Can Performance Marketing Finally Work On Steam?

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Welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast, where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games. We bring together the industry's brightest builders, investors, and thinkers to keep a pulse on current events, dissect emerging trends in games, share lessons learned, and have a great time. This podcast is also part of Naavik's growing ecosystem, which ranges from free and premium research to consulting and advisory services. For more information, visit www.naavik.co. This episode is brought to you by medal.tv. Built by gamers, for gamers, and used by over 15 million gamers per month. Medal is the fastest way to clip, save, and share gameplay on PC. Millions of clips get shared every week, turning your games moments into word-of-mouth at internet scale. With discovery being one of the biggest challenges in the games

industry today, Medal is building a platform where publishers, studios, marketers, or anyone looking to reach gamers can find the right players across multiple genres and geographies. For more information, head to medal.tv or check out the link in the show notes. Now, let's jump into the episode. What's up, everyone, and welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host Alex, and this is the Interview and Insight segment. Every category in media and entertainment has sort of figured out paid acquisition. E-commerce, social apps, mobile games, streaming services. TikTok scaled to a billion users partly on paid. Mobile gaming studios at the top of the market run UA budgets that are probably like 99, if not 100%, of their total marketing spend, and can do so confidently because they have good estimates on customer ECPI, DCPI, and LTV. And there's a ton of creative optimization to an insane level. And then there's PC gaming, a market that generates tens of billions of dollars in in revenue per year, whereas

typical studio maybe allocates around 90% of their budget to production and treats marketing kind of as that last-minute oh [ __ ] budget until lately, which is out of necessity since it's getting a lot more focus. But it's generally kind of been a bit more fuzzy and hocus pocus cauldron. Um the dominant go-to-market strategy is Discord, Steam wish list, and hoping the right streamers or group of micro influencers picks up your game. And if you're rich, you do brand big trade festivals, pay for big spotlights or press. And if you're trying to build bring over the mobile performance playbook, you'd hit a wall immediately because 30% or more of Steam purchases are actually never played. Identifiers don't work the same way. There's limited desktop ad inventory, and there's generally a lack of structure and data footprint, you know, years of historicals by geography or by genre to inform just how much money you should sink into PC performance. But I think here's the thing, um the problem isn't that PC performance marketing doesn't work or that it isn't needed. It's actually I think more needed more than ever, and just like mobile, um there's a lot of content and we need to try and match the right

gamers with the right with the right players. Just the problem is that there isn't actually the right stack for it yet. So today we're discussing PC performance space as a new entrant alongside brand, influencer, and other types of marketing for games. I'm particularly passionate about this problem from lived experience having run a studio and thinking about how to deploy a very small marketing budget and where I'd want every dollar to work for me, but I don't want to buy transitive KPIs like Discord members or wish list. I just want people to buy my game. To do so, I'm welcoming Jules Ballart, founder and CEO of AdZerk. AdZerk is a full-service PC and console performance marketing agency that spent two years building the ad tech infrastructure that PC probably didn't have before. Jules and his team have worked with clients ranging from indie studios all the way up to Ubisoft, and they've been trying to prove that you can acquire PC gamers at performance prices. Jules, welcome to the pod.
Thanks, Alex. Great to be on the show.
Awesome. I'm so glad to have you. This is going to be a really fun one. Um, and I know we've been working on this for a long time getting this together. Um, so before we break down the PC

performance problem, like the delta between mobile and PC, the tech that you guys have built, and maybe share some real case studies, um, give me the short version of who you are, where you're coming from, and what made you want to work on this problem.
Sure. So, first of all, I want to say you really did sum it up quite nicely. Like the there are it's a very big problem with multifactorial kind of issues, and I think you're you're spot on. So, first off, yeah, I'm Jules. I've been in the gaming industry now for around 10 years. Started in the PC console business at Ubisoft, but then worked at various startups. Most recently a company called Homa Games. You might be familiar. It's a mobile games publisher, hyper-casual. So, really at the Homa I was all about scaling very simple game experiences from zero to hundreds of millions of installs through performance marketing. So, really aggressive ads, trying to use data as much as possible to, you know, target the right player base for the right game. And basically Add Zapp, this is a company that's about a year and a half

old, and we started as a publisher. So, the initial pitch was actually not an ad tech company. It was, all right, we're coming from hyper-casual, so Homa and my co-founder was from Voodoo, the leader in the hyper-casual space. Let's we we published together games to over 500 million installs. Let's apply the same framework to the Steam platform, cuz Steam at the time was growing and is still growing very much with the indie segment getting more and more popular. So, the pitch was simple. Same thing, get the same indie teams we had been working with for years on mobile, get them onto Steam, and scale their games with performance. So, we got an A16Z speedrun investment off of that thesis. And for the better part of 2024, we scaled a few games on Steam. We published a few games. And then we realized that we hit the wall that you just described, which is performance doesn't really work that well on Steam. So, it's impossible to get a proper CPI, to get your ROAS. Steam doesn't give you any data, you know, on the actual store page, like

what's happening on the store page. It's basically very hard. It's a great platform to distribute your games, but it's overall very hard to work with and to control, to have agency as a publisher. And so, we decided to switch to pivot and to build these tools the the tools that we wanted to have as a publisher, but build them for the for the overall for the whole market cuz we realized that nobody else had these tools and everybody else had that same problem. And that sure PC console gaming isn't like mobile where 99% of your spend will go to to ad dollars. And maybe we can talk more about the differences between the two markets. But there is a big need to to unlock that programmatic channel.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I would say to to reframe it a little bit, the problem statement is that Steam is a black box. Currently, publishers try to optimize on the Steam algorithm to try and get Steam to feature their games, which is which is a good strategy. But to us, it feels like the App Store 10 years ago where you try to game the ASO, but it's

getting more and more crowded. And so, you need another channel, which for mobile has been UA has been UA and Apple have been more broadly. So, yeah, that's why we're here.
Makes sense. Yeah, yeah. It's a really good analogy to think about the App Store back in like the early 2000 uh 2000 teens where and I think that is exactly what it is. I mean, Metal are working with studios all the time and they're just like, "I need to do this thing to game the algorithm." And we're like, "Do we even know if it actually works like that?" Like, it's it's just all like a mystery, you know? Like, I think like you know that like front-loading Steam Next Fest is pop is like because the because like the the ether speaks it so. So, anyway, I think you're addressing a really important problem. So, before we go on to like the foundation, right? Like we've talked a little bit about the problem at a broad a broad level and but we're going to unpack like the reason why and and what can be done. Is there anybody else that is working on this problem, too?
Uh depends. So, there are a few problems work a few people working on the game

