's a lot of question marks for me cuz essentially it's like kind of a lot of things that I feel are missing at least from an ad monetization side and probably from the UA side as well right but we'll get there well let's let's say blizzard is not the well mobile first mobile first UA company that's let's call it that way it's not even close to to whatever super cell is yeah but these launch it's like it's a great game but like the fact they not mobile first there's a lot of money they've lost out on in this first couple of weeks I think yeah that's true actually I think like they yeah I have a little bit of different opinion here oh well tell us tell us M I have a different opinion for me this is really really properly done

uh in case of monetization wise like some of the things I have there like I'll told the spend numbers but is that the only thing uh in the in this piece of global launching like the technical issues and everything like I mean like crashing like [ __ ] we get to all the can of worms that we are having here okay okay let let's start with this um so tldr for those listening this is basically Clash Royale which much more complex gameplay core gameplay and progression both are kind of very heavily iterated with heavy PVE Focus instead of PVP as everybody knows Clash Royale is the PVP game that everybody plays against competitively each other with one V one battles this is mainly using the player versus environment meaning that those are predesigned levels rates dungeons locations pretty much mainly against computer and the gacha system is very custom I would say I yeah I play like two or three p matches and then the rest is just PVE

and then rids and uh yeah yeah it's more of a like nice to have rather than the focus which at CL is complete Center so we'll see by the way what's your levels the usual question so my level well the collection level is six uh and then I just unlocked raids on the level 31 or whatever that is you mean dungeons dungeons dungeons oh that's pretty nice yeah I me like 12 okay I'm I actually yeah I like the game um it's not bad like I'm I'm missing few few sigils into a campaign but uh okay yeah pretty much seen it all like it's it's like quite quite kind of fast looking have you seen the ugly font that's on the load screen so it's like Times New Roman where it just everything is so polished except the goddamn font is like rebirth because the long loading screens are very very longes themselves so you really notice

it it's just like I was like is that maybe they could have use comic sand instead I don't know it's like the only f is uglier that would be amazing the game is honestly like it's quite hard if you don't pay attention yeah we'll get to it we'll get to it because it's like one of the different changes that they did and really shows okay so to go properly this was soft launch August 9th this year uh it was already announced last year and from that point on it was kind of nobody knew anything about it and then suddenly this August just we've seen it uh it was released on November 2nd if I get that right not exactly November 3rd as not even November 2nd like when I checked the numbers the the downloads increased already on October 30 so it's like week yeah this week was kind of interesting in terms of like this pre-registration which was kind of in this case like a [ __ ] because I didn't get um the push notification or

just it didn't start downloading I already see I already we already saw it kind of like in the store like November 2nd but I guess it was sitting there also like I think I got the push notification how did we know that we it it because I was I I downloaded it on on my phone and you were searching for it in in in the room like when we yeah that ignite like oh well let's try to play okay okay okay yeah um regarding the numbers that we see uh so it seems that regarding downloads it's getting pretty big traction allegedly allegedly yeah we don't know yeah we don't know we don't know like where's it's to be expected this Blizzard game there was this giant biscon announcement around it I've seen through whole like one hour announcement even to further R my I can talk about it later so it had some price don't get me wrong it has the pre- campaign running in and it has like been kind of hyped up a little bit let's say not that I would

say it's like typical for something like for instance supercell game but yeah it's getting big traction so we're talking something like what 500k 600k download a day currently most probably yeah I think most probably a little bit more one tool says 300,000 daily the other one says anything between 600 and million a day so it's kind of need to stabilize with little I think it will stabilize around like 400,000 per day yeah download download right downlo okay regarding the revenue then uh that's even worse it's even worse worse not in case of Revenue but in case of like what we see and accuracy so yeah some things say it's 10 times less then some say it's 10 times more so the thing is we yeah I thank God we have the sadness multiplayer and that like we kind of reviewed a lot of games so we I think we have pretty good kind of estimates by this

point or maybe we won't well we'll see but I would say the game makes anything between 250,000 to 400,000 a day in revenues I Revenue iip revenues because there's no admon obviously S I would go to be honest I would go a little bit more optimistic because I've seen monitization and it's very very enticing so I would still go like what do we see in some of the other things which is like 600 K already but it's peing pretty fast meaning that probably by the end of the week it will peek yeah because there there's no U no UA spend up is there but yeah there's no UA and downloads will fall off pretty pretty strong here keep in mind that like as mat seen there's not this giant UA push because this is what's still missing in Blizzard's Arsenal like they're not really doing it like a proper mobile free-to-play company would do yeah if you don't put uh you know new users in like you can't expect this to grow until yeah like

don't get me wrong you still make like 500k a day or even more problem but downloads will fall off and then retention will kick in and then you know we will kind of stagnate it's like nothing works without giant UI push in these days if you want to have like top 10 game of course yeah I mean so this is a good start but let's see how it goes because I was but yeah it will get yeah it's a really good start for those counting out 500 to 600k a day equals to something like up to 20 mil a month if it would stay there so yeah we'll see then there's the question if this is enough for Blizzard or whatever but it's if I remember correctly the launch M of clash Royale was something like 65 m month that was just to get the reference yeah just to get the reference okay oh this is most probably not going to get very close to that yeah uh as we see most of the kind of a revenue is coming of course from us and then the usual kind of EU tier one countries but well there's France and Germany which are like apparently the the biggest uh and then we have what else yeah South

