Accessing global players and new markets with Sebastian Zechel from Xsolla

[Music] [Music] so we're delighted to be joined by sebastian zeschel from zola the business death manager over there how are you doing today sir thank you i'm doing really well uh just came in uh last night uh getting started this morning uh show is looking great so looking forward to the week it's nice to be in a physical place once again absolutely something that we've looked forward to for i would say well i got i had the chance to go out end of last year already to two physical events but uh really like one and a half years uh we have been waiting for this uh so i'm happy us to believe us well in that case let's get stuck in so what has the last two years look like for you at xolo i understand you joined the company like within the pandemic period how was that yeah so i joined solar in november 2020 so really you know in the midst of the pandemic really and for us you know the company is always

very active working with conferences and also i believe has been before i joined in physics for physical events so for us it was important to keep that going for the digital events as well so we were really sponsoring uh and you know working with pretty much all the confidence that we could uh get our hands on and work with um that was uh that was really one thing you know that we did try to take as many virtual meetings as possible but i also have to say that uh probably in the second starting the second half of last year we uh we realized that there's a fatigue kind of setting in and people were just getting tired of these virtual events it was really getting hard to you know i mean also everybody did the same thing you were running in the same people at every conference or okay so i only met those people like two or three weeks ago it doesn't make sense to have another meeting right now um so yeah that's that's how we went about it but uh i think it's time to to get back to in-person events here absolutely we are glad to be here for sure well speaking

about that plans for 2022. you guys have worked traditionally with a lot of pc and cross-platform stuff the way that that fortnight lawsuit played out and the legislation it's a little bit up in the air still but there is potential possibly for marketplaces within marketplaces on things like the mobile stores specifically for apple what are your plans for the new year and uh is there any lee white and leeway to moving into mobile a little bit more than previously yeah absolutely i mean uh in the past you know the company was very focused on pc uh and cross-platform games and therefore developers and publishers in that field um but with exactly what you just said we're monitoring it very closely and uh especially since beginning of last year we started you know pushing into that field with our mobile commerce solution and now we're also working already with quite a few uh big mobile game developers and are helping them to monetize their games outside of the app stores in the form of the way we are doing it right now is helping these companies to set up a web shop for their mobile games where they

can let their players uh you know pay for uh in-app items uh and use them also um either on the web if they also wanna go with the web version they can also use those inner purchases uh in their mobile versions which kind of helps them to circumvent the uh platform piece because on in the web shop they can monetize to us at much lower fees for them what's the biggest challenge in monetization at the moment with all the different potential avenues like whether it's premium which is kind of certainly immobile died a bit of a death whether it's free to play people are now talking about pay to earn games people are talking about you know micro transactions so small that you know we're talking pennies like when it comes to trying to get new new folks in and spending money what is the challenge at the moment i think you know for especially for the mobile companies uh one of the um one of the big changes that comes with this is you know the possibilities to open up to new markets uh and reaching new players

uh because there are certain territories on this planet you know where people don't have access to bank accounts they don't have credit cards and uh within the app stores you know you're very limited in terms of payment options that you can offer your players and uh therefore you can't simply reach those people in these territories and that is something we can certainly help with because we are working with a lot of local payment methods uh overall in our platform we have more than 700 payment methods which is much more uh up like i would say in certain territories we can increase uh payment coverage in comparison to uh the app store for example of up to 60 percent uh and that that in itself opens up to you know potential uh additional revenue for our customers so if someone's watching this and they hear you say like 700 payment methods immediately like the layman might go what like a credit card and cash what what do you mean when you say like types of payment methods in a digital workflow well you know you have for example in china you have these super apps where people basically use uh wechat to take out

credits and they pay with that and they are also all from all sorts of uh digital payment options uh and there are there are tons of them in local markets you know that are just focused on certain countries and uh so we are trying to work with all of them and um we actually also have a payment team in our company it has their own business development uh team as well that constantly tries to you know work with more payment options to make our payment network even more valuable to our clients when clients come to you and they're looking for your assistance what's the most common request that you get why do people come to you what's the expertise that they lack they feel that you have i there are many different reasons i would say simply because we do so many things or you know the the portfolio of services that we can offer in tools is so wide so it really comes down to uh you know the specific project the developer is working on for mobile game developers you know like we just said it's typically the case that they uh that they are interested in finding out what they can

do outside of the app stores i mean at the moment you know because of the the restrictions it's still not possible to offer in-app purchases within the app in the app stores technically it's possible we would be able to do it but you know that would get our clients in trouble but who knows how this whole thing evolves and then for pc developers you know it really comes down to maybe just wanting to build out your their own sales channels uh selling directly to clients or maybe they have a multiplayer game and they want to utilize cross-platform uh functionalities for their uh for their in-game items so people could continue to play uh between pc and console for example with the same items they already bought those are all things that we can help with so it's it really comes down to the specific project and that's also how we approach approaches so whenever a company comes to us um we always listen to what they're trying to do and then we basically consult uh you know what we would be based on our experience what we

see works for these kind of projects and then we can advise them as to what kind of tools and our tools like they could use for that and then of course all of that usually ties in into our payment platform so they can utilize you know that vast payment coverage that we just talked about when they do come to you and they're saying look we've launched this game we've you know set prices at this point we're not really connecting them to global trends or anything we're not raising them alone then we've locked them at a fixed point and selling you know no one's buying anything from our from app stores no one's buying our hats or whatever it might be like what's the biggest kind of mistake that you see developers making when it comes to monetization when they come to you and ask questions like what's the thing that they're generally doing wrong i don't know if it's you know i don't necessarily i wouldn't say it's uh too much about what they're doing wrong uh it's more about you know what else they can do because for a pc developer let's say you know they are going to put their game on steam uh which is a good thing

to start with you know steam is still the largest platform for pc games with hundreds of millions of players on the platform so i would always advise a pc developer to you know have their game on steam simply for the visibility uh although they are in some way a competitor to us right um but you know it doesn't mean that you have to rely on that 100 so the idea kind of is you know telling people what they can do on top of that kind of build out these sales channels go directly to the uh to your players and build a connection with them and own the player relationship because let's be honest if you have your game on steam you don't own the player relationship the player relationship is happening between steam and the player and you just you're just pushing content in there so you know the forums are in there uh you only see a certain amount of details on on you know the players and where they're from and what they what they've uh bought but you don't have uh access to

data down to transaction level that's something that we do completely different so whenever somebody is sold on our platform our clients see everything down to transaction level where a player was from what kind of payment option they use how much taxes were collected paid for and those that data points um that they can they can acquire through using our tools will also help them to you know create more effective marketing campaigns for performance marketing campaigns for example so it's not necessarily about what they do wrong it's more about what can we help them do better really [Music]