discovery problem from different angle. Obviously, there are people handling it from the short-form side like a huge short-form platforms. Uh there are people working on the attribution side which we we can talk about and we started as an attribution. So, the first pivot after being a publisher was being an attribution company and then we pivoted again into a performance company which we are now. And there are obviously So, yeah, there are people unlocking new channels for games, people building ad tech tools for games and then agencies which were somehow competing with, sometimes competing directly with and sometimes we partner with cuz they are distribution partners into clients and and we serve as their performance arm. Um but yeah, I would say that's kind of the landscape right now.
I see. Okay. And just to make it clear to the audience, what to you is the difference between a attribution platform and a performance platform?
Sure. So, when you sell attribution, you sell visibility and analytics. So, it's like, okay, can you tell the marketing director might tell you, okay, where are

my wishlists coming from? Where are my installs coming from? It's So, it's more about precision of the actual attribution framework. When you sell performance, you really sell uh cost-effectiveness. So, you sell a marketing channel. So, it's like, I'm selling to CMOs like, okay, I can get you wishlists for a dollar in the US cost per wishlist or I can get you installs for for that much. So, it's really about like, okay, my my our focus is how to get the costs down for our uh clients while keeping a scale uh interesting enough for them.
Mhm. And one could also extrapolate the difference is mostly a measure an attribution platform is retroactive, right? It is looking backwards at your performance, right? A performance company is a bit more forward-looking, where you're saying, "Hey, like this is where you should deploy your dollars given this efficiency KPI." Makes sense.
Exactly. And I I would say attribution is one tool that a performance company can use. And so, we built our own attribution internally because uh we needed to increase our performance. But, it's not the only thing uh we use.
Okay. Cool. All right. So, I've often

said um we'll start at the foundation of the problem that PC performance marketing doesn't exist, and we've kind of disagreed in that extent um that it doesn't. Uh but, there's a lot to unpack here in terms of why. So, first, I think there's four categories I want to talk about for like 5 minutes or so, but just the first is budgets, the second is streamers and influencer marketing, the third is lack of desktop inventory, and the fourth is the technology and data footprint. We've mentioned all of these things, but we'll go into each of them each of them individually. But, as mentioned, a typical PC studio puts like 90% of their budget into production and like not a lot into marketing. Um I've seen a lot of studio P&Ls, and like this this tracks, but why has this not changed in your opinion? Is it cultural, structural, or something else?
Yeah, it's a it's a good question. I still don't have the exact answer myself, to be honest, but my my take on this would be um the way I see PC console gaming is more akin to uh e-commerce than it is to mobile gaming. So, in mobile gaming, you'd spend actually very little of your

uh market of your overall budget to production. All of it will go to marketing, and all of that marketing budget would go to ads. It's very simple. On gaming, I feel like PC console gaming, I feel like it's closer to e-commerce, where a lot of it has to go to product development, for sure. Uh and then some of it will go to marketing. Uh where I am confused, uh and this is also why we think the market we're on will have to grow at some point, is that every single product on the internet, digital product, so mobile games uh or uh even e-commerce, fashion products, anything, all use performance marketing as their number one uh marketing budget. Uh and for PC console, uh not only is marketing a small share of their overall budget, but also ads are very small share of the overall marketing budget. People will spend a lot more on brand or on influencers. Um uh as opposed to performance.
Okay. And sorry, and just to say here, performance for you is ads or there other ways to do performance that is not ads?
Um it's an interesting question. I would

say performance, yeah, when I say performance, usually it's programmatic ads. So, ads can be not uh performance based, like if you buy on a CPM basis, for example. Uh but performance, I would say is the is the action to buy ads optimizing with a programmatic engine that optimizes based on results. Yeah.
Cool. Okay. So, that's problem one. I'm also confused like you are. Um so, there's that. But maybe it's because they don't have anywhere to sink it into because the technology isn't good. So, maybe we'll get to that in a second. But all right, the second thing, streamer and influencer marketing. The streamer economy, I think is actually part of the answer here. Um so, um you know, I think you actually mentioned like AAA companies won't spend like anything on paid media, sorry, paid performance programmatic, as you just said, but they'll pay like 40 40k for an influencer. Um what do you think that um like when you look at those ECPIs, how do you think about that this is influencing the problem?
Yeah, I think I think this is a huge problem. I think uh the influencer channel has been a great channel. Uh I

mean, it was the Apex Legends kind of distribution advantage when they launched. It's been It's been a huge channel. It still is, but I think it's largely tapped out. Like streamers are so expensive now, and it's becoming and there's so much competition for attention that is becoming more and more unreliable. Um and I think the core problem for me for with regards to the influencer marketing, if I were a CMO, is first of all, yeah, the price. So, to give you an idea, like CPM pricing for influencers versus ads or performance is 100X or 200X higher. Uh so, it's like a lot. Yeah, like it's If you it's so much that influencer agencies have started reporting cost per viewer per hour uh as opposed to cost per like CPM, which is the traditional advertising metric. Because uh if you if you can't if you use that metric, then a viewer who watches several hours of stream can be counted several times. Uh and so, yeah, it's kind of crazy. And the other the other angle of influencers that I'm not a fan of is the

repeatability of it. So, even if you have an influencer campaign that's successful, which obviously happens, um then it's hard to reinvest those dollars in the same place. You you don't know that it will work again. It's it's harder.
Yeah, you can
to performance, where it's it's really repeatable and scalable. Like if it worked once, you can invest a few a few dollars here and there in the performance channel. If it works, you know, you can scale it and you know it will work.
Mhm. Okay. All right. Moving more towards that to the performance section, um desktop inventory, right? So, like what's the issue with desktop inventory? Mobile works pretty well because the advertisement is already in the same surface that the player already is.
Yeah. So, walk me through this challenge.
Yeah, and so, attribution actually works quite well for desktop-to-desktop uh flows. So, if you advertise on desktop inventory like YouTube or Twitch, and then you use a traditional off-the-shelf attribution uh solution like IP IP address uh that kind of that kind of thing, we used to have a product like that. It actually works quite well. So, you will be able to attribute uh fairly

well the traffic that goes to your game and know where your traffic is coming from and so on. The problem is that it's super expensive. So, you won't be able to get performance. Um and this is again the difference between attribution and performance is that sure, you can you will have, you know, clear as day kind of view on where your traffic's coming from and whether a campaign is profitable or or not, but the campaign will never be profitable because uh the channel itself is very expensive because I think it's like 95% of ad inventory is on mobile. Pretty much everybody that's, you know, hanging out on the internet is on their phone on social media. Uh, and so you're bidding with a lot of other players on the same small sliver of inventory. And so that's why it's super expensive. And I would also say that the ad engines are not the best. Uh, so if you bid on YouTube probably is the best cuz it's Google Ads, but other than that if you bid on others like desktop networks, they're not super good at optimizing like figuring out like who your audience is and optimizing and showing ads to them. As opposed to like