Korea is Kore thaan is kind of big I saw South Korean uh creatives and texts on Facebook so I see blizzard is also very strong in Asian countries I mean Asian outside China or even in China I would say but this is not really in China mobile market if I get it right not yet because game it's already it's already yeah showing so show show show the game um yeah here's here's a font here's a font favorite font oh it's so ugly doesn't fit in at all yeah so we'll see um so first first things first so they took the core gameplay of clash Royale um the one that you know and then added a few other vectors or pretty much extended the game through a few other vectors to make it much more deeper and complex and this is I think mainly done because most of their content is PVE and in order to make PVE content happen you just need

bigger Maps because you just couldn't communicate the level through level design like keep in mind clashy is just one screen like no scrolling like here for instance here would be my Towers here would be their towers and that's it the scrolling is annoying as [ __ ] it's annoying but they there wasn't any other way to do it like serves the purpose okay got it because for me just to get like very big overview this seems like the same play as Hearthstone where what they do is that they just use Warcraft Universe content try to emulate the V experience through this game similarly how I did to Hearthstone in Hearthstone we have the same thing like the PV part of hearthstone is the same like the raids the mechanics everything is adjusted to feel like you're playing World of Warcraft here is the same where again you think you have the same references same lovable characters everything and it feels like you're playing the dungeon of World of Warcraft the one that you played 20 years ago because currently we are the main kind of audience here yeah of course blizzard games aren't that popular these days like World of AR is great but don't get

me wrong it's not fortnite yeah it's not for it's not for like a young exactly so they I'm I think they're using the same Playbook um the main thing is of course that the energy Vector is much different meaning that in Clash Royale use pound units for Elixir but here they added this kind of a gold mining mechanic with uh I screw up with um where is the Cobalt guy here here is the Cobalt Guy where every deck automatically even you don't have even a choice here is included with this Cobalt guy who mines or WIS and there are also chests which adds Elixir to your well not Elixir but pretty much the Mana currency the gold currency that you Spa units from this is the first very very big change they have there the other very very big change that they have these flagging Towers which means that if I flag that Tower I can then uh spawn units right there and I don't need to you know pretty much start directly from my base which is

again very very big difference because now we need to scroll and go to this Tower because we not pushing from this unit and we could be pushing from that unit or like the soul Stones whatever so I think again this is just a natural extension that they needed to add because if the maps are so long going always from a base would be just impossible so you need some kind of a checkpoint to to to go here yeah it will take like the other thing which Again Play directly into it is that you have these Unbound units like this guy which I can spawn pretty much anywhere I want on the map which is completely against the CL Royale thing where you are in CL you are mainly trying to focus the influence like the territory that you control where you can Spa the units if you destroy the towers you lose that control mean the opponent can Spa closer to your base like over the river which is again uh the like different case here uh the other thing of course making it more more complex they have these leaders or like the Hero characters that

are pretty much the main point in all of the decks they are they're kind of carrying the whole deck and it can be only one leader per deck and it usually so kind of important abilities that you build the whole deck around him you can spawn multiple of these on the field but still like every deck is pretty much done around this this kind of a leader and I'm getting completely slaughtered here because talking and then concent the that's the thing you can't very much like uh do anything else you need to call you need to focus on the game play because if you miss one thing and you're [ __ ] immediately yeah it's kind of hard and all of these things that I just mentioned which extend the complexity and depth of the game creates a much more core game in itself because there's many many many mechanics and by the way they're being thrown at you very very fast tutorial is very very short very steep learning curve yeah in Clash Royale the tutorial would be playing the

same game with same um kind of a deck multiple times teaching you mechanics one by one here no you're they using the usual blizzard way which meaning you learn as you play because we give you content to learn on but you can you know force your head around it sometimes and you're just banging your head against the wall if you don't understand it yeah like the question is uh would this be advantage or disadvantage because then yeah that's the thing because it's definitely not playing into the mass Market formula it's playing formula because blizzard formula it always was in World of Warcraft was that they release rates and nobody knows what these rates do you literally go into this progress part and you discover as you go so when you finally beat the first phase of the boss amazing and then you get immediately slaughtered in the second because uhuh now he does this so let's start over yeah so all of the all the raids and tactics those were like one of the big Pride things that World of Warcraft did where you need to learn everything pretty much by trial and error and this is kind of the same which

for blizzard audience works perfectly I don't think so that's a problem but are we talking about Mass Market Mobile game here or just some kind of a pet project you know yeah that's what I'm that's where I was aiming for like uh is this for because yeah of course I I played this and I I kind of like lost few times until I kind of understood like what I should do because nothing was explained properly I like okay well this is Warcraft so okay I will give it the chance and then because it makes sense because you know the characters you know what they do because you've seen them but if You' seen them for the first time what the [ __ ] is happening here yeah so yeah that is that is like one of my biggest gripes with the game in a way that maybe they see it better than me regarding they have some research numbers whatever some kind of estimates that this would be better for them rather than to kind of dump down the game and do it much more mass Market much more streamlined in a way so don't know but definitely this is not going

like for me I don't think so this is going to achieve the scale of clash Royale in just just because it's just much more Niche it's much more Niche much more core more yeah much less approachable much less intuitive to begin with don't get me wrong it can still make millions but it's probably never going to achieve the same scale as Clash Royale because Clash Royale is just s elegant Simplicity it's literally elegant Simplicity that all of the systems pce nicely them eles all of the things are kind of done for you in a way nicely the units are given to you slowly as you progress to Arenas you can even get them sooner it's impossible here you can get every unit much all the time so yeah that's that's there like the positive side of it that is PVE meaning that you don't feel bad that you lose and this is something that I think Bard can is hoping on that in PVE if you lose you don't you don't can lose anything you can't progress basically yeah you just can't progress but you can still kind of bang your head against the

puzzle try to switch your composition and figure out the puzzle then you have this great aha moment and stuff like that it's it's it's like very amazing and I would say satisfying for some people for some they just kind of lose temper and don't care uh but the the other thing is that um yeah again they're just again using their formula from blizzard days like PC style yeah because in normal mobile games you just want to widen the funnel as much as possible while you throwing bricks into your funnel literally yeah cuz you have wirecraft IP you can do whatever you want but I don't think like it's going to work on yeah I don't think so the days of Warcraft being you know on your South Park every season yeah are over yeah we know yeah we know the IP but like uh that's kind of generation like but does every you know 20-year-old know the IP I don't think so no no no most probably know then they have to just do now South Park you're talking about Boulders gate three you know like

