AI is helping drive game monetization, player retention and UA for Games. John Kavanagh, Scuti.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] next up we're going to have John who's going to come up and join us and he's going to talk to us about how app monetization helps Drive profitable business grow oh no no yeah that is the right one I've got your title wrong there John come on up John uh so John is from scooty our sponsors and he's going to tell us all about at monetization to drive business growth okay John over to you scooty at the last minute the actual speaker couldn't make it so I'm filling in than at least I could do

um yes so scooter you might be wondering first I'll try and explain a little bit what it is um and what problems it's solving so um all right so the background to it um scoo has been built by game veterans they were behind the original in-game advertising company called massive entertainment and as you can see a broad range from the industry from mobile from PC and um you know have all built significant um franchises themselves and really you know thought it's time that we used games as you know that's where the eyeballs are bring bring the the market to where the eyeballs are so to describe the problem at the moment we all know where we are at with uh um in with current advertising and monetization we're we're finding that it's you know incredibly expensive to get get consumers the value for player

is is going down um the the cost of you know for the cpms is is crazy on the return and then you know we've got situation where games that are built essentially to be ad Vehicles they they you know before it was acceptable now you got 90% of players are turned off by these obtrusive ads particularly in things like uh hyper casual and then with you know we've we're also looking at uh trying to get the right Brands into into the into the right prodct products is becoming a challenge so with with with the use of scooties AI we're able to um we bring a quite a bit more uh direction we can analyze the player what the game they're coming in from we can direct them to the right the right products to them from there that it helps with you know we're accessing a massive industry you know the retail Market is is 8. it's you know nearly uh 9 trillion dollars it's now in

inside your game it's basically bringing an Amazon experience inside your game that helps with with uh with um increasing the long-term value of each player because every time they buy something inside the game you get um a reward it attracts the pairs that ordinarily wouldn't spend you're now monetizing them um we're getting uh we get rewards and that goes back into the game and as I said it's targeted the kinds of ads that they're going to see and the kinds of products that you see we have much more uh in information on them because now in the post cookie world it's only by registration that we get that kind of information so that's part of our platform so using this these are be these are better better methods we're giving gcommerce that's our term for being able to buy an a physical good from inside the game be a pair of sneakers or a gaming chair there's rewarded ads being served up while you're brows in um there's a digital

store where you can buy branded packs from inside your own game without having to pay fees so if it's it could be branded something that's similar to your game genre say it's a driving game and it's the Volvo pack and here's 5,000 coins that you buy inside our store and then there can be converted to use in your game and of course we're we're much better programmatic advertising because of knowing someone much about the player and their spending habits in the ever evolving world of gaming one thing remains constant the pursuit of an unparalleled player experience and now the future of gaming monetization has arrived brought to you by the creators behind some of the biggest gaming franchises in history introducing scooty the world's first rewarded gcommerce platform designed with one goal in mind to revolutionize the way you acquire retain and monetize

your players scooty seamlessly resides in your games Lobby never interfering with gameplay and preserving the immersive worlds you've worked so hard to create with just a few hours of integration time your game is ready to embark on an entirely new and incremental Revenue journey and your players are ready to play shop and earn scooty never interrupts gameplay and never ejects players from your games instead it opens doors to a world of possibilities right from the game Lobby players are rewarded daily and with every purchase they make your earning revenues from the everyday products your players are buying anyway the best part is that scooty allows players to convert their hard-earned rewards into your in-game currency converting more players to IAP don't think your players will shop from your games think again surveys show that 90% of players said they would purchase physical goods from their games if they're rewarded and they can use those rewards to to make in-game

purchases scooty can be customized to each of your games and localized to cater to players in different countries but scooty is more than just a monetization tool scooty is your nextg user acquisition tool that's right we've got players with rewards wallets ready to spend in your games scooty is driving new audiences to your games it's all part of the scooty Network join the gaming Revolution with scooty where player experience and your studio success go hand in hand scooty elevate your game right so there's a lot to cover in that video I'll take a a deeper dive into each one of them um so more revenues more retention where we're getting you're adding Ecommerce in there you're adding shoppable ads you're adding a a digital Marketplace um just to give you some idea we you know um you're going to get much greater revenue from any uh a purchase in those systems and you're currently getting what I mean