a company like Meta which is probably the leading actor in the space. And if you feed data, the right data and the the right signals to Meta, they will find at scale an audience for your game for sure. Cool.
All right. And the last one which is you tried to bring over some mobile UA stuff to Steam, right? As you mentioned and you were like, "Wow, this isn't working." Um, you know, you wanted to maybe install an SDK, maybe do fingerprinting, or reconcile the ad exposure like tip the in-game behavior. Uh, what challenges did you encounter beyond with a in a little bit more detail than Steam black box?
Uh, you mean like if we tried to do Yeah, cuz when we started we had the we had an attribution SDK. So we we were like, "Okay, let's do the same thing that we had on mobile which is you put an SDK on your mobile game and then you try to link between what happens on your like on the ad side, on the store side, and then inside the game to kind of get a full picture of the funnel. Uh, first off on Steam it's harder cuz uh, the store itself doesn't send you any data. So you you don't even know what's going on inside the store. You

can know what's uh, so usually what publishers do is they they run an ad, people get redirected to a landing page where the IP address for example gets fingerprinted. And then when they launch the game, uh, the IP address again is fingerprinted and so they're able to reconcile Uh okay, this person that's playing the game and that's spending money in my game, uh especially for free-to-play games, is that person that saw this ad on this campaign. So, this is kind of how it works. The problem with that is, as you said early on the podcast, 30% of people who buy or activate a game or install a game on um Steam will never play it. So, you will never see a signal coming from inside the game for all of them. So, already, even if your attribution is perfect, you're missing 30% of the traffic. Um then you're you're running into other problem, which is if desktop inventory doesn't work, you have to bid on mobile. And this is where the IP address signal doesn't work. So, if somebody is in the metro, you know, browsing through TikTok, they see your ads, and then they go play on their PC, you will never be able to attribute them. And so, yeah, this is kind of where it breaks. Um and so, this is why we decided, even

though the attribution, I guess one learning for us when we had our SDK, was that uh you know, it it worked. So, if you if you do desktop to desktop attribution, actually the attribution is quite clear. Uh but, it doesn't work in terms of performance. And so, uh and so, this is why you're not able to scale spend, and this is why we decided to fully focus on mobile, uh and to not rely on game signals. So, all the signals we rely on are pre-Steam. So, because from the ad network side, everything is pretty clear. You have a good amount of data that you can work with. Same thing on the landing page, if you send gamers to your own web properties. But then, as soon as it gets to Steam, tracking gets broken, and it's not it cannot be recovered from the game itself. So, our approach is maximize the amount of qualified traffic we can send to Steam, and then let Steam do the conversion, which it does actually quite well.
Okay, cool. And we're going to talk a little bit more about your technology in in a moment, but I think that's a really useful kind of insight about the differences between where the marketing

occurs, and and how and and where you can actually do clean attribution. As you said, if you're desktop desktop, it works. If it's mobile it's mobile, it works. It's crossing the two that's really challenging.
Yeah.
Um but let me maybe let's talk a little bit about mobile and PC and like why you can't just like copy paste the same strategy that you did on mobile on PC. Um, I'm going to reiterate that on mobile like for our audience is that like basically the experience to me is you see an ad, you hit install, and you're in the game. It's like on one piece of hardware. Usually install is free, so it happens easier. There's not a lot of friction there. Um, so can you just whatever that's maybe like that maybe like the caveman way of explaining it. Um, can you explain to me exactly how mobile attribution works in a few sentences and then we'll do the same thing for PC?
Sure. So on on mobile attribution relies mostly on fingerprinting. So I'm not I'm not a mobile attribution expert, so I won't dwell on that too long, but it's it's basically fingerprinting. So you as you said earlier, you play you see the ad on your phone, you play on your phone. So you get game signals, signals from the ad network, and you're able to

there are frameworks like SKAdNetwork or like others that you can use to attribute quite cleanly even with IDFA duplication. Uh, on PC console, the core problem is the cross-device nature of the flow. So if you see an ad on your phone and you play on your PC, it's another or your console, it's another device, and so it's it's very difficult to to have a clear tracking. Uh, I would say that's one one issue, and then the other issues are that it's a different again, it's more akin to e-commerce, so it's a different sales cycle. Especially for premium game, a gamer might wish list the game and then purchase it, I don't know, 2 months to even a year later. Um, so it's very hard to have to attribute, right? Cuz your attribution window in mobile gaming typically attribution window is 7 days. Uh, you can push it to 30 days on PC, but still I don't think it would capture enough of the demand you're driving. Um, so there's that, and then there's the fact that of course like a lot of people buy the game they never play, and so again, uh, it's harder to attribute uh, on on PC from in-game signals.

Okay, got it. So the differences are kind of that there's attribution differences, right? There's consideration period differences. Um, you know, how might like you said, like I might not buy a game for a super long time, and the longer the window is, also the more chance there is for there to be something inaccurate. Um, you know, if it's like I saw an ad, right? Like 30 days ago, I might have had if if it's 30 days, I might have had a lot of time to talk to my friend Patrick who also told me to buy the game. And then you're like, how do I attribute, right? Whereas the reason why it's 7 days for mobile is because like it's trying to keep it tight so that you can really do that last click attribution. And the last thing is that you said that, you know, there's a dearth of desktop inventory. You have to cross device from where mobile where the marketing actually occurs is on your phone. And then, you know, on TikTok, on Meta, or wherever you are on your phone, and then you go to to your PC, and that and that breaks it. Um, so my question I guess in that in that in that direction before we move on to your your tech stack is, um, so you're running most of your PC

game campaigns mostly on mobile inventory. Um, do you think that you'd want more desktop inventory? You said desktop inventory has good attribution if you're going desktop to desktop, but it's expensive because there's not a lot of it. So, if there were more desktop inventory, would that help solve this problem? Or is mobile just
Definitely, for sure, for sure. Uh, and this is why uh we're opening our own DSP. Uh, so we're going to be able very soon to be bidding on any not only any mobile app or game, uh but also any website that, uh, you know, opens their inventory up to any DSPs to the the open web, basically. And I'm very excited for that because, as you said, like typically desktop inventory is the best inventory for PC games. Uh, but it's usually very expensive and doesn't work. And so, with uh being a DSP, that could enable us to buy per impression kind of thing, which enables us to be uh bidding at competitive costs uh still on desktop. So, this is something I'm quite excited about.
Okay. Cool.