yeah so as I said uh this also changes the whole kind of a setup of the map compared to clash Royale like the PVP Works kind of the same you have your base they have their base you need to destroy but with all of these Maps levels rates dungeons you need to destroy boss which usually involves some kind of puzzle mechanic meaning that whatever here we have a poison Aura something which means that probably fragile units won't survive here so if I have a Healer here I have a pretty good counter against him blah blah blah for instance that's there so yeah it's literally for me it's literally kind of emulating a little bit the experience of World of Warcraft of me going through dungeons learning the tactics the mechanics trying to kind of pay attention to all these kind of different elements on the screen it's kind of very attention heavy I would say like you see just by talking I cannot really properly play it because I yeah no you need to focus on the on the game play Focus yeah otherwise you're [ __ ] just you can't it's it's not like not like um any other Ro yeah basically CL Ro is just much

easy to much easier to get into so my guess is this was deliberate it's not that like because they don't know is it's my guess is because they deliberately choose to do it this way because I think it just goes directly like competing or let's say it's direct targeted their fan base that they know like Bard people will do this and yeah probably it will work definitely like as as I said like scale-wise it's it's a problem um yeah let you to talk when I actually yeah honestly like when m is doing his UA review you should play a game when you focus so you can show our viewers you can you can actually you can actually win yeah because I'm just like Slaughter yeah okay uh the other big difference is I was talking is progression and this is where the ker happens um in Clash Royale progression is very smooth and very paced because you have those loot boxes and the pool of those loot boxes increases by your Arenas meaning that if you start the game you just played with eight character characters or or I don't know seven or whatever some kind of a very

small number you slowly learn them up and then you progress to next Arena and one two or three character gets added in and the process repeats you again learn to play them counter them you know how they work how they play and so on and this goes on and on and on until the last Arena it's very gradual very smooth very easy to get into very approachable here it's completely different pretty much all of the acquisition in the game regarding characters is a choice it's always a choice in CL Ro they pretty much scripted it for you so you don't have you don't even have a space to make bad decisions here you can make bad decisions all the all the time yeah literally all the time like immediately when you select the leader it could be like one of the worst ones for PVE let's say because early game is you suffer quite heavily yeah you suffer quite heav you're stuck with your choices there's like no way that's what happened to me I mean EXA quite hard from the beginning you didn't get the healon guy did you you get the Karen guy the um tan one yes of course which is kind of [ __ ]

compared to Tyrion my my Tyrion can face roll like the early game like there was nothing because he was healing himself and everybody around him easy yeah I didn't have but the thing is I didn't get that option yeah you didn't randomized it's randomized even for the starting character you know no more charman the bulbas are Pikachu analogy yeah so you literally can get like Slowpoke because we decided exactly yeah because you can because why not and then you by the time I have I have my Charizard already at level 50 you are just crawling with slow exactly yeah exactly I'm kind of yeah with the Magikarp Magikarp oh that's very true yeah that's very true now it's it's slightly different but yeah like it was very painful start you were like oh well this is great like I can heal myself with the another tyon like and I don't get this why they don't have it scripted because just the cares about you want to script because you want to

have as smooth funnel as possible for everyone it's like watching EA make a mobile game it's just like it's not the same as watching scopely release a mobile game it's so different yeah because it's not mess Market it's niche and it's like that's the thing it's GNA N I know like even Pokemon does it like squ the charmand the bulbas out they're not there from like you know because they wanted to but you know that's uh not everybody thinks like this maybe they will change the the onboarding at at some point definitely want to change the because the game is Just much more complex on top of it you throw this wrench into it because you just pick the wrong hero so yeah because you didn't even have the right to pick the right hero because sometimes you get unlucky exactly and good lesson in life though you know this continues because later down the line you have these troop choices which can get rewarded by either this kind of scripted progression from sigils or from the kind of a map choices themselves I think here I have the yeah for instance here you see a troop Choice yeah yeah and again you get a choice between two

characters which one do you pick or do you pick the one that you already have leveled you don't know nobody knows how good is the one that you're picking is it complimenting your deck or no nobody knows nobody knows and you're stuck with your choices again because there's limited resources to get there and on top of it this is the scripted scripted Pro acquisition then we have this piece of work called GD which is even better the game never tells you how it works and this is the main source of acquisition of all the other characters I felt really stupid cuz I couldn't work out what this was and I didn't want to bring that up but I was looking at this like I don't understand this like this is the great Innovation that everybody's talking to but the execution of explanation is nowhere it's missing it's missing Lally missing like do you know even how how these things Works Felix just by playing no I I just said I want to talk about I don't know how you'll be very very surprised so it works in a way that it always have five cards yeah and then if I let's say select this card the

cards horizontally and diagonally gets reset so I'm losing these two if I select the talentful sanas here I cannot get the Golem and this guy because they get out and new things comes in the other thing is that this thing kind of resets every day but just the bottom row meaning the bottom only bottom row so the whole thing kind of collapses on the bottom row and new row is added on top ah okay okay then you can move the characters to to horizontally and diagonally to kind of cap them switch them blah blah blah stuff like that okay we're not finished in this week of course we not only hord character leaders can spawn so if I don't pick up a hord character lead now I need to wait the full rotation which is four other weeks because there's hord black rock Alliance Undead and beasts until again hord leaders appear here and then this is the biggest problem which is nowhere to be told um

when you start upgrading your units to uncommon like this guy for instance if I buy this green guy he gets to be uncommon which means he unlocks his talent slots because the progression is very deep un have talent do you need to get those talents yeah like here in Sylvanas here is a talent this is not like I'm buying syvan I'm just buying talent for Silvana and the thing is when you unlock too many characters into uncommon all of their talents starts appearing here and you cannot get the normal characters but you can but you can move those yeah you can move and it cost gold which you don't no but it cost five Cs it's not that that hard but still yeah what would you do for than ad you know add placement but you don't probably know where the reward that is right the the other other big difference is that in Clash Royale if I'm increase my Arena all of The Shard gains like how much cards per character I'm getting increases automatically because you know progress in higher more costs more requirements because characters always

