Path of Kings: An Excellent Concept, Ad-Monetized Incorrectly

Who doesn't want to play an RPG that looks like the original Bard's Tale series met the immortal barbarian Minsc, who always carries around his absolutely cute miniature giant space hamster Boo, from Baldur's Gate? The game comes in the form of an autorunner + battler with events you manage with a swipe right, swipe left choice system.

I, like other players, love the idea, the random events, the progression, the unlocking of new characters, having a different pet in your hand (like Boo ^^). There are tons of things to iterate on here. But sadly, the way ad monetization was implemented is killing the fun.

Apart from forced ads every five minutes, everything is a choice. Get gear, equip it or sell it. Get a chest and continue playing, or watch an ad to get another one. Get gold and a boost for gold, or skip it. Get Mana +5 now, or +10 for an ad. Improve your gear by watching an ad, or skip it… Get a little for free (and more likely nothing), or a lot more for ninety seconds of video (if you're lucky and it doesn't last longer…). That's the loop, constantly.

So after playing for a while, I decided to try a small experiment. I started the game, played for 10 minutes, and logged how much monetization push I was being fed. I did this a few more times after that, and basically arrived at the same conclusion every time.

Time	What popped up
00:07	Upgrade 3 items, watch an ad or skip
01:29	Get gold, or watch an ad for a boost to gold gain
02:22	Get a chest, or watch an ad for another
03:07	Legendary item set offer: €9.99
03:55	Get a chest, or watch an ad for another
04:27	Upgrade 3 items, watch an ad or skip
05:13	Forced to watch an ad
06:28	Remove Ads offer: €9.99
07:23	Purchase offer: character
08:06	Buy a piece of equipment for €1.99, or sell it for gold
08:44	Mana +5, or watch an ad for +10
09:27	Hero summon: x10 for €5.99, x30 for €9.99, or skip
10:33	Forced to watch an ad

I ran it again for a longer session, about fifteen minutes that time, and counted over twenty of these swipe screens. Different session, same story.

It's bad. And I'm not the only one saying it.

The storefronts, while showing great ratings (4.9 on the App Store, 4.7 on Google Play), actually tell a different story when you start digging.

AppsHunter shows 41,000 of the 44,000 star ratings are five stars, but across the 1,374 written reviews it tracks, sentiment comes out 48% negative. I also went through the 200 most recent written reviews there, roughly the last month. Nearly half of them mention ads. More than 30 are from people who bought No Ads and are still watching ads, in five different languages.

People are rating it well at the top of the page and telling on it in the text underneath.

There are four issues here worth going through.

1. You need to respect the genre

The fun of an RPG is the loot. That thrill of expecting something rare and stupidly overpowered to fall out of a boss fight, that's basically the genre distilled into one feeling. Look at how obsessively studios like Blizzard tune the loot formula to get that feeling exactly right, how many loot passes has Diablo IV had by now, four, five? And they're still chasing the best season for loot. That's how seriously this genre treats the drop.

Path of Kings tells you the rarity before the fight even starts. You hit a Special Encounter, and you already know what tier of drop is waiting on the other side. That's not a small detail, that kills the thrill before it happens.

Like every RPG, it also runs on item rarity: common (grey) and uncommon (green), with one or two lines of stats, then rare (blue), with up to three. Above that sits epic (purple) and legendary (orange), with four.

In several hours of play, I never got a drop above rare (blue). Epic and legendary only ever showed up as paid offers, your choice: buy it, or sell it for gold (soft currency). A full Legendary set, the Mythrion Set, four pieces, showed up mid run with exactly two options, skip, or equip it for €9.99. No ad option next to it. No play-to-earn version. No offer to allow you to complete a set whose parts you could have already dropped...

And it's not just the offers. Close to 20 of those last 200 reviews describe the exact same moment: a rare or epic item drops on the path, and equipping it costs $1.99. The loot drops. You just have to pay to wear it.