All right. So, let's go a little bit more into the technology that you guys built. You actually already alluded to this, but my opinion, some of the desktop ad tech is in the Cretaceous period, but like mobile's in like, you know, 2040. And so, mobile advertising is obviously a lot younger. It grew up with the advent of mobile in 2013. It's already a It's already a more advanced system. So, I want to spend a minute on actually what's more specifically missing on the PC side. What tools exist on mobile that just simply don't have the PC equivalent? Um, so can you walk me through like your signal engineering approach? The traditional attribution stack doesn't work. The desktop inventory is too thin. So, what did you guys build instead at Adsapp?
Yeah, so I think one of our big learnings, so I guess for less in the last 18 months, we ran ads for around 100 games from like pre-launch campaigns, demo campaigns, free-to-play, premium, all all sorts of genres. And so, we learned a lot. Uh, and one of the learnings was, okay, the Steam app is actually super popular.

So, don't know exactly the number of downloads that the Steam app has, but it's between 100 million to a 200 million. So, it's a huge audience that has the Steam app installed. More or less the same for PlayStation. And it is, even though it's not really heard of, like typically Steam is thought of as a PC first or desktop first product, actually the app is not that bad. Um, and so, we used this the app as the core funnel to drive people to Steam. We don't drive people to Steam on on PC. We drive people to Steam on mobile directly. And so, we've built signals to detect basically, so what we've built really is a conversion API. So, it's a user sees an ad on their phone, on TikTok for example, they will get to an Adsapp hosted landing page where we would do the typical fingerprinting that mobile game company do mobile games company do, but with the tailored to Steam. So, basically we're able to predict that this person will be a Steam uh gamer that they will have the Steam app on their phone and with many other uh typical digital

marketing signals. And so we know that when we send somebody to Steam, it's very likely that they have the Steam app and thus they'll already be logged in, they'll already be able to do like uh wish listing or purchasing actions uh straight from their phone. Uh and so that was the core hypothesis behind the product and it's been it's been fully realized. So we're able to get really good performance on uh cost per wish list. So $1 per wish list in the US is typically the number I communicate to to clients. It's our median performance across games. Uh but also on uh campaigns that are like games that are already live, we have really good results on on these as well.
Okay.
And so basically the fingerprinting, yeah, it's it's very it's a bit technical but it's like anything your browser gives you is something that you can use to figure out like for example the IP but there are many other things like um that you can use to to figure out okay what what this person does or or has potentially on their phone. Um and so we used the data we've accumulated to build a conversion API

uh to figure out whether or not people are Steam gamers. And we also have that for for PlayStation and Xbox.
Okay. So to some extent actually you're sort of um uh cheating is the wrong word but you sort of cheated in the sense that you're not actually building any of the tech for PC, you're just like oh Steam has a mobile app so I'm going to do it like I do mobile. Um is just kind of what you're doing. So you might be missing some people who have Steam on desktop but at least you can do what you can for the you know the 100, 200 million people that have Steam mobile and the same thing is true for either Xbox or the PlayStation mobile app.
Yeah, exactly. And I believe that Steam for new Steam accounts, the Steam app is mandatory for 2FA. So every new Steam gamer that's logging onto the platform now has the Steam app. Um and yeah, yeah, yeah, probably so yeah, we we there's probably a lot of people tell me like uh yeah, I don't have the Steam app on my phone cuz usually those are developers that have been on Steam since like 2002 or 2003.
I have it, so uh there's that.

You have it? Oh, yeah, there you go.
use it for the two-factor and um well, I also
Do you browse?
I don't Sometimes I do, but it's not really like it's more It's not browsing, I would say. It's more uh specifically looking, which is I think how a lot of people use Steam on I use Steam mobile in the same way that I use Steam PC, um which is specifically looking, which is another So, you're playing around discovery and you know, we've talked about this even with you know, metal-related things. Like that's a whole separate thing. Um but yes, I do use it and I have it. So, that's That's That's really interesting because essentially what you've done is you said like, "Hey, I'm just going to use the Steam mobile architecture and just rely on the fact that people will have the mobile parallels of these companion apps on their on their phone." Um okay, so how do you actually turn that something turn that into something that like TikTok or Meta can optimize on? Like And And maybe I'm not even saying that right, but like Okay, yeah.
Yeah, so this is exactly the signal engineering part that you were mentioning. So, the way the way I see

it, there are two types of advertising environment. One is the open web, which is uh bidding system that you bid for uh to for impressions basically uh in a real-time fashion. So, this is something where the an environment we're going towards. But most of the ad inventory, I would say, are between are caught between walled gardens or called walled gardens. So, it's basically environments where you don't really have much to work with. So, Meta lets you optimize on clicks, so you can do cost per click campaigns, optimize on reach, so views, or you can optimize on other more custom things. Like you can send them a value uh and they will optimize on uh sending you users that have the highest value. And that value you determine however you want. And so, what we built is a conversion API that based on the users we receive on our pages, uh we send meta a value uh and uh we get them to optimize on sending us relevant traffic. And so that value obviously this is the I guess our core piece of technology is that conversion API and

that that targeting model that we built using all the game campaigns that we ran in the past.
Okay. And so then when you set that infrastructure up, I presume there's a lot of like everybody in that loop needs to like hold hands, right? The the studio needs the right landing page. The influencer needs to use the right link. Like all of that sort of stuff. How do you make sure that that is actually airtight versus some of the chaos that I think can happen when you're kind of pulling a campaign together across multiple different channels?
Yeah, so this is why we made the deliberate choice to do everything internally.
Right.
So when a studio works with us, we do everything. We do creative
touch it, guys."
Exactly.
[laughter]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, cuz we we've heard Yeah, and we we started as I mentioned as an attribution company. So we had this SDK that we were trying to sell and then we were running into like privacy, you know, endless conversations with like the DPOs and uh and even like people having to integrate stuff into their games. It's it's tricky cuz they need to have bandwidth. So there's a lot of tricky questions that are all solved if you're just on the web

using our own infrastructure. So for studios it's very easy. It's like we need your media budget to start running the campaigns and we need assets and that's it. Uh then we set up the landing pages with all the tracking ourselves. It's all automated. Uh we run the campaigns. We have a dashboard with the performance you can check in real time and you can also see it in your Steam back end. And we can also do creatives to optimize the campaigns ourselves. Uh so yeah, it has two main advantages. One is uh we can get set up really quickly, so within days. There's no need of like as you mentioned like this coordination. And then two is we given we own all of the funnel, we can optimize it really really well. So you can gain, you know, cost per wish list points on creatives, on obviously the targeting engine, but also how you set up the campaigns on Meta. Campaigns are not the set the same way on Meta, Reddit, TikTok, Android, iOS, you know, based on user's device. Also, sometimes the targeting model changes. So, essentially it's a we have more to