cost like you know exponentially more like every single level is like doubling the amount of resources needed like for instance if we go here uh yeah for instance here it takes like 200 if you go to level 11 it like 400 whatever but the thing is that how like what increases this so there's this hidden thing called collection level benefits and collection level benefits works completely unintuitively because what it implies that the best investment for you is to buy all of the characters that you don't have at the first like common level all of them because it automatically pumps them up to your current kind of collection level new units boost meaning that already you will pump it up to level seven so I get seven level UPS already because you upgrade your only through level ups and that's the thing that for instance at the beginning I was investing all my shards and like tro choices into characters I already got and I was like crawling very very slowly I'm like wait like in Clash you invest into de you're playing not like all the other

characters but this is it this is it it yeah it's very unintuitive and you like say I that's that's when we talked about this on Saturday I started uh kind of buying all these like different common character and suddenly like my collection level increased by two by two like oh wait a second and now I can I can get more shards in the in the quests like huh yeah this is this is nowhere to be said in the whole game because for instance here in the shop if I go here chest now for 60 Gold are giving like 300 shards before it was like 100 150 150 I I have it on for 150 same gold cost because it scaled it needs to scale like in Clash Royale some somehow it needs to scale and this is the system that they choose because on top of it it's not the usual kind of random gacha and actually what they did is they I think they took the mechanics from Marvel snap where in Marvel snap you get of course those are not power progression cards but the Skins you get shards randomly selected on a random card from your deck which happens also

here that after you finish a game every time a character levels up a little bit from your deck so this is the same same principle that things that you are playing with level up same goes for quests that quests are given on two two of the quests are given from characters from your deck and one randomly from your collection so you level up what you play um the other thing here is that the PV Saga know it's big is just like there's heroic campaign later which is kind of very very hard and like AI have like super big advantages there then there's Dungeons and raids let's just talk about Dungeons dungeons at um dungeons is pretty much a Rog light mode yeah very nice to have you fun yeah it's kind of fun very again Nostalgia completely because you're playing all those World of Warcraft dungeons you need to do this because it upgrades Your Leader Army slots and this is where we get really deep into to customization so let's take our leader here and not only

you upgrade his level through these shards you also need to upgrade his Rarity because this game doesn't have like kind of fixed Rarity every unit can be upgraded to Legendary all of them yeah so you slowly upgrade his Rarity which takes this special currency called AR light or whatever light you get that from Dungeons and rates you need to get copies of this unit which gives you start and then this kind of just region which is just like a lot of gold and then upgrade the character and then after you do this you can select a new Talent from him which is again another Noob trap because if you select the wrong Talent you're stuck with it you're stuck with literally again you can't reset like you can't reset because again you need to bite somewhere and then like upgrade it like 10 times more to that Rarity again is a giant Noob trap like for instance here like if I didn't select the Divine Shield my unit would be literally two times kind of weaker here because that's the best conent a lot of people like sounds good why not but you cannot change it yeah

you can change it I was like okay so I have three options now like I have no you can use only one Talent at the time anyway yeah exactly and it's like I have no idea like what the [ __ ] like any of these like do it's like okay well without obviously like Googling for all the all the builds okay okay [ __ ] I'm sorry yeah you need to Google for this [ __ ] otherwise you break your progression of course there's exra sheets for all this you seriously ask this question Mr I was going to ask which Pokemon he chose on Game Boy but I thought this was me more you know applicable definitely like I I just like when when went with all of it because then the leaders also upgrades their slots which like these upgrades are given through dungeons each dungeon needs to be replayed or let's say leaders needs to replay these dungeons 21 times you know to get full like upgrades on all those slots and again you're choosing the slots but at least these ones you can change it at all time where the like what what does it mean

the like the the slots the upgrade slots yeah so it increases your level it's literally a bonus to your levels so instance for instance here my Griffin here if I switch it with morlocks notice that its level goes down to eight because see it's nowhere to be told I didn't get that until you explained it like what yeah exactly so it gives bonus we play games very differently Remo yeah I know I play games with Excel sheets and you fun yeah yeah no I mean like there there are games you play for fun and there are games if you if you want to progress you need to read all of this [ __ ] if it's this like this Niche like that like this exactly so here for instance it's very good like don't get me wrong it's another level of great customization because you know the leaders have three uh kind of Mand like fixed slots like for instance here Tyrion has two Alliance and one tank slot and then these other three you pretty much select from five or six different tags that you can customize your deck and then switch it like the customization is literally

endless like I can every single unit not just leader every single unit have three talents every single one of them so and you know you can change the talents on a leader which can change on all those units you can change the Army slots so it's very very deep customization and then goes plays very well into the level design because of course the level design and even the dungeons themselves they require you again going into rotation to bring a specific hero for instance this week There's the dile dungeon for whole week and I can only bring horde Heroes if I don't have horde Heroes I cannot even play the dungeon honestly right I just I just noticed those like custom army slots I was like okay [ __ ] it I didn't even know now I see like's no tutorial for it yeah like there's hard hard bonus for for this like oh well okay at least I have this and then I have man this [ __ ] ah okay but this is typical blizzard in a way that they're literally counting with you

being kind a hardcore PC Warcraft fan which is like this is second blood for me like I you know I I when I go like first thing you do with these games like you go to tier list and you see which units are the best and then you go after them and then you see the decks there like which are the top tier decks and you go after them why don't they put that in the game if it's so if it's so important like why is that not in the game I don't get that I don't get it why not like I seen few games having like this kind of Wikipedia page or whatever or like even AFK Arena has it at Leena literally has like a winning combination like for from other players on the level and you can check like what's the winning combination of people that actually won this level and you can copy their deck they have it in the game so yeah this is very very hard here in a way like as I said the approach ability is the biggest downside of this whole game like it's a nice iteration on CL Royale like the core gameplay is very very nicely adjusted for PVE content

