Creator Collaborations in Gaming - 2024 & Beyond - Axel Danielsson & Björn Karlsson, WeHype.

[Music] [Music] [Music] our next session um which I'm really interested in is Creator collaborations in gaming 2024 and Beyond and for this we have Axel Danielson and bejor Carlson from weight it's almost lunch guys like hanging there 30 minutes more 30 minutes more but we're going to increase the

appetite a little bit I hopefully so uh last year I was here with my CEO actually talking about the trends that actually happened last year very happy about most of those coming through as well so I think you have a good track record to follow up on now um so but this year um we're going to talk a bit more about rewarded and supported which is two different ways of collaborating with creators last year we talked more about pay that is more the classic way of actually working with talents and collaborating with them um so I brought Axel cuz he's SM than me about this stuff so I think you can perhaps introduce yourself a little bit yes so my name is Axel I'm the director of uh brand experience and the last time I was here uh everyone was talking about if covid was going to be a thing or not uh so it's very good to be back uh but yeah like we hype traditionally has done a lot of paid sponsorships but we're now shifting to kind of cater to uh the new needs uh we see in the industry so that

includes something we refer to as rewarded and supported content and we're going to touch on all of those things today yeah and as a reference I think you and I together has have worked on perhaps 200 games together launched them and about 50 to 70 live service games that I would say and most of them as a reference WEP has been around for six years uh we're Market leaders um we're Swedish most of us so we're a bit humble but uh we work basically with um seven out of 10 of the Revenue bringing games and Publishers in the world um heavy ndas so we won't be able to say too much of those uh nice topics but uh happy to share more benchmarks and stuff after this as well so why are we here and why we want to talk about this um I created a just a really to the point slide to Showcase that these are the most stream game on the platform twitch which is a live streaming platform it's heavily correlated that you can see that also most of the successful games right now

have a lot of content being created around them and um I think a few examples where we've seen lately this year I think I think you mentioned Among Us is an old one that was really good for Content creation but you had a few more I guess yeah quick show hands like who here has heard about lethal company that was surprisingly few like the rest of you need to do your homework but it's a game it was made by one guy uh it launched came out of nowhere he had been making games for around 10 years so very perfected his craft but still solar developer I think it was the seventh most Revenue bringing game uh on Steam last year and he launched in the end of October so that tells you something but the point we're trying to make here is that the shift that has happened over the past few years is that you guys as game makers need to not just think about like okay is my game fun to make but to have a good chance at winning you have to think about okay is

my game fun to play but is it also fun to create content for so there's an added element of like is this fun to watch and to create for yeah and I think um one recent example I think most of you I don't think they need the hands for this one but pal World recently launched more than a million concurrent players on Steam um it's so fun to make content around and you can see that the the amount of paid content they have is very limited but it actually made it easier for creators to be involved and part of that game so that's also a good example of that I think and yeah so this is what we mainly going to talk about today in different ways to understand where we can Implement um different credit collaborations so this is where you're the expert so I'm going to look at you now yeah so essentially what you have here is just a very simplified way of looking at a game's life cycle so we're going to be talking about different what different things to do in these different stages of a game life cycle so we can actually actually jump to the

next light cuz you'll be seeing this a lot more uh do you want to start with paid yeah yeah so so paid is I think what most of you have seen before on everything from twitch when someone does um um a stream where they play the game for you know one two hours or more or when they create a integrated YouTube ad or a dedicated video when they play the game or make a creative angle of it um if you would go to our website and look for supercell in Clash for nature you would have a really good example of that that you can find um and yeah I I can talk about that for hours but that's not one to hear so I'm going to contain myself so please reward it and support it Axel what is that thank you so uh the way we look at it is that essentially the further down you move here so you have paid rewarded and supported the further down you move the less Monetary Exchange you have between you and a Creator So Paid obviously you kind of control the narrative you're actually sponsoring content uh but then there's what we call rewarded content which means that there's some Monet

uh incitement for the Creator but you have less you as a brand have less control of the narrative but there's still money flowing between you and a Creator and then we have supported which we tie into everything everything related to ingame items and skins and keys and so on so yeah do you want okay so this is a picture from a game but bjn is way better than me at the game so I'm going just going to let you tell us what this is yeah I love this game cuz I can play with my mom and my fiance it's nice so it's called geoguesser so they use basically Google Maps to put you somewhere around the world and then you're assume where you should guess where you are basically just on the information you get from the street view um I'm decent you're really bad but there was recently like a World Cup in Sweden and um yeah it's it's been just blowing up I think I don't how many players do they have I think it's 60 or 70 million but it's like it's one of the latest Swedish like proud uh proud games that have come up uh but if you look