play with because we we manage everything internally.
Okay. All right. So, let's let me just summarize. First, you basically have built a different ecosystem that centers around the mobile apps companion apps of PC of sorry, of Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation. There's probably a bunch of gamers who don't have Steam on their phone. They're just lost to you essentially. You've just forgotten them to some extent. You are trying to do this thing where you're talking about like a pre-Steam storefront funnel, right? Where you're trying to just funnel the correct people to the landing page. And you're intercepting the users before they like actually make a purchase. So, you actually don't ever know whether or not someone has installed the game. Right?
Correct. Yeah, because it's not our goal. Uh our goal is to depends. I mean, we can run some uh uh install cost per install campaigns for free-to-play games, for example. But usually our goal is either yeah, wish listing or getting people to purchase the game. And in that case, as you mentioned, like 30% of players who purchase the game never play it or install it. And so, our goal is usually

to get people to Steam and then Steam does the conversion part pretty well.
Okay. So, do you track when someone purchases a game?
Uh no. It's It's hard for us to do that because of the attribution window issue we mentioned. So, user might wish list the game and then purchase it a year later. Even Steam doesn't track that very well.
Okay. Yes. Okay. That's what I was trying to clarify. So, you don't actually track whether or not someone has purchased the game or installed the game. So, in a different in a different way, it's still not exactly the same thing of ECPI cost per install as what it is on mobile. Like it's like CPW cost per wish list or
Yeah, so so yeah, so I can elaborate on that what we exactly what we see on the Steam backend. So Steam offers attribution tool called Steam UTMs which we rely on quite heavily. So for wish list typically they will give you a good picture of the wish list you're bringing to from each campaign that you you run. And also activations. It has an activation step. So you know for free to

play games this is especially useful. You know how many people activated the game which means how many added it to their library. Cuz from mobile you can add the game to your library and then it will be in your library and so usually you then go to your PC and then install it. Um so that's that's more or less like the the value that we share to our clients and then the other way of measuring our impact is lift studies. So typically kind of more traditional retail the way they do you know retail measurement which is like you figure out a baseline per country of like wish list you were getting or sales you were getting and then after a campaign you measure the lift that actually happens in the relevant geos and potentially you keep one or two geos that are control. Um this is how we measure lift in live games that we advertise for.
I see. Makes sense. Okay. And now obviously the game has to be out for some sort of substantive period of time to have historicals. All right. Um and that was kind of actually going to one of my last questions on this section which is kind of like how you guys think

about proving incrementality. Um so like how do you know that your campaign drove a Steam install not just organic one that would have happened anyway. This is obviously a very hard question. Um I think across the whole marketing space. I don't think anybody has the perfect answer but mobile seems to have cracked it somewhat a little but tell me about how you think about that.
Yeah yeah this is something we usually we usually get and I think that's what's you know um keeping marketers from investing a significant amount in performance cuz it's always hard to have a clear attribution uh no matter what you do, even if you have the best state-of-the-art techniques. Uh on our side, we like to start with clients on the wish listing because this is where there's a clear picture. It's as clear as day. Usually, there's something um there's something that we call the ad sub effect where the day that we start campaigns, we get clients sending us like they really see the impact. Like we get clients sending us screenshots of like, "Is this bots?" Uh like we we've had that in the past because they really see a spike in their wish list.

Given it's a free action, people really do it uh freely on their phone. Um and so, yeah, there's really a day one impact of the campaigns we run on the wish list side. Uh and usually we become the number one wish list source on their Steam dashboard. Uh this is actually very common. So, on wish listing, that we don't really have those uh those discussions usually. Uh but they are on the installs and sales front, it's always it's always tricky. Cuz um it's uh the sales cycle is tricky. So, for example, if you advertise we we tried running campaigns in every setting. So, if the game is full price, usually it doesn't work well because Steam gamers only buy games when they're on sale. And so, when the game's on sale, all of a sudden, the sales of the game increase like a lot. But then, you know, is it the marketing? Is it because the game's on sale? It's tricky. So, the way we figured out how to do it is when the game goes on sale, we usually keep a week like the first week is control. And we know that the first week is usually bigger than the second week cuz people get the notification on the first

week. And then we advertise on the second week in some select countries and we we see how, you know, what's the decay. It's cuz you're going to have some let's say everybody uh so, we ran a campaign for example for Voyagers of Nara, uh an early access title. And so, we we like we measure like all the countries how much they were selling in week one, how much they sold in week two, what was the decay. And then for For GOs actually, we sold more in week two than uh in week one. So, that was kind of the the spread that we we brought.
Okay. Yeah, and we're going to we're going to actually talk about that campaign in a second. I just wanted to kind of address that like it's a I think it's a hard question across the whole space about incrementality and what you spent your money on and what would just have been organic, but you and you sort of never truly know. Um but, I think it's a I think it's a you know, a question that you probably have been facing and I wanted to kind of get your thoughts on it. Um I mean, maybe this is actually a good opportunity to jump into that, right? Like I mean, we were going to talk about one of your smaller one, Might Magic,

first, but um but let's talk about the Voyagers um of Nera One. Uh this was a game. Uh can you tell me about the budget? Can you tell me about whether or not the game was free or not? Can you tell me about like what your objective and what your goals were? What the client came to you with and sort of how did you approach the problem?
Yeah, so Voyagers of Nera was a game uh is still a game in early access. Uh that's a premium game, survival crafting. Um and so, they came to us with the a pilot campaign that they wanted to run uh 10K. Uh $10,000 and they wanted to see exactly that. So, cuz basically it's a game that's very well well rated on Steam. Uh very positive rating. Uh has a great community. And they wanted to see if they could lift the long tail revenue of the game. Basically, bring the game to more people without cuz they rely on Steam obviously, but it's not enough. Like the the game is is super cool and it could be brought to more more audiences. And so, yeah, the test was basically what I I just said. So, 10 $10,000 for the second week of the of the sale was

the the sale the Christmas sale. And see what kind of uh what kind of uplift we could drive. Uh and so, on the first one, I think we only did it for the US. Uh and we measured uh like basically, we they sold more or less the same thing um in the second week than in the first week in the US while other GOs decayed like 60% something like that. I mean, we have a yeah case study on the website with all the numbers. And then they did another test with us on on further sales. So now they're regular customers. They they basically every time the game goes on sale they they try to work with us. And every time we do the same thing which is like 10k the second week of the sale. And now we do more more Geos. So the the second one test that we did was with I believe Germany, US, France and then some Geos like in France I think we almost 2x on week two versus week one. So there's clearly incrementality. It's it's more it's more complex typically than the wish listing campaigns which