by that is if um if for example a the average player is spend when on network is spending $62 on IAP that's unheard of in in uh in the market now out of that you're going to get about $450 back to you the the publisher of the game that means you you would have to serve up 2,000 ads to make as much as one purchase will make you in in the game so it's a it's a you know it's another a scale of of of revenues um and you know that also then puts $3 into the wallet of your gamer because he gets scooties that he can then convert into your in-game currency so now you're also getting that $3 in your game when they convert So you you're now looking at $750 from one purchase it's a an enormous amount Revenue now obviously you know everyone shops it's just a question of where

they're going to shop are they going to click on exit your game go to Amazon buy something or just hit the button that's already there in the game and get into a very Amazon likee experience and you we know we've seeing that people don't they they seem to think it's perfectly natural to click on that button and buy something um and so you're looking at um you know ads that only appear when you go into the store rather than interrupting the gameplay ads you're going to make more money from than traditional um advertising and you you purchases where both you as the publisher and the consumer get a gets a reward back and it's price the very significant thing is the price competitive with um with uh Amazon so it's you're going to get it at the same price because we're buying it direct from the the retailer and it's been drop shipped so um when you look at the how how by looking after the player and

delivering the player we we know so much about them through through their spending habits and because we're not tracking with with cookies they're actually registered so it's as if we're a store like Amazon where again we know what what they're spending on so we promote the right things to each player we know that they're coming in from Candy Crush and that's a much larger female audience so chances are and we can tell from their name in some instance so using our AI we could say right this profile means we're going to serve up these kind of of consumer objects rather than you know to oil for your car or whatever the important thing is also we from we're seeing is that there's no cannibalization from your existing Revenue it sits to one side you go into it it doesn't affect anything else you're doing there's no uh we're not we're not um taking away from one Revenue source and swapping it to another we're also make means people that don't traditionally be aren't play

you're not holding out just for whales in order to make money Grinders will start sh will shop for you know necessary Goods whereas they may never click uh pay for in-game items um and then yes you can see how our our our revenues uh change then we average about $10 um because the the video ads obviously you know are monetized better than the static and then and you see there the numbers as they break down so with um the interoperable rewards just to explain that a bit further as I buy things in the game as I view videos as I um uh come from a different game to yours I've now got a wallet with with it's called a scooty wallet and that is interoperable with each game's in-game currency so somebody

might have say earned a lot of money while bought bought something earned a lot of scooties while playing a different game but now they discover your game they bring that wallet to your game and so you're benefiting not only from their their purchases but your and all their other activity and then you so every new consumer and we bring in that brings across a wallet as well so you're seeing a much better see conversion Beyond let's say whatever they've you would see from another play regular player coming into it you're coming you're seeing players coming in with a full wallet so we we have a very you in addition to just getting money from back from uh you buying you know items on the store we have a strong rewards section where just by visiting every day you get you you get scooties that go

into your wallet um you get as I said paid ads and um we've you know an enormous amount like 15% of of of players coming in checking it every day and it's just they're already playing the game they sort of casually check look inside see what's going on what's on sale and pop out it becomes very natural in part of their process so so you can see some of the numbers here we're much more likely to see Grinders um paying spending because they see real value they see that they're getting rewarded they see that they're getting currency from that those things um yeah and 30% of them are converting their WS daily they lit you know they come in they look they check and they see what they've got in there and they'll convert it and as I say they could have earned it from variety of different sources but they'll convert it to to to to the game that their favorite their fav

game so again U so little more about the uh the digital Marketplace so in addition as I said to selling you know speakers and keyboards um we we're now with the new dma rules we're able to put these rewarded packs into into it and they are branded as I said um and they can be bought you know with scooties or they can be bought um you know with their with their regular wallet um and then used in your game so you're going to see a lot more revenue from those packs than if you if they're bought through the store um which is a big Advantage but it also means that people coming from other games can spend their their money in your game so right now I think we're at just over 120 um uh games um in in the on the on our system um and we're looking at um

you U accessing nearly 150 million players through all those games uh by by the end of this year that means you're going to see a lot of Gamers going to our website seeing other games that they um that are on the scooty Network so you it's a very good um uh customer acquisition or user acquisition uh strategy to be on our Network because you're going to get visibility to all these other games and people have a wallet and they're saying hey I'm going to try that game because I it's sent free I can play and spend some of my coins in there um and that's you know a very powerful uh Network effect so yes just to to recap we've got it's not the scooty story it does not get in the way of gameplay it's typically access from the game Lobby not during the game um and that means you've got players it's not like a popup ad it's not intrusive it's a it's a voluntarily done thing you click on it

