From Offerwall to Always-On: Xsolla’s Take on Player Engagement

[Music] Welcome to this special episode of the pocket gamer.biz podcast. Here I have brought together conversations with two members of the team of Exola and they're going to tell us how brands and publishers can meet players where they are and keep them engaged. If you want you can think of it as a dynamic duo of insights and together it brings us one playbook. So, first off is Sarah Schaefer on how brands can literally get in on the action in games and level up with gamification and offer walls. Yes, they are back and yes, they are very important. And then Travis Anderson zooms out to the bigger picture about how publishers can strengthen their communities and tap into opportunities

like cloud gaming. Doing more with less. That's what it's about. As I said, this is the playbook to keep players coming back. [Music]
You're working with so many brands. You see the good ideas. Give me one.
I love thinking about um brands really trying to engage uh users through gamification, whether that's
earning or whether that's interacting or whether that's just
trying to get to the next level even within the brand experience. Um, and you know, I think that there's a lot that can be done there. I love hearing that
brands are have coming up with their own gaming and maybe engagement and
different ways that they can reach out to users. That's really encouraging to me.
Um, and I do think that we've been encouraging people to think about branding as a brand formance. um and and focusing on that, thinking about brand dollars are not often um tracked down to

the to the unique user or uh tracking their return on ad spend as we do in digital marketing.
So, thinking about um shifting
your traditional billboard marketing or your commercial your television commercial marketing into something that's more measurable um
quick turnaround uh and almost in real time. So that's uh that's how I would think about it if I were at a brand trying to reach gaming companies.
Are they thinking about awareness or are they thinking deeper funnel?
It can be both.
Um if you think about the awareness that you get on a traditional television,
um you're looking at like a brand lift or some sort of study that would tell you it was successful, right? Um, if you think about it as a brand performance campaign, you might use some of that money but also have it track back to your actual MMP tracker or traditional tracking company that would be able to tell you what your return on was it. It's kind of how we're approaching it with brands at Exola.
Um, is like think about your brand strategy and think about what kind of

performance you'd like to see from it.
Um, and you can meld those metrics together and still have something to show for it at the end of the day. You can almost do like AB testing with products and you know there's a lot of possibilities there because I'm choosing what I want to reward myself because I earned it right.
Absolutely.
So did are they doing that? Is that part of the metrics or is that just evolving? Because for me that would be even almost as exciting as understanding you know how I can get to a conversion because this is giving me intelligence as well as event you know as well as impact and uh and outcome.
Yep. We we see user choice being a big part of the offer wall.
Um there's a lot of different things that a user can do as a user of the offer wall. You can select something really low friction that won't take you very much time. that might be um installing an app that you're interested
um you'll get a small amount of currency, but when you lean a little bit more towards um a higher friction offer,

you're going to get more currency out of it.
Um one partner that we're working with is Paramount Plus. So, the user will be getting a lot of currency to continue in their game if they subscribe to Paramount Plus. which I think is pretty exciting for the user because not only are they accelerating in their game, but now they have a new subscription service that they can look forward to consuming content with later in the day.
It's going to fit because it's entertainment.
Absolutely.
And games are entertainment. So that really fits.
We have, you know, the when I think about brands and and games like the convergence of it, I think of like a lot of like the IP movies that come out. Yeah. some of the blockbusters every year that use games to try to um drive engagement with those movies. And we think about it the same way for the offer wall. We're always trying to think about new ways to present us as a fun way to engage with the user.
Um and a lot of it is about user sentiment from our side. So
how will that user feel about you as a company after you've helped sponsor their way to their next level,

to their next game play? Um, and that's there's a lot of creative different ways to do that, but it could be um registering for a movie ticket or
uh it could even be taking a survey about their sentiment about a brand. So, lots of different ways to connect with those individual brands or products.
How do you keep that going? Because once I have a good experience, you know, it's one thing to say, okay, I'll go back. I'll check out the offer wall. But you sort of want to elevate that because when I think about Exola, I'm thinking you about you very much as being at the center of what we called before and is now happening Gcommerce, right? Games commerce because that's what it's about. And it has so many different levels and it becomes
almost like a virtual mall if you do it right. And you do have a lot of products. So how do they come together to create a more lasting experience or a more lasting impression? You know, I think for users, it's about variety. Um, and one of my challenges is creating the right amount of variety for users where we keep it really interesting. We make

sure we have something for everybody.
Um, gamers are universal in my mind when I think about the different genres that that play. I always say that everybody's a gamer.
Um, everybody's got something that they like. And I have to to think about creating an advertising experience for users that's uh diverse in nature. I want people when they come to the offer wall to be excited about what they're seeing. Uh ready to engage with a brand, ready to engage with a an exciting fun brand that they like and that they know. So um that's what we're focused on
to create that excitement. It's a little bit of both partners and I'll be talking um to another part of Exola that works with the publishers, but you know at some level it feels a little bit like you have to be the connector. I mean I know Sarah that you are by nature by nature. So you have to bring them together. It's almost like having them speak the same language to start.
Yes. Yes. And and when we think about uh the the originating game or the publishers, they also get very excited to see brands within their game.