are like obvious and and more easy to sell typically on my end. But we can clearly see a good impact on driving additional incremental revenue for for clients.
Okay, got it. I mean I think and we'll talk about we'll close this podcast with a little uh old debate about wish list. But I mean I think that this is like obviously the valuable thing, right? Like there's a I've looked at so many games. Like there's one that I was looking at today. I was like how holy [ __ ] these guys have so many wish lists and holy [ __ ] they've sold so little units. Like it's just like it's so tragic, you know? It's like we're so hard to build up this thing and like all of their campaigns are running around it and then like the thing that they actually want which is like revenue in the door is just like not coming in a dumpster. But anyway, um but okay. So
Yeah yeah I have some horror stories with that too. Yeah yeah.
Yeah. So I mean and again like it's what you can do but we'll we'll talk about that at the end. But um this is pretty cool and I think like that's sort of a a good case study of saying like hey like through meta through TikTok through the demand sources that you're deploying you're able to do localized performance opportunities to these certain Geos that

move the needle meaningfully for PC units, right? Which is like the actual North Star of like what people will want.
Um Exactly. And this really why we're doing what we're doing is like we think there's just a lot of good games out there that aren't like they have good ratings and are not being discovered enough by in like shown enough by Steam cuz there's limited real estate on on Steam. And so what we enable studios is first to regain control over their distribution cuz they can activate that lever. It's in their control. Uh and two, it's a scalable, repeatable channel. So again, as opposed to influencers, once we run a campaign, you know that it works, and you can just pour more dollars in it, and it just scales.
Yeah. Okay. So now let's flip over to the other case study before we talk a little bit about the business of performance for you guys in general, but this one was for Might and Magic Fates for for Ubisoft. So set the scene for me here. Um what was the mandate? What infrastructure you have to work with? Was like the game free, etc.
[snorts]
Yeah, so this was a TCG game from

Ubisoft under the Might and Magic uh license. And they initially came to us for wishlists. So basically uh yeah, we wanted to acquire wishlists for them, which which we did. Um and uh it's By the way, like it it was a card game. So it was probably one of the the trickiest games we worked on because card games are notoriously hard to to advertise cuz they're all UI, right? Like for for us, we see the same cost per wishlist uh dispersion uh that we saw on mobile. Like basically, the marketability Some genres like simulation or first-person games are super super marketable cuz the ad is basically you get straight into the gameplay. And it's very immersive. And some UI-heavy games like card games, for example, are typically harder to advertise. But for this game, it worked quite well. So we were around yeah, like one $1 per wishlist or something like that. Uh and then for their launch, they decided to uh to continue with us. And so when the game launched, we used the retargeting function uh of all the the campaigns. So

basically, this is something I didn't talk about, but this something actually I think is very valuable. The wishlists we acquire are not just a number sitting in the Steam back end.
You know that.
an audience that we can then retarget. Uh and so and by the way, it doesn't even have to be a wish list. So, once somebody gets into our landing page, we know that, you know, they might be a Steam gamer and whatnot and that they're interested in the game and we can re-target them at will for every milestone of the game, be it a demo, be it, you know, an expansion DLC, the game launch, whatever. Uh and so this is what we did for for Might and Magic and it worked super well. So, we were at $6 per install cost per install in tier one countries uh using so using the incremental method that I I outlined earlier.
Mhm.
Uh and and they were happy. So, basically they continued working with us uh a few a few weeks after the launch and for for a few months we worked on on the game. Uh and we basically uh we spent uh what Ubisoft had budgeted for the game and we were profitable on that on that acquisition.

Cool. Um
think this is because of the re-targeting aspect of it.
Right, right. And that's definitely very valuable. Um how did the studio I mean this is just a question, right? And I mean it's it's hard to answer, but obviously this is a free-to-play game, $6 Steam install, right? Like that's a pretty like I mean obviously mobile ECPIs are depending on where the country you're from can be somewhere between like, you know, $3 to $5, right? Like that's that's on the very high side. Um how did they feel given that the game was free, but it was a $6 CAC and did they feel they were going to be able to offset that with some sort of in-game monetization? Um what was the
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, so the game is free-to-play, in-game monetization uh and they were definitely profitable on a $6 cost per install, uh which is why they they continued piling on the
Okay.
UA budget.
Cool.
Typically, I wouldn't consider $6 cost per install to be uh uh expensive. So, in mobile I like
Okay.
obviously on on No, I wouldn't. And on hyper-casual mobile, yeah, sure, we were looking at like 20 cents cost per

install, something like that, 50 cents. But that's hyper-casual.
game, yeah.
Not for a PC game. Even like so, this is something I learned uh working at this company is that so first off like some casual match three companies on mobile buy traffic for $80 an install. Like 80 bucks. Because they know that they will recover that amount over like the five years that this person is going to play that match three. It's not uncommon for for yeah, for companies like match three companies to buy people like $60, $80 cost per install. Obviously those are like bro ass campaigns or targeting whales or people who will monetize in those games, but still it's it is very not uncommon. And the thing I learned this job is that actually free to play games uh monetize better on mobile than on PC. Which is interesting cuz I would have thought that
you know, PC gamers are more hardcore. They tend to spend more. But that's not true actually. So PC gamers definitely tend to play more. Uh but they don't spend as much. And LTVs from what I've seen LTVs on mobile are higher on the

free to play side than on mobile.
Yeah, no that makes complete Sorry, I don't know. I could have been coming from the Blizzard background. Like nobody everyone. Like the mobile people they're like oh a couple dollars here for these gems, a couple dollars there, whatever. Like, you know, also it's it's also maybe like the geo, right? Like the Asia's, right? They typically spend in game on play games and love spending money on mobile, right? It's their console platform. The PC players they're like they play a lot and they're like by God I won't spend any money.
Yeah, yeah.
I will make it through League of Legends without spending a dollar. Or I will get through all of Hearthstone and I won't spend a single dollar on any card packs. So maybe that's actually part of the hardcoreness. But it's it's funny that that's showing up in in your guys's numbers. Um Okay. So I want to talk a little bit about the business of of you, right? You know, you're you said something the other day you said you're like eight people you know, serving like 10 to 15 clients per month. You know, some of the people that we talked about like the Voyagers of Nera was clearly like an indie game. Then Ubisoft Might Magic. Um how do you

guys like structure this engagement economically and like how does it actually like work and and what do they get out of it?
Yeah, so we tested different formats and the one we have now as I mentioned is full-service. So we take care of everything, we get set up super quick and there's no commitment in terms of number of month we have to work together and so on. It's ad hoc campaigns. So it's really like an agency business model where you come in with a budget, we deploy it and we take a cut of budget that is 20%. And then that covers everything including creatives if that's usually an optional. So some some developers are very touchy about their creatives. They don't want us to touch their their art or their brand which is totally fine. But it does improve performance if we can iterate on creatives and you know this creative has like a super good CTR like let's make variants even if it's a if it is like changing the button on the creative. Like that definitely has an impact. So we also handle creatives internally.
Okay. How do you like but but but imagine that