to go there rather than it just interrupts what you're doing um as I said it converts players to purchases people would never spend money on on ing game they just play it for a little bit they'll you're now getting monetization for them because they're seeing ads they're they're buying goods um and then um it also then because they've got a wallet they're more likely to stay playing your game so it improves retention that's a very important part of it um and the at the as I say with AI were're able to customize the store and the look and feel of it to each G each game so you know if you've got a um a driving game you could make it look like it's a you know a garage and all you know we can customize it to that level and of course we're completely GDP GDP compliant because it's a voluntarily based registration we're not you know people log in and they sign up and they give us the their um their their information so we're not you know following them around that with

cookies and I think um yeah um if there's any uh got a couple of minutes for for questions good point do we have any questions um I mean I'm going to just add something because um some of the stuff you were talking about is quite familiar territory for me because back back in the day when we were doing the uh applify which then became Unity ads a lot of the stuff that we were working out was the way the rewarded ads unlocked kind of this audience that previously just weren't engaging with the game and it seems to me like you're trying to provide that antidote to what's happening I think at the moment where a lot of the ad companies are essentially blocking you know they kind of trying to hold people in to an ad experience that's not great and is arguably damaging lifetime valy potentially it does because it it interrupts what the what the player wants to do and he's you're locked into that for that that period of time the other is a lot of the big advertisers

are you can't they're not in the market because they don't not getting enough data on who's actually watching the ad um and so it's hard to sell to them uh you know that hey we've got this network and we're going to deliver it to 100,000 people that you've never heard of and you don't know anything about because hey look Everything's changed we don't have cookies but in in our instance when we go to the big Brands we can say I can tell you their age I can I know their email address I know where they live and it's like w this sort of scary way ter of like these are people are actually genuinely engaging it is literally like I bought this I must be interested in you this guy bought accessories for his car therefore that's something that's good to to advertise to and I think if we understand how we're reducing the barrier to entry we're increasing the transaction to conversion later that that pathway is actually massively important I think is important as the data itself it it is and because it's because it's non-obtrusive and it's rewarding you get something better back for it so it is like rewarded ads but

it's it's on top of that it's you know it's purchases giving me something back but you're creating an ecosystem from what I'm understanding you correctly where it's not just about me engaging with this game but as my playing habits change the value proposition I'm building can then be reused in other experiences if you've you you've got a wallet that follows you around from game to game so if you play Candy Crush on the train but when you come home you want to play some midcourt game and in fact let's say it's a midcourt game that traditionally you you only get the purchase price they bought it for $9.99 that's it in this way you're now getting more ad Revenue without saying you're putting ads into what people would say hey I paid for this why am I getting ads and in this sense no it's okay the ads are only occurring in the store uh so you're going to as a now get further revenue from a consumer where you thought you'd only you've gotten all the revenue were going to get from them I could go into so much depth in terms of whether you should um ban ads

from people who've paid um which is a a really deep conversation but not one for this morning so uh uh I think we question at the back there so do you want to ask a question please yeah I actually have two questions so this is really interesting uh first of all does scoy only work for mobile games and secondly uh uh does it have a flavor for what kind of uh Jr of games it works for for example does it work better for uh casual games than the midcore games uh what about hardcore games so um to answer your first question no it works in in in any in any uh platform except for console but but PC uh or you know just web games it it it's you essentially all it's doing is opening an if frame inside of your game so it can't crash your game it can't give lead to errors or their tracking because it's all the codes now executing on our server and you're just being delivered the image as in an if frame so yeah it works on any device that you know can display an ey frame um sorry the second

part was that what kind of game is does it work best with I wouldn't think of it that way it's a question of what kind of consumers so everybody shops everybody buys sneakers um so we haven't seen a kind one genre emerging that says oh yeah they're the guys who monetized the most because if were delivering a different consumer product to every individual group as I said if you can do it by by by gender or you could do by age so what they're seeing a store that to them looks like it was made for them so we try and get around that thing that only casual gamers will you know what I mean that it because it doesn't seem to affect it it's more because the store is so targeted well do you have like a generic uh customer profile like you know uh mid aged uh female whatever right and that's what we get from their registration and then that's what we use to curate the store for for them so it'll be like well

everybody buys toothpaste so we don't have to worry about that but um you know not everyone buys a skirt so right you know we're going to be have a genre a gender aspect to that profile and and to offering those things some people might you know want to turn off that and they don't want that that to happen and that's fine we can easily do that as well and on that note unfortunately I got to say thank you very much John thank you very much thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music]