don't get me wrong it's like kind of masterfully crafted and I'm really looking forward like playing all these things because for instance raids they already announc race on blon there's going to be a ragnaros raid where you can get like the ragnaros leader like everybody you know favorite flaming Elemental guy um there's going to be Coates actually so two people can play against the computer which is very very good and it plays very well into PVE games you know they're really not going into the PVP motivation Because by the way this is one of the things that's kind of very very steady in life the the older you are the less competitive you get that's like yeah of course research based I don't [ __ ] care about the play very well like as I said like Warcraft like core workcraft F base like us it plays very well we don't want to compete with some kind of 15y old kick our ass we want to slowly grind through the dungeons you know buy slowly everything all the combinations my own PA not get teab bagged by some 12-year-old in America yeah exactly so it plays very well for the core audience

of Warcraft and blizzard but I don't think so anyone else and and that's why I don't think so why don't you announce a PC client like this is so much better on PC and you said you want do PC client at all yeah it's like it's it's weird it's but here you are playing it on PC anyway Rema right we'll just get to technical issues let me just but thing is like I so I opened up my battl net account on my PC and there's like Warcraft Rumble SC scan the QR code download it on your on your mobile like why why the [ __ ] I can't play it on my pH yeah I just put it there come on it's weird I would rather play it on my PC than on of course and you can have you know offset the stores or Revenue I wanted to connect the yeah exactly there another thing like obviously you have your own launchers account which is the same yeah exactly come on easy 30% on top of on top of whatever you're earning why not and then I was like I wanted to connect my battl net account on phone and I was

wasn't even able to because it was like [ __ ] crashing all the time okay thank you very much yeah we'll see um let me finish this so PVP so main two things when you play when you're stu at Campaign which you eventually stuck or heroo normal campaign is quest which are you can pretty much play them forever but it's 20 per day cap which is 20 quests per day yeah but they refresh so probably you'll never run out I never run out of them play all time uh and then you you play the PVP which is uh I would say a little bit more challenging than even the the normal gameplay it's kind of dominated by all those like main PVP characters like Baron Tyrion and all these guys if you don't have the lead just even like higher higher PVP don't even try you just R stomped uh but as I said like it's not needed like PVP by itself it doesn't have a specific resource that is exclusive dungeons do dungeons have that arite energy whatever the the PVP here if you look into it

it's just normal resources on top like you can get all of these things from outside of the game doesn't matter so it's the typical blizzard approach even with like World of Warcraft PVP there is nice like the Battlegrounds is nice you can have your own progression with like PVP gear but doesn't matter like a lot of people don't yeah it's nice things to have so I think that's good because otherwise it would be bad and they also added this nice mechanic of like three different modifiers again from Marvel snip that are changing the flavor of the PVP which is kind of nice so it's good as it is I wouldn't Fred about also have you seen the the this yes GU system GU system how how the [ __ ] I'm supposed to get in in here I mean it's like five clicks and suddenly I was like I was playing and saw this like chest on the top like what the [ __ ] is this I like oh it's another okay they don't explain how it works and it's just like don't explain how it click the info button click the info button okay yeah like

thanks cool story bro yeah like like those you know our usual handh holding click here click there tutorial with like character telling no we just like keep this I wouldn't even read that obviously but still at least I I know I kind of know it's here I guess guess yeah yeah so here it's like some kind of a just tracks your progress and adds it to one kind of package people already screaming in my gu that like kick the ones that are not contributing also uh for those who are listening uh go to YouTube or Spotify just to see what we are looking at because yakob is sharing the the screen and showing on the the warcraft Rumble kind of gam playay the the important thing like the exclusive one is Sylvanas the new hero that they give through this mechanic but again if you don't have it here from the PVP doesn't matter you get it in the grid next season so again it's not exclusive like whatever PVP does is not exclusive it's nice to have which is good because I don't even know like how I contribute into this kind of War chest by the way I

have noidea just by playing just by playing okay then pretty much your progress play you play arite surges and earn PVP honor so do these two contrib arite okay I play like okay yeah arite search even though I don't have it on the map is the main way of getting gold after you run out of like early game fixed rewards which just kind of force you to replay two of the regions here on the map with some kind of a random modifiers you not really using your units or some kind of super flavor mechanic of glass whatever and you farm the gold for two days that's it and it's like 600 gold or something like that yeah second I don't think it's yeah it's it's not available anymore oh no I have I have one which is now yeah like so your armor is replaced with troops from beast and Alliance families instead of whatever I have which is kind of nice yeah so so as I said like this is pretty okay the monetization part and why I

think it's working so well and this game actually I think will make millions don't get me wrong from that blizzard con fan base is because the monetization is done very very properly on top of this grit thing so if we omit the fact that nobody knows this and we are already by that point that I completely know how to use this it's actually great because it has this very very big pressure of you don't never know what's come up with it and if you don't have money for it it will run away so it's this kind of permanent offering thing and for instance it spawns even rare units which are like 900 gold per piece and you know you want to buy them because it saves you gold because otherwise if you going to rare unit Rarity normally it would cost even much more so this works perfectly for me it's yeah it's pretty much like a permanent offer innovation in a way and with this kind of nice gamified way I think it's good the other thing is that they have very very nice starter P which is a piggy bank in itself which is uh this arite booster which not very much Start bre if you need to pay 20 20 um but keep

in mind it increases in gold all the time is there forever so it's it's the one that kind of remains here but it's very good because the more you play the more go it accumulates and it has Life Time 50% gold and F shards increase which is very very good then most of the monetization I think is done currently the one we see in the charts through these progression offers meaning that those are triggered when you kind of end up in some kind of progression point so let's say you acquired Sylvanas you acquired Karen blood ho you finally beat lorder on whatever region or something so those are progression offers then you have the normal daily offers here the special offers that reset which are just like common stuff and then on top of it I would say you have these other daily offers which you can reset which are can be paid again with gold this is a little bit different than grid but it's pretty much the same thing as grid that you just have kind of more Avenue of like getting resources from the game and then