you're having like 10 to 15 games a month. How are you doing that like at scale with eight people?
Yeah, so that's the part where the platform comes into play. So we have an engineering team which like half the team is basically engineering and everything is automated from campaign setup, landing page setup, analytics. Basically as soon as we have a new client like the and we have the assets the landing page and the campaigns get rolling with very very little human intervention and the data you know goes to our dashboard and our clients can interact with it live. The human part comes into more like the strategy of like okay, let's launch this or that campaign and interacting with the client like the back and forth with the client is where that takes a lot of time of like okay, we got to figure out what their needs are how they want to orient the their next campaigns and so on. But the campaign management itself is all automated and this is something that took us a long time. Like last year we didn't have all those automations. And and it also has problems with like human

errors. Typically you don't want to have a human error when you run like I don't know how many campaigns we run in parallel, but probably in the hundreds. Uh you know, it can uh it can mess up very quickly.
Yeah, makes sense. Um and then that also kind of goes to my other question which was going to be around like why does a studio not hire someone in-house versus using you guys? Um like what's like your response to that?
Uh somebody in-house or
I feel that way about agencies sometimes. They're like, "Why don't I just do it myself?"
Yeah, the thing is like the the the technology we built is really our edge and our moat. Like if if you're sure anybody can run ads on Meta, uh but we we've we've done it in a way that we're sure for sure we're getting the best performance. And 20% if you consider it is not that much. Like if you if you diminish your cost per install or cost per wish list by like a 3x factor or 5x factor, then paying 20% uh and then you don't even have to pay payroll, right? Like the payroll agent like having a person in-house, then it might be better to

have somebody external like us.
Cool. Um and then also earlier you mentioned that you might be moving to doing some real-time bidding. What does that unlock for you and your team?
Yeah, so this is really exciting for us because it unlocks I I think so right now we're sitting at around like $1 median cost per wish list for our clients. Uh and I would say the biggest bottleneck to get that down is the walled garden. So Facebook obviously has a huge keep a huge margin on the advertising dollars that we spend with them and it's very hard for us to to go beyond like it's it's a black box as well basically. Like we can feed it signals and they will the algorithm will optimize, but if it thinks that the performance maybe is too good, maybe it will keep some margin for itself and we will never know, right? Uh on real-time bidding you have a lot better uh uh control over the economics. Uh and so that's that's number one. Like we think we can get to 10 cents per wish list with real-time bidding. Um and we also uh get access to new

inventory. So, as I mentioned, like desktop inventory, niche websites that we can bid on in a programmatic fashion with our own uh algorithms and uh and bidding engines. And then the all the mobile apps, like any mobile like AppLovin. I used to be at Homa, we were spending like 10 20 million a month on AppLovin. It was I mean obviously, it's it's hard to see all that money go away, but there was a a reason why we were spending that much on AppLovin. It's it's it's a really really good network. Uh and so if we uh start bidding, we can uh start bidding on AppLovin, we can start bidding on any mobile game or app with a much uh better view on uh you know, on the users themselves. So, we can know, for example, have they spent any money? We can start bidding on PC niche PC apps or games or pixel art games or whatever targeting only spenders. Like basically, we have more uh control over uh how we're spending the advertising dollars. Uh and again, it increases our mode cuz then if you're a studio and you want to do this, then all of a sudden it's not

just one or or three like marketers that you need, it's like 20 people with a big engineering team. Um one interesting thing that I learned on the job I'm I'm coming more from a gaming background than an ad tech background. Uh and uh meeting with my CTO, Daniel, who comes really from the ad tech side of the spectrum. He worked at Criteo, if you're familiar, huge uh ad tech firm. He worked in in Israel uh in at various DSPs. And it's basically it's a it's a fascinating world and it it's uh but it cuz it powers all of the internet we know, right? But it is also very very different from what we know in gaming. So, those two worlds are um are very niche in their own ways and very like uh people are very specialists of their crafts. Uh and but they they don't talk to each each very much. Uh and so it's rare that I talk to PC console executives and they're familiar like intimately familiar with how the ad tech space works. Uh,
Yeah.
So yeah, I think that's that's why it's worth it for us to go that route.
Is it Is it Is it Criteo? I thought it

was Critio.
Uh, Criteo or Critio? I'm not sure how they pronounce it.
it wrong the whole time then. Okay, well, I learned something today. Um, okay, makes sense. I want to move on to some of our conclusionary topics. Um, you know, I think that there's a couple questions that we could we can talk about, but um, the first is they're actually around um, PC performance marketing you said won't actually look like where mobile UA is, right? Where it's like 99% of the budget. So, where in your opinion do you think it lands? Like what's the actual realistic ceiling on how much of PC how much of a PC studio's marketing budget should go to pay performance if you were to make like a recommendation and where do you think this actually settles in the next like 5 years?
It's a good question. So, my metaphor for PC console gaming is uh, e-commerce basically. So, I think in the end and yeah, gaming studio or publisher P&L will look very much like an e-commerce brand. So, they will have a lot of product development, but a lot of their marketing uh, so marketing will take a larger share of their overall revenue

and eventually within marketing performance will take a larger share. Um, and I think it will go So, right now yeah, I think less than 10% of publishers' budgets are uh, spent on performance, something like that. Uh, and I would say it will increase from 30 to 50 depending on the game genre. I would say that though, but obviously it's finger in the wind. We'll We'll see where that lands, but that would be my like within the next 5 years that would be my guess, yeah.
Hm, okay. What is um, all right, so we talked about the budget. Want to talk a little bit about Steam. Um, first, what is something that Steam could do to make your life easier to do PC performance marketing?
Uh, well, Steam So, it's funny. I was at the GDC, it wasn't this year, it was last year at Steam's at Valve's happy hour. Uh, and I cuz they used to have Google Analytics on the Steam pages. So, you used to have a much better view of what was actually happening on your Steam page and, you know, understanding your audience and whether or not this Steam page conveys what you're trying to convey.