Credit where it's due though. A lot of those complaints were about rare gear (blue), and the most recent one I found is from mid-September. Since then I've been getting blue drops for free. So it looks like Voodoo moved the line up to epic. Good, but it still doesn't fully treat the core of the problem.

Gating loot behind a paywall is as anti RPG as you can get, and you can't really afford to put a new player through a loot paywall in their first hours of gameplay… that's no good for your D7 retention figures.

2. You need to be generous with players, extra generous with payers

This is the one I think studios get wrong the most. Generosity is what makes people spend, not what stops them from spending. Cap the loot rarity and you're not protecting revenue, you're giving players a reason to leave.

Take the blacksmith. Right now it's watch an ad and upgrade three items, or leave and get nothing. That's the wrong way to go about it. The blacksmith is already a swipe, so let it work like one: left upgrades one item, right upgrades a different item, no ad needed for either. Then sell a monthly VIP status for €9.99, and tell VIP players they get a choice between two different items on the right, or two other items on the left.

And the blacksmith is only one example, there are at least 5 that would need to be reworked to drop the "either buy or watch an ad, or get nothing" choice.

Paying for something, even in a mobile game, is about speed and choice, not access. Look at gacha games that update their meta every month, Marvel Snap, Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. Every player gets to unlock the meta characters the F2P way, just in three or six months instead of on day one. It's never "you will never get that rare item or character." That's the generosity I'm talking about. What Path of Kings built instead is a locked door.

I'll get into generosity toward payers, a form of cashback that barely costs mobile publishers anything, in a future piece.

3. If you sell a "stop ad," it better do what it says

Voodoo's own support team replied to a review admitting the balance isn't where it should be. The €9.99 remove ads offer only kills the forced ads, the ones landing every five minutes. The reward ads tied to your actual progress, the chest, the gold, the mana, the upgrade, stay exactly where they were. And the timing is no accident. The first forced ad of the session lands at the five minute mark, and right after it you systematically get the No Ads offer at €9.99. I tested it again, it shows up every single time on that first one. It came back after the second forced ad at ten minutes too, then nothing at fifteen or twenty. Hit first, then sell the fix. I'm not the only one who caught this. One reviewer put €9.99 into it and wrote: "they have purposely made it sound as though the optional adverts would be removed, as they are the most intrusive but also the ones the player wants to watch for the rewards, however they are left in because they bring in the most money."

And here's the part that gets me. Voodoo replied to 31 of those last 200 reviews. On the No Ads complaints, the answer keeps coming back the same: "A no-ads purchase should absolutely work," come to our Discord, we'll get you compensated. So is it a bug, or is it the design? Because it can't be both. Sell what you're actually selling.

4. How did this game clear Voodoo's launch pipeline?

This is the one that actually keeps me thinking. Voodoo doesn't wing wide launches. Thibault de Vésinne-Larüe, Voodoo's Head of Publishing, told Game World Observer back in 2023 that a game "should have at least 45% D1 retention, 15% D7 retention (20% for puzzle titles), and 10% D30 retention." That's the bar Voodoo sets for itself before a game goes anywhere near a US, UK, French, German or Japanese release. So either somebody saw exactly this monetization setup in soft launch and decided the numbers were worth it anyway, or somebody read the retention curve and skipped the reviews sitting right next to it. Trade site Gamigion estimated Path of Kings at $20 to $30 thousand a day back in July. From my experience, a successful midcore game should be doing around $80K a day.

And they're still tweaking the economy live. Blue gear went from paid to free somewhere around mid-September, in a game that's already live worldwide. When you're live in tier one markets, you're not supposed to be tweaking the economy anymore. That's exactly what soft launch is for.

Bottom line

This is not a pay2win problem, it's an incorrect use of ad monetization. Using ads is acceptable and part of the standard kit of monetizing free2play, but it doesn't mean anything goes. There are still things you need to respect. The genre. The generosity. And making sure No Ads means exactly that.

This one turned into one of the heaviest, most dense pieces I've written. See you next week for another piece of news. Voodoo, if you want an RPG player to take a swing at your current design, I'm here 😉