there's usually like anchoring prices for gold there's no hard currency in the game they're just gold which is a little bit strange but yeah I guess they they know what they're doing but let's see it can still work well also the other interesting thing you can have this recycle button which kind of bombs the whole grid you get these from daily quests and you know if you're desperate like I said because just kind of crap seems kind of to show here you you you do it and then the whole resets I'm not doing because I want this um yeah moving forward this was the card progression yeah there's like a lot of leaders here three from each faction and then some more uh regarding troops they launch with 54 troops which I think is very comparable to clash Royale we launch it with 53 if I remember correctly so pretty much the same kind of collection width question which games do you think this is going going to be competing with cuz this is very much more hardcore right than clashes and maybe not they're going after that

audience like which audience do you think they're trying to go after like I think it's going small Giant games type of territory or I it's even going to compete with Hearthstone which because it's blizzard fan base yeah keep that in mind so I think it's even going to compete with Heartstone even though it's different genres because Heartstone is ccg this is like action real still the same audience though yeah still the same audience and this is the thing like is that same formula so we played World of War what Warcraft before and now we don't have time for that but we have time for these other mobile Shenanigans which try to emulate that Nostalgia and experience late so yeah I think it's going to compete with that maybe with Clash Royale but uh for a short period of time until people understand it's hard as [ __ ] and then they move back yeah yeah I don't think so like Pro Clash Royale players are like you know Clash Roy is an esport to be to to begin with like currently so yeah don't know that if they're switching into this um then we have um yeah the spend depth so

I try to calculate the spend depth right so back to spend depth um so span dep is actually much higher than I thought that it would be $250 yeah what we calculated with Marvel snip yeah this definitely not Marvel snip even though some mechanics as I mentioned are taken from it like the yeah you level what you play think but regarding spend up this is even higher than your typical Clash Royale which I think at the start was something like 25k or something like that counting the gold and the shards here with gold it took me something like 4K EUR and then shards are problematic because shards you don't really you know can buy that consistently like you can buy from these chests or offers or whatever in the shop let's say if I use the current multiplayer on my level because keep in mind this changes that progress you get more shards for same amount of gold so if I would count it now with kind of this chest being like 4.4 gold uh 4form

chart per gold it would be something like uh 35k or something like that to upgrade all of the collection to and all of the units to Legendary that that that that would be pretty much it if we would just take one full deck in way because keep in mind that this is like all of that like full spend it but if you don't really need that compete the effective spend up like a full deck for me which mean one leader and six units all together fully Max legendary whatever everything that we got is something around 4,700 o there just one deck and the collection as I said is around 40K currently if on this level but this will go down as I progress because again shards get cheaper and so on so but gold gets the same full Gold collection regarding just the gold like that won't get kind of lower it's 4K but that's you giving them a compliment right that's that's a good thing course like you know

usually we are kind of encountering explicit games kind of having very low yeah so now this is 40k so 40K will give you the whole game like as I like as I said this is making what like 600k the a like don't get me wrong these offers are done pretty well like this is not what I expected that blizzard would run the typical kind of a fixed offers progression offers and this aride booster is top one selling SKU of course but it's like like you know yeah it's no no brain over yeah yeah yeah so yeah amazing but you cheap [ __ ] you didn't buy it because they want to feel free to play you know we're actually we're actually playing at my house on Friday and I was like H which one of these going to buy and he's like I never make I AP purchases what and I'm like why and he's like because it takes away from the free free-to-play experience and cubby hols me into making purchases I'm like I mean five minutes later Felix was there begging like Grandma please can you pass this level for me I'm an ad guy I play hyper casual

stuff like oh my God I never lose and I started losing see see this is the mass market like Felix wasn't able to progress there in first day so first day of course I mean that's like yeah let's see um last but not least uh technical issues I'm sorry wait let me say something on ads before cuz there are no ads right so it's going to be very short I don't think this game can support ads because of all the technical issues they yeah cuz you're just add on top of it yeah yeah put more more ads in until I talk about this thing like literally I found this on the subreddit of the game where people were literally having phone CED in ice because it's overheating it's overheating so much man it was just unbearable I was like why the [ __ ] is my phone so hot like okay I play for me the overheating isn't that big of a problem uh the biggest problem for me is of course gruesome loading times sometimes longer than the match itself like some matches are very fast like 40 seconds

loading times take like up to 60 seconds like very very long so yeah don't get me wrong it should be optimized better especially when people start comparing to clash Royale which is Super Hyper optimized it's like 5 Seconds loading time but I get that like you need to load it [ __ ] big level of course but why do you need to load it every single time when you restart it so yeah H the other thing is as I said over heating crashing how many times did your game Crash I'm on level 12 I count it's crashed for me at least five times seven to eight times a day if I play yeah five five times day it's other big other big problem it doesn't syncs properly between devices so if I play now on my emulator and I play on my mobile phone I but that's illegal that's not illegal man it's normal why do they have in the battle account this between devices I have I have gold in minus I have my gold in minus on my mobile because they know you're cheap [ __ ] ah they think too

well too well so yeah that's there and then uh last things there regarding the announcements that they run through bison on Friday so there already said they're going to run New Seasons Seasons make like six weeks duration currently and each season there's going to be new leader new unit that into it like typical kind of clash formula don't see something different they already announced the raids The ragnaros Raid as I mentioned which is very very kind of I'm really looking forward to this because the end game of this game will be PVE focused I'm really looking to play like would be great if we could play the ra by the way mate yeah don't don't worry I'm not going to drop this game after after the podcast let's try don't worry don't worry I'm busy on that day you're rating yeah playing hyper casual at the time no worries don't worry it's fine yeah so so again play something together Diablo 4 anyway so it's fine yeah let's play Space Marine to when it comes out uh we'll see yeah any uh so it's a typical blizzard formula they're going to push like all

of the very very nostalgic famous content of World of War into this game it plays very well for them the audience wants it like they want to again relieve that all times of their rating and you dung engineering and stuff like that there's going to be school and moonglade dungeon Zounds there's going to be PVP updates even with replays don't know if that's going to really help them that match and then of course they I think added more kind of a legendary kind upgrade materials or stuff like that so just new you know new content new maps new hero campaigns like every kind of content Vector is going to be extended pretty much with the new feature being great so that's that it's you know your typical thing and also by the way this was the highlight they haven't have a boost slot which is kind of really common within these games boost slot is a slot that later down the line with the progressions get so kind of tight it really takes so much time to upgrade a new unit therefore you're literally discouraged to get new units because takes so much time trying to upgrade so boost slot is the slot where you put a new unit completely underleveled and it