Uh, and it turns out that they removed uh, Google Analytics and included their own tools, which are worse. Um, and I asked them like, are there plans to reintegrate uh, Google Analytics? Uh, and they told me that uh, for privacy, that was the number one reason why they took it out was privacy concerns and that they wouldn't uh, turn it back on. Uh, which is which is fair. Uh, but yeah, I don't expect Steam to open up privacy-wise. Um, I think it's a terrific platform. I'm really excited about all the new things they announced, the Steam Machine, SteamOS. Um, but as a yeah, as a uh, environment for advertising, I still I think it will still remain very hostile. Uh, this is why we exist.
Okay. So, no no notes besides go back to Google Analytics.
Yeah, yeah. I don't well, I I don't think they're going to build tools for for advertising, unfortunately. Yeah. I mean, obviously, the best thing would be to have an IDFA or some kind of something like that.
Yeah.
But uh, I don't think that will ever happen. Even on mobile, it doesn't exist

anymore.
Right. Of course. Yeah. Okay. Um, two, who do you perceive are your competitors in this space?
Uh, it's a good question. Um, well, I would say right now, we're mostly competing for budgets with other agencies. Uh, but we feel that we have a very differentiated value proposition because it's very much tech-enabled. Uh, and we're also very comfortable competing. Like, this is a space where uh, you know, you you see this I mean, yeah, exactly. So, so you see it. You know, you see it like you run two campaigns side by side and then you see, you know, white and black if it which one is the best. And so we're very comfortable competing. I think it's it's just we don't have the deep publisher networks that agencies have cuz they've been around for a for a very long time. Um Well, I I will also say agencies, it depends which agency. So, I would say I would specify and say performance

agencies. Uh there are a lot of agencies that we work with in our partners with us and we are their performance arm. And I think that's a very smart choice cuz we don't have the ambition to go into influencer, to go into brand, and into events. And I don't personally believe that performance will be uh the only uh marketing effort for publishers going forward. I really believe that publishers have to have a marketing mix that is balanced and that performance is only a part of it. It is another string to our customers bow essentially. Uh and so I think yeah, for agencies it's it would be it's a good strategy to to partner with us as their performance partner and then to handle the rest where they're uh better than us.
Cool. Okay. And then finally, what we'll do is we'll close with the the wish list
Right.
Um so, you're clearly you're basically optimizing around like a what I would call like a peripheral KPI, right? Like I think the the peripheral KPIs that I think are big in games right now are the following: your Discord size, your wish

lists, um your number of social media followers, um right? And a lot of these things are very transitory, right? And they're they're meant to be like leading KPIs, right? Like you hope that because you have more wish lists or that because your Discord is bigger that you will sell more units. So, I guess my question for you is like do you think studios should chase wish lists and and why? You're obviously helping them chase wish lists because they're willing to pay for it. But, you know, like in an in an existential sort of macro market level away, what are you thinking about this this this problem?
Um yeah, so short answer is uh yeah, I think they should definitely chase wish list. I think there are obviously other KPIs they should follow, but it's it's very uh important because I would say it's the the most important real estate on Steam is the wish list tab. So, people when they want to purchase the game, they usually go like they when they want to discover new games or whatever, they they want to play a new game, they usually start with their uh wish list tab. And we see it on uh customers data. So, you can see where your uh Steam page

uh provenance is. Uh you know, where the traffic is coming from within Steam. Steam does tell you that. And usually a large part of the traffic is coming from the wish list tab if they have a big wish list provenance. So, yeah, I would say I would say it's important. It's not the only thing, obviously, but um one thing uh that I wanted to touch on, this is something I get often. So, when we got started, people were telling us, "Okay, uh paid ads don't work on the Steam. Don't bother." Um and then when paid ads finally worked, uh and we were chasing wish list, people told us, "Well, uh you know, sure you're getting a dollar per wish list, but paid wish list don't convert as well as organic wish list." This is typically something that I get at every sales call uh with clients. Like, "Well, you know, uh and it does make sense intuitively." Like, somebody that watched an hour of your game on stream might has likely, you know, more probability to convert into an actual sale than somebody who just clicked on an ad, right? Well, it turns out that after uh looking at, you know, we work with over 100 games now, uh and some games that we scaled to 100 plus

100K plus wish lists, we were the the only source of wish list they had. Like, nothing else. All paid. Uh and and the conversion was in line with what we see on the organic. Like, we didn't see a Basically, I think there's a big myth in gaming right now is that like paid wish list don't don't convert. I think that that's a big myth. I think there are other factors. Uh and to touch on your uh on your uh example, like there are definitely horror stories of games that have you know, a million wish list and they you know, turn out not having too many sales. And in that case, usually the leading factor is those Steam reviews at launch. So, if your game is reviewed mixed or or very negative or whatever at launch, it's done. You can have like
Which is a product problem, which is
It is a product
completely. You deserve that, right? If you If that Like you That's a That's a That's a thing that marketers can't control, right? I think the
Exactly.
a really hard thing about generally the space is I I think we actually encounter well like on what we're doing in Metal, but like it's you can't control what

happens when someone arrives at your store, right? And there and there's a bunch of people that are like game is not game is okay, right?
Because they're good, yeah, exactly. And it's all written in red on the on the Steam page.
you could have gotten them all the wish list in the world, the highest quality people, right? But if that's what happens on launch, like it's kind of like the
Exactly.
And and objectively, that's fair, right? Like if you Everybody has a right to buy the product they want to buy, so um
Yeah, there are other factors that that we found were were very interesting in wish list conversion. The The other two, so you have the Steam reviews, which are by far the number one impactful uh variable. Other variables are how old the wish list is. So, typically if the game was wish listed 7 years ago, person might not even be on Steam anymore. So, they might not, you know, buy your game. They don't Like some games have been around like in pre-launch for like years, like close to 10 years. Uh and they have a million wish list, but sure, like those wish lists will never convert. Um And the other one is country. So, we've had games with like huge influx of wish list from tier three

countries, uh and they have same like wish list in the hundreds of thousands or in the millions. And those wish lists typically don't don't convert super well. Um
Okay. Are you finding the same dollar cost per wish list across the US or is that a blended number across geo tiers?
older numbers I shared are US. So, if we go to even tier one, it's lower. And then if we go to like tier three or like a like a Brazil, for example, or, you know, other type of countries that are like big Steam gaming countries but are less expensive, it's like yes, much lower.
I see. I see. Okay, makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I think it's just a general macro question. I mean, I I I honestly I don't fault anybody for chasing wish list. I just do wonder when I think about the macro PC space as a whole, right? Like, is it really like leading to the best outcomes um for people? And uh and sort of, you know, you're optimizing for a pre-funnel KPI, but it's, you know, one of the few that you can. But, um Jules, this was such a pleasure. Um I think this is you're working on a very important problem. Um so, then I, you know, when I was we met when I was

looking for a PC performance solution. Um cuz I was committed to like, you know, I wanted to I wanted to work. Um so, thank you so much for coming on the show. Um if anybody wants to get in touch with you, how can they do that?
Uh well, we have our website uh website zab.ad, uh or you can add me on on LinkedIn.
Very cool. All right, guys. Um as always, that's my that's our show. If you have feedback or ideas, hit me up. I'm always open. And with that, I will see you guys next time. Thank you so much.
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