Um they want also the same variety. They want to create a really good user experience for the users.
Yeah.
Um they want it to be positive in nature. They want the users to feel good about how they've earned their virtual currency or their points. We do spend a lot of time trying to understand what they'd like to see um coming out of that and how can we even accelerate that? How can we take um a brand that's running in the offer wall and potentially even pull a larger sponsorship into the game itself. So these are things that Travis and I think about quite a bit. Um and so
uh more to come there. [Music]
What is the vision of Exola?
Yeah, what is the vision? I I can speak what the vision is uh for our what we're calling our quest platform which is a offer wall I think of as the engine that powers that.
Um we are playing with some really unique ideas where we're thinking about social questing right like there is a

lot of people that are now trying to drive users to Discord. There's a lot of people that are trying to drive users into
creating social footage through YouTube or through Tik Tok or because that extends their brand, right? This is this is marketing. When when something goes viral,
you want to equip your advocates. Absolutely. And we're hearing it. I mean, every time now when you go to the events, they're saying know your audience, build your community. That's your job as a publisher. So there you can create the incentives and the motivation and the excitement to say okay this is what we want you to be doing. Yeah, I think that offer wall has been around for a long time
and I think there's a big opportunity to continue to to create some new ad units and some new ways for people to be um you know, one thing that I'm excited about personally is I think that cloud gaming could actually become the next playables. So, yes, I know it's a big,

but like playables right now
aren't a great experience. Uh, traditionally, they can be sometimes they're not
sometimes they're not really the experience of the game. Sometimes it's a drag and drop and uh, you know, you're sliding the solitire cards across the board. But I truly think that as cloud gaming continues to scale, there could be an opportunity where that becomes what if you could pop on your phone and play 15 minutes of a game and then determine like, hey, actually I want to buy this game. I I'm really enjoying this experience. And so
we're playing with some interesting things behind closed doors and thinking about what is the future of Offer Wall, right? Like we know what the past has been the last 10 years and it it does well and it monetizes well but what's next, right?
Yeah.
You can see it. It's try and buy on steroids is what it is.
Absolutely.
I was at I was at dinner yesterday and there was someone from Korea showing me what he was doing with cloud gaming and

it was like
that is astounding. And it's just like this little tidbit, you know, this little piece of a game and it was like this looks the game.
Yeah. You're playing AAA titles on your phone. It's really It's And it moves and there's not as much latency as people expect. Yeah.
It's like real.
I know. It's We're getting there. Yeah.
So, I can see this all coming together. Absolutely. And I mean, it's natural as well in the other direction with the physical world. I mean, it's merch, right?
Of course.
Um, it's experiences,
of course.
Um, so we're excited about the future. What would you say to publishers now who are maybe on the fence or thinking about this? Because it's a resource question at the end of the day. I talked to a lot of publishers. I mean like you know one one a day in my work and they're like yeah I'm really excited about this but I don't have a team. I've got my team you know they're over here train we're over here doing AI prompt you know and trying to figure that stuff out. I mean there just isn't that team there for it. So what's what's the answer to that when they say I'm really excited but I don't

have the resources.
Yeah. So what we're doing at Exola which I'm excited about is we are bundling our products together so that one integration can support
numerous things.
Okay. So one to rule them all.
Yes.
Okay.
So if you integrate web shop for example
you can integrate offer wall with two clicks like it you don't have to then go through another SDK integration of putting this offer wall in. So,
okay,
we we're giving people the opportunity to get numerous things with one integration and and create
ultimately, like I said, like a rewards hub where users can talk to this user who's a who's a purchaser and also talk to this user who is still trying to figure out if the virtual currency and the elevated experiences for them
and the parent and the payments as the engine means that you know that's covered because we know there are companies that do all of these. Yes. But it's like anything, you know, do I want to deal with that many companies? It's

like in the early days of the DSPs. How many DSPs do you want? You you want seven, 14. Then we got down to like, you know, four.
Four. I was going to say
I remember it was like how many part I remember in the day, oh more partners is better. Let's have, you know, as many as you can and then you start to manage it, you say, no.
So I can see that that when it all comes together, that that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah. We we we talk about it internally that we're ultimately trying to do all the things like we're trying to support
game studios so they don't have to have an ads team and this team like we're trying to support so that one integration or one partnership with us can support numerous things for you
and then you also don't have fragmented data as well because data coming out of this is what informs how you shape that experience.
Absolutely.
Uhhuh.
So very exciting. Guess guess you're really happy that it went full circle for a while there. It probably looked like we were all losing our way.
Yes.
Or we were doing something completely wrong or you know just not wasn't going

to happen. But here we go. It's the second time around. They always say, you know, what is it the second time around? Is it better the second time around?
Yeah. See, we're we're definitely uh coming back around and seeing
more interest in offer wall than ever before. Uh which is making uh it's making my job really fun, right? Because making it easy,
it's it's always a little hard, but it's it's fun to sit in with these really big gaming companies and and and
and think about the future and think about what their vision is and what's their user acquisition vision, what's their monetization vision, what's their payments vision, and and can we create solutions that
that do it all for them?
Because part of their vision, and I'm hearing it so much more, is be a brand themselves.
Absolutely.
Yeah. Be a brand themselves. Absolutely.
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I'm Peggy Ansalt. And that's a wrap. Until next week.