automatically levels up to your collection level so they're going to have that AFK Arena has it from the start so rally no innovation here but yeah it's good that at least some quality of life things are being implemented and quite fast but for me please solve the technical issues that will be the best feature to lowest hanging fruit in like the whole universe I guess or maybe it's not I I don't know but should be they definitely to do something with in order to be Mass like not even Mass Market just Blazer people are already complaining very hard on reds and like the forums that I've seen already I'm complaining too so it's not course you are you always complain yeah but you know it's a Bard game people are kind of used to some standard so yeah that's true go with it change the font in the loading screen yeah why do why do you even care about the font in the load but you look at the most because honestly the loading scre are so weren't so long that's why I care that's you know okay with people start you know to to care about your phone that the loading screen is mean your loading screen are too damn High

yeah exactly it's like if it takes too long to load then you you pay attention to terrible details okay exactly okay I get that uh so that's there but like for me like this seems to me like the usual kind of Christmas feeling when I open a new Blizzard game like from the start and especially the ones that are focused on Nostalgia like Heartstone and this one very very similar feeling very similar kind of progression very similar kind of content Pace again if you're a blizzard Fanboy this will be great if you're not you're going to get [ __ ] it's simp because the mechanics ramp up so fast like so yeah that's yeah it's very complex very complex but on the other hand that's kind of like you you feel the strategy element that you kind of need to pay attention and then you can play Win whatever if you're stuck somewhere then you just need to change the strategy because a XY Z whatever yeah and then you change the strategy and suddenly win it's great yeah like one last thing I'm really kind of

looking forward how this thing is going to get like this whole kind of unique way of progression because now they're combining the kind of clash Royale progression with bits of Marvel snap progression bits of like the usual core like Star level progression if somebody's going to copy it I'm I'm kind of very very curious because this seems like literally custom tailored to this but still I don't think so it works that well in a way because for me the biggest grip is the pacing here as as I said like all of the things are like regarding characters are unlock immediately which is kind of too fast for mobile user definitely any mobile user even even even blizzard person like it's kind of very very fast like even Hearthstone has much easier progression to get into so maybe I think they will try to get like if they even need to kind of rebalance a little bit early game to smoothen out the funnel but other than that yeah so my realistic rating would be something like 8.5 uh half a point down because of the technical issues because okay you're

[ __ ] blizzard sorry yeah and then one point away because yeah this is definitely like mobile first well it is a mobile first but like very very hard to get into the approach ability it's very very hard there but otherwise than that the game is amazing like oh the game is great yeah very like once you get into it is there very satisfying mechanics very satisfying core gameplay very satisfying monetization I guess because we see you know the ramp up there very robust there's giant span depth it's amazing so yeah definitely 8.5 from my side I give it a zero out of 10 for ad monetization because it has no ads and then you get a zero these guys won't have ads man never even though they could earn 12 to 20% easily from ad monetization but it's not even think they care about 10 to 20% that's the thing you know like uh if they had a good UA team they would care cuz because of you know the opportunities would open up for them on the UA front which is a good segment which is a good segment and

Segway as well seg are not segment why different because your segment is over but my segment is going to be very short as well oh well it's not going to be because I want to talk about like how they actually get uh got into the global loue because the soft loue was quite long right uh was a gear no no like I don't it was in soft lunch it was just kind of stealth mod was it um Family beta friend family beta and but they they opened up the the game to Philippines then Australia Canada when in August uh yeah in August in August so what three months yep pretty much three months not not here but just like I guess friends and family B are on on yeah okay okay but this is kind of like monetization stage let's call it that way uh so they also added Nordic Sweden Denmark Norway Finland nothing else so when I was

looking into this uh kind of two weeks ago your typical game won't make in monetization stage around like $1.5 million dollar I guess so it's slightly different soft loue than you would you would see for like a different mobile games but I guess this is kind of like Warcraft blizzard you know 10K daily in up revenues which may be even more because of the sadness multiplier we use it could be like 20 anyway right now if it's 600 then kind of makes sense right they kind of took a very different or not very different but different approach because I think in even now they kind of show it they don't care about the UA that much it's just like their soft L strategy was more about community building and like sharing content updates and all of these like building fan pages I've never seen like so many fan pages like in the normal

mobile game not normal like different mobile game like traditional mobile games not blizzard type of thing because they had Reddit they built they're focusing only their blizzard audience commun exactly YouTube then they they they Twitter and they have still Twitter in even Instagram page and Discord channels I think like when I checked it it was like Discord was like 1.5 th000 no it was 5,000 members I didn't check it now but I is already something like 20K yeah so now it's like but that is organic you don't control that exact yeah it's organic but it's also Discord kind of it's the same thing but anyway like they were getting like 2,000 players per day and so the thing is now like what do you think the cpis are for this type of game like or how much 50 no 50 I I think could be around like 20 even you know like you have like like Warcraft IP

right so you have Warcraft IP are they running UA by the way um it looks like they started on Saturday but but so this this is the thing in in soft Lounge they used mainly Apple for some reason uh Google and unity I a very small Facebook very very small Facebook because I checked what's wrong with that um I don't know it's not a very typical mix for the for the soft launch because you have I mean you have usually bigger Facebook in soft lounge and then Google quite big and then you have maybe Apple an Unity afterwards now they it seems for some like I checked multiple tools it seems like they're running only Facebook and Google nothing else so that's the weird weird part so you run Apple in uh in soft Lounge you have have no playables because I guess like nobody knows what playables are in blizzard I guess and then you have a little bit of

