Given its position as the inspiration for games like Clash of Clans, the mobile release of Kixeye's Facebook hit Backyard Monsters: Unleashedhas been closely watched.
After all, in various forms, it's been in development for over a year before finally being launched on iOS as a standalone game (without any link to the Facebook version) on 30 October 2013.
The title offers familiar gameplay for strategy fans.
In one element, you slowly build up your base, levelling up your town hall to enable quicker resource collection and better defences, as well as training the monster army you use to attack other bases.
These are either pre-set levels in the single player mode or the bases of other players in the multiplayer mode. In turn, other players can attack your base, stealing your resources and decreasing your medal status if they're successful.
Shiny, shiny
Looking at the game through the lens of our Monetizer process reveals a subtly different economy to other mobile strategy titles.
The key difference is that the game's single hard currency (Shiny) is used in a much more direct way that say, gems in Clash of Clans.
Of course, it can be used to speed up building and unit production, but instead of a fixed conversion between Shiny and the game's soft currencies, your only option is to fill up your storage containers 100 percent.
This is one way in which Kixeye 'plays the house' as this option typically will see players using more Shiny than they would otherwise choose to if they had the more standard 'X amount of Shiny = a Y amount of resource' option.
(In terms of the soft currencies, there are four: Twigs and Pebbles for buildings; Goo for monsters; and Putty for building and unlocking new monster types.)
Fast spending process
Another direct way in which Shiny is used is when you're upgrading your buildings.
As well as being given the option to upgrade to the next level using your available resources (the time this process will take is also detailed), you always have the option to buy the upgrade immediately with Shiny.
Again, this is subtly different from other games in which if you don't have the required resources, you have to convert from the hard currency into enough soft currency. If you want your building upgraded immediately, you then have a second step of spending more hard currency to enable this.
Backyard Monsters: Unleashed shortcuts this process with one single tap; something that's more accessible and also encourages faster hard currency spending.
The third builder issue
In addition to its various currencies, Backyard Monsters: Unleashed has a number of items you can buy.
Unlocking a third builder is a direct real cash purchase of $5.99 (i.e. you can't buy it with Shiny), and you can buy 1-, 3- and 7-day shield using Shiny.
Looking at the in-game store, something else to note is that as with recent games from publishers such as Kabam and GREE, the minimum IAP is priced at $4.99.
Even more significant is that the next cheapest IAP is $14.99, which is the most expensive 'second cheapest' IAP we've come across. Indeed, of its five IAP transaction, the majority cost $29.99 or more.
The highs and the low
Plugging this into our Monetizer system, it's little surprise to see that Backyard Monsters: Unleashed scores 350.
Even in the context of the 100 score benchmark we used to define a highly monetised game, it is a highly monetised game.
Running through other part of Monetizer, it has a Discount Currency ratioof 1.4, which is fairly standard.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Backyard Monsters: Unleashed, however, is its (lack of) commercial success.
Although we typically wait two months to get a good idea of this, Backyard Monsters: Unleashed has only hit the top 10 top grossing charts in 1 country on iPhone and 3 on iPad.
In the US, its best position has been 196 on the iPhone top grossing chart, and it's currently outside the top 300 and dropping.
This gives it a Success ranking on iPhone of 0.0003 and 0.003 on iPad. We treat anything over 0.01 as a success.
Backyard Monsters: Unleashed's top grossing performance on the US iPhone chart - via App Annie
Of course, this isn't to say that Backyard Monsters: Unleashed's in-game economy is too highly monetised for it to be successful. There is a lot of competition in the mobile strategy market, and it's clear that the delay to get the game released on mobile has been a big issue. It's not called 'first mover advantage' for nothing.
Its download performance on the free charts hasn't been strong either - Kixeye hasn't yet launched a marketing campaign, nor has it been heavily featured by Apple - so there haven't been a lot of players to generate revenue from.
Also, in terms of the gameplay, the pace of building is relatively slow at the start, compared to other titles in the sector.
Conclusions: Backyard Monsters: Unleashed
Success coefficient (iPhone) = 0.0003
Success coefficient (iPad) = 0.003
Success coefficient (Android) = n/a
Currency Discount ratio = 1.4
Monetizer coefficient = 350
In a world dominated by Clash of Clans, and that's already seeing strong contenders fighting for the #2 position (Samurai Siege), or looking to innovate in terms of graphics and gameplay (Galaxy Factions), it's not clear that Backyard Monsters: Unleashed does anything different enough to find a largescale audience.
But it does provide some interesting techniques in terms of how to tweak aspects of a resource-heavy in-game economy to improve accessibly and hard currency usage.