here in the corner so what they've done is that they've implemented support a Creator which means that they can go to creators and say Hey you know we think you're a great fit for our game or we like your stuff maybe they are already creating content for it and then they can start to share Revenue with that Creator so they can say hey here's a Creator code you can share that with your audience and if your audience use it then you will get X % of whatever Revenue uh they generate I was going to do want l oh should I yeah you should all right go back to the pr I'm sorry my friend so um I mean one question would also be not just the LTV actually but be if you have any examples of uh different Publishers who have done this successfully historically yeah so fortnite uh put this like on the map but a lot of the big games like fortnite Call of Duty are doing it in different

ways uh we are now seeing more and more companies like us uh bring up that allow smaller companies to do this as well so it used to be something that was quite reserved for like the really big ones but now more and more tools are appearing uh to let anyone do this but an important thing that I wanted to mention is that people go okay but I'm maybe I'm already scraping by why would I share Revenue but all the data actually show was that customers who come in Via something like this have both higher engagement and higher LTV so like your bottom line in the end actually is better than having some random person come in from some other channel so that's a very important thing to mention I mean that's that's similar levels that we see uh from P marketing actually and when they do that kind of dedicated content so that's really impressive and I think one thing to mention here as well is that um I mean now we talk about the size of Publishers but in regards to what kind of size of

talents would you say that actually are open to this kind of collaboration that's a good question so uh in theory this would work with anyone but uh what we've seen is that you know larger creators are less prone to accepting stuff like this CU I mean they're swimming in brand deals and and whatever so this is something that's more usable to I would say micro to Mid tier creators than anything else I was was that fire alarm first it's okay all right is someone hyping us up all right I get it um that's great so LTV yeah yeah so uh something that's very worth mentioning is that here I mean this is just us playing around and what you see here is the viewership of any sort of standard uh live cycle live service game uh so you have your Peaks and your valleys you release it it goes down you drop a DLC it goes up and so on but when you have these types of like always on activations like support a crater uh you can almost think of it as like raising

the bottom floor so you would have your the same trends like your Peaks and your valleys but you're elevating both the top and the bottom of your graph uh because you have a bunch of creators if you run this successfully you have a bunch of creators that are naturally incentivized to create more content for your game than they would be uh otherwise and if you're really smart you deploy something like something like this with an added perk to the audience as well so if I go to you as a Creator and say hey we want to give you uh 15% of the revenue share but you can tell your audience that if they use your code then we will give them you know uh 1,000 coins to use in the game because then you're giving the Creator they're not coming like may I have some more soup like they're not begging their audience to support them they're actually giving their audience something so they're saying hey guys here's something for you you can support me I can continue to

create you know the content you that you guys like but use my code and you will get something and if you're smart you put it so that you know it will actually increase their spending even more so to not be um to play the devil as Advocate a little bit here um so let's say as a publisher I give away you know 15% or 10% of Revenue that's a lot of money I is it really worth it yes is the short answer no but again uh obviously we won't we can't share any any uh data from real clients but all data points towards that this actually works like OB you might not want to give out 50% of the revenue forever but uh the increased engagement and the added content and the fact that the the purchaser comes in connected to like a creator that they enjoy uh actually means me that they are more engaged and

they they seem to spend more in game yeah so an example of this could be that you know through this kind of collaboration you get also content that otherwise if it would be paid would have cost you know 50 $100,000 or euros and so on so um it's actually also one way to get a lot of that content more as a more fair value exchange I would say where the creats then have a lower threshold also continue to make content for that game so here's where in your life cycle we we would say that it makes the most sense to deploy this and it's essentially you can have it up and running as soon as you launch your game and then just keep it on uh forever essentially as long as as long as there's creators who are interested in playing your game you can you can have it on cool so then we're going to get into supported content so essentially for us this is everything that that's not tied

to a monetary exchange between you and the Creator so I mean these are just some examples but like Early Access Keys skins items in-game currency Community rewards uh I mean here we took as an example some lucky bastard actually got the master sword uh so that's super nice for them yeah and I think um I would like to continue also because this is a good way to visualize where you can use it the best and I think here I would love you to share a bit more how you can use this actually in the testing and pre-registration phase or like soft La faes phases yeah so so for our supported content like uh in the best world you would start already in in the testing phase uh again we talked about it earlier in the talk like getting the confirmation from creators that that it's not just fun to play it's fun to create content for but you can also think of supported as a great tool uh to either engage more with creators