unity so it's like in these kind of countries which is Canada Australia and like nordics like what do you think what you can get like in terms of inventory on like app and unity it's like very small this like like you use kind of like Facebook and Google because Google is in these countries I mean still quite small but it's way more used than like up in and in these countries because the overall potential reach could be in like hundreds of thousands players well not hundreds of thousands but yeah it's quite less than than Millions let's say in the in the tier one like Germany or UK or then later on in us so very different approach but then kind of they focused more on the the community building and then I was like okay well what about Facebook I was trying to get some information from Facebook which I kind of got and then they spent like 1.5 th000 on one creative then may then

on other creative Enders huh getting that you know on the other creative is like $200 it's like what they really pushing their credit limits huh exactly and now I see that they're like there's like one creative in Germany and in two days or three days they spent 2,000 which is like 600 a day like come on guys it's very low but I until like yesterday I didn't see any any spend at all and I was like I was very worried that like they didn't spend anything but then on the other hand like it's all Organics like the hype and what yaku mentioned like all the blissco and all the fun stuff pre-registration it's Warcraft as well right so it's kind of like been built kind some kind of um hype itself because of the IP but then when I looking when I'm looking at the the creatives it's just it's very it was very small amount of creatives in the soft Lounge now it's

very small amount of creatives as well so if we talk about the creative def there's like zero creative death yeah they have the freet toplay spend but not the freet toplay UA spend yes that's the I mean I have to say like the quality of the creativ is absolutely amazing right like the of course it is it's like there's no like a different Universe right like it's it's just not enough Creative Concepts it's just one kind of in in in soft loue there was like one kind of I will show it after you kind of finally win something I will show the creatives so there's like um the trailer which was cut into small pieces which also like happening now there one trailer it's like cut into sixc videos I was like okay that sounds ma one yeah it's like sounds like more like bumper ads on on YouTube but it's like used on Facebook as well it's like I don't see this strategy work quite well because you said it I said it Felix said

as well it's just very complex so what do you want to show in these videos I guess if you are kind of targeting the warcraft audience yes you will show the IPS and all the heroes you know from the past but if you're trying to get the strategy players and all of like maybe a little bit wider audience you should use something else right like strategy elements and all of the fun fun different things but they at least they are they have like few hooks I you will be pleased Felix It's Kind kind of nice I mean it looks amazing are they are they in the running for Captain Hook of the year uh most probably no Captain Hook is uh I mean the hooks are nice but it's like all 3D CGI like it's just goodlooking I mean it's not like uh you have uh the white out survival types of hooks that those are contenders for the Captain Hook anyway so I think uh the creative death is just not there and

then like you have they have only two kind of UA channels which is Facebook and Google at the moment I hope this is going to expand but on the other hand I kind of yeah I don't I don't see that's that's going to happen because yeah it's just different rely on organic yeah yeah yeah but how long you can rely on Organics like see how how how strong the workcraft is pretty much that's that's how how long I guess yeah that's true does a game like this need UA like really every mobile game come on like what the [ __ ] is this question about no I just want to get a discussion going I I agree that it needs UA but I just wanted like probably what they're thinking is that it doesn't right but what's like needs UA for what exactly every mobile game needs UA man but for what what do you want to like what do you want to get like users yes in that case yes you can't just rely on like getting these featurings all all the time from Apple and Google like the featurings are not not even the same quality as they there were before featur

exist these days yeah can you can you finally win I want to showus the creatives yeah yeah I mean there's not that many CA anyway so we can you can play for yeah you can oh nice okay because then by way I have a kick a question before you finish tell me uh do you think Microsoft will change this their approach here how no I don't think so in a way that they will let's say push for mobile UA or try to go more on I mean if it was Apple then I would say yes but like Microsoft Microsoft don't know how Mobile Works yeah like how they just look at UA as a cost probably yeah don't spend it yeah don't spend it that's PR a good hook yeah it was quite a good hook also like the music right so that's fine these are these are the from the from the soft Lounge so I love to know how much they pay for these creatives this is just cut out their

main video yeah yeah the main video is like one minute long one turn cut it into pieces that's it that's how much they paid that's most probably yes this is the one where they're downloading like five gig of content and you have to watch the video exactly yeah people are just complaining like how big this is uh play for free so it's like all all the fun I mean now we're getting into this and again this is quite nice but then why would you use the headline in first three seconds and then just with like no background nothing just like wasted three three seconds of the Dominate the battle is clearly not from my gameplay you are definitely not dominating right okay no no no unless Remo's playing for for me cuz then I was then then okay you're dominating and know

right and that's it right so it's all all of that's it basically sounds like looks like Pokemon intro no Sailor Moon intro um maybe a little bit but by the way there's this giant hidden opportunity here to sell the minis physically like they have the Skylanders uh brand oh that's a great point sell the things as merchandise immediately course immediately at least like we have different music but again that's it using Vivaldi as the music here is perfect because I guess there's no IP you have to pay on it okay and then this is in the Hall of Mountain that's even better this is basically the okay no still the same thing we saw we saw it already will you master the rumble of course again like do you see like this is the like two videos all

over again yeah slightly adjusted nothing else like this exactly the same what we saw before and now again going head to it so they're using these different headlines same music different yeah different text and headlines up the crazy thing is for me like they don't know enough about U I would say that they don't even realize they can put in like there's no ads in this game and people love that the Crea yeah B no Wi-fi games or like no ads game yeah chosing arm me okay and this is this is basically basically so you have this IP and you can oh my God you can just use it so more efficent like way more efficiently and then there's like uh four other videos which I'm going to just add into the into the post production afterward because it's not nothing that we didn't see already yeah so basically what we are now I think uh

we can wrap it up right yeah y yeah I would say one out of 10 because it's so much more potential that we can actually um see here but yeah I guess we hopefully we will see during the year when they yeah we definitely keep it on our review R there oh yeah we'll definitely return with the prediction final final call prediction for first man Revenue 15 mil my 15 oh okay 25 I'll say 18 it's so out of my wheelhouse man I do ads like I don't know I do ads zero on ads for sure ad we see you next time see you next time thank you very much cheers by bye [Music]