so say for example I sponsored a Creator they made a Content piece it was good everyone seemed to like it I can then immediately have to go hey uh you know love the stuff that you did here's 10 blah blah to uh give out to your audience so if you do another stream you can do a raffle and uh and give it out to them so it's a it's a super powerful tool to quite rapidly and easily uh let's say get more squeeze out of a Content piece or like a collaboration and it really also increases brand Affinity so if you don't mention it from the start and so if you're a Creator and you do something and then the brand says hey that was awesome here's some stuff to give out to your audience uh it's it's a really good tool it's also a good tool to probe interest so to send out like to to reach out to creators and say hey would you like to try our game out in the test testing phase if all of them

say no and obviously you wouldn't go to like Dr disrespect and has this like you would have to pick smaller creators in most cases but if all of them say no that's already then telling you something like you probably have a problem that you should address or like investigate further and uh since I'm on the partnership side I know you are not so I I will lead you into this one where can you actually overview all of this track this distribute this well if you're smart you're doing it with weye ah okay thank thank you now I'm happy now you can talk what about you want so if I may add one point here is that for the paid campaigns that I usually oversee we take a lot of the learnings through the testing phase and the preig phase to actually understand how we should spend the budgets during the launch so um One Challenge that I see today is that nearly you know eight out of 10 clients that come to me they are at the launch stage like we're going to launch a game we really believe in it but it would be better if we had started to work you know two years ago or one year ago or half a year ago please CU

then we can use this knowledge to spend them money smarter and basically take less bets um in it and that's that's a that's a massive one and um basically on our team at we we also have former content creators uh so they can also give feedback how it actually is making content around it we can also do offline testing so there's a lot of different ways to get that knowledge and I know a lot of you have potentially for your games different creative communities already that you work with that have you know they love your games but remember they love your games already so you need also the outside perspective from other content creators if you want to reach uh other inventories other categories of players may I go on you may yes cuz now I want to talk so um one thing I really want to make sure to mention is that in the last 12 months we have done some massive campaigns uh probably the biggest ones in the world ever um and what we've seen where we can correlate a lot of the value is that when we do a

campaign we do a market takeover that means that we have at least 15% of all the gameplay content that is created so this could be Germany France us is tricky but we can do that we also talk about South Korea and other regions we see an average that the actual cost per install through UA at the same time is reduced signific significantly which is incredible for us because that is actually us seeing hey you get value back from working us directly it's not only the long-term value of those Partnerships or that L livity of the content um this heavily reflects each market but it takes a decent amount to get there but but and I think the main learning with this also is that a lot of the Publishers works at silos they have UA team they have the paid team they had a Creator Team all of you should work together actually so really try to to work as one team because that is when you get all this value together uh we're happy to help with it but if you as a internal team don't see that values those values or really leverage them

that's going to be tricky um and just to quickly mention I don't don't have much time left is basically these are the main phases where we focus on paid we probably have like 50 different uh formats um I know you probably want to ask me a few of them but since running out of time I would love to just for you to conclude it a little bit yeah okay so so to conclude like the the first point here uh make sure to start to talk to creators early and again we talked about paid rewarded and supported and there's no like there's no textbook this is how you do it it's Unique for each game but keep those three components in the back of your head like okay how are we going to find creators which ones are we going to sponsor which ones would be interested in working with us with a less let's say they're not getting paid as much but there's higher potential because they're get getting Revenue share and and how are you going to work with supported content you should have you should be thinking about all of this

early on and even make sure that you have the infrastructure in your game to easily distribute rewards and items and stuff like that uh because the payoff is really worth it uh and yeah like you said talk to each other like if you're in the community team talk to the pay team get in the same room because I think traditionally it's been a bit like the Creator team is in one corner and UA is in one and uh stop doing that it's stupid we have to work together yeah and leverage the data please that's the that's the last one I think I think we're out of time yeah you are out of time and we started a bit late so we're going to have to sort of gather a bit of momentum I'm afraid so if you want to speak to the guys which just the stuff they're saying is amazing especially that point about bringing those teams together and talking more and going early I think that's a really big message we're at B3 in the bottom floor we have the booth and B3 we table there so please come by if anyone wants to talk a bit more thank everybody for sing in definitely thank you

[Applause] thanks