Game Commerce: The Elephant in the Room Devs Are Not Always Thinking About.

[Music] we're going to kick it right off with the first talk uh i want to immediately uh ask the first speakers on stage for the first talk so i'll be john newton and james woods um we're going to talk about game commerce the elephant in the room the devs are not always thinking about so all right guys when you're ready take it away hello hello hello i thought this was about whales not elephants no elephants definitely okay

especially the big ones in this room so hi everyone my name is john i am the senior business manager for canada for ixola um basically part of what we do is basically is to show you guys that hey we're here to help developers create something really interesting which is elephants or wells james you can introduce yourself and i'll introduce myself a little bit more about my background cool i'm james woods i'm ceo of blue check games uh previously that i was cto of boat rocker media who was a large producer of tdip like orphan black and i led their ip division for game building and uh yeah broke that off into blue check games and working with guys like john at zola to figure out how to make whales so basically for my part i started in the game industry about 12 years ago uh smalling the developer basically mod group we grew up to about

40 out in the maritimes i've been basically business marketing doing publishing as well and now i'm with xola so with that going ahead we're going to talk about what the outfits can you just skip a couple slides please just go for the next one so basically what exalt is we are a global provider of ecommerce solutions so our solutions are basically used to build funnels for developers and things are really changing interestingly thank you uh for the space because there has been basically i'll just go ahead and skip ahead just a little bit yeah there you go thank you so what is the elephant basically so everybody talks about marketing and everybody talks about commerce revenue so the middle thing is before you can get to revenue it's commerce and james has a huge background in actual e-commerce himself so maybe you can talk a little bit about this slide here talk

about the elephant yourself in your whales um yeah thanks for that pitch um so when we built games based on ip like orphan black we thought about the audience and how to and this is a very sensitive audience within a very specific community and um a lot of the conversations that we had internally were how do you build commerce to this community without offending that community and i think a lot of developers come up with the easy answers which is micro transactions loot crates um and they go to the easy out which is in-app purchases with the big you know 30 percent cut players and what we started to do is is reach out to other people that are more other companies like zola who are more seamless in the way that you do those transactions um and they gave us a lot of options to be able to make those

transactions happen with keeping a larger percent of that revenue which made us really happy so basically it's more than just like hey let's develop an apple let's just throw it onto a store of some kind and just pray to the alcohols and let's go right we're going to make a huge success on that it's much more involved with that you actually plan out your infrastructure you have to plan out how people are being acquired how they move through your funnel and eventually how you convert them into revenue so this is why there's this huge gap in most dentists knowledge about how do you get from spending money into marketing and how do you get into revenue so why is this important but the business landscape is changing for you guys for everyone here so basically what are some of the challenges that are happening right so basically there's a decline in profit margin when you're using some other larger app stores right or platforms distribution platforms you're basically giving away 30 right off the bat and we're not even

accounting like if you're working with a publisher so you who made the game are basically giving away the line share of money that you are rightfully entitled to further are furthermore your games are getting noticed how many games are being released every day right how many games are are there beautiful games in then sure there's a ton of shovelware let's talk about that right but how many beautiful other games are there quality games that are competing for your space right maybe you have them yeah so uh beyond the orphan black space is where john and i really started to get into some interesting conversations we also do hyper casual games and uh this is probably more prevalent uh than you would think is people think just to go to the app stores for the hyper casual space and there are other options that and that's the elephant to me is that

don't make those micro transactions those in-app purchases just go to another provider and you don't have to be uh you don't have to be epic or you don't have to be you know jason free or dhh to go battle these guys you can just find another partner it doesn't even have to be these nice folks but yeah yeah and then the other challenge is the idsa creating new challenges so basically now you're not getting even visibility into what you're doing with your marketing money how do you determine roi how do you determine attribute how do you determine that the 200 000 that you just put into a marketing black hole is going to generate sales for you you don't you don't have visibility on that so you need to be able to control your funnel through that and obviously scaling as well so basically what changed this changed so before i talk go into deeply into this i'm going to make a lower joke because i actually have a law degree and basically this is not legal advice i am not an attorney do your own research

but we are going to talk about this and this actually created some opportunities for you guys right so basically as a mobile developer now you can process mobile's game sales there are tools out there to do this there are tools to market directly to the consumer and there are tools to take back control of your ua and ux of your online payments and of your payment flow so this is the missing component to it generally you can talk about somebody uh why is this important to you from your perspective uh well it's about control uh ultimately um typically you just put your game on the app store you get your transactions you give up your 30 or now 15 if you're small enough um now i have the tools to be able to do more create lists um and it's all within one platform which i really love and what's asked of me is very little in terms of what i give up for the tools so it's a good deal

so we're just going to go in so now we know that there's an opportunity right so how do you do this like why should you actually control your funnel right you said it was mentioned in the amazon control and it's basically from point a to point b of getting your money you have now basically a increase your revenue and by the way zola has 700 payment methods globally so what does this actually mean this means that we have several times orders of magnitude more payment methods ways to pay than your traditional platforms and i don't know if you guys know this but there's like a third of the population that is actually unbanked meaning global population i mean these people don't have bank accounts and it could be for any reason social economic right and it's not because they don't have revenue or money or they're poor it's just basically because they can't

have a bank account you might have a bank account you can't get a credit card if you can't get a credit card you can't pay right and i think you experienced this yourself so uh for a game that i made and i don't want to point out any particular community but uh had a global audience within a specific community where that community can't come out uh and and they can engage with our game through methods because they're unbanked so uh so basically you were seeing that you were seeing active users out of these regions of the world and yet never see a scent from them so so that's that's one of the things that we hear that uh that is changing in this world is you now have the ability to actually by using us actually you have now the ability to actually tap these markets and use payment methods that these guys are using that's right so how do you embrace the change right

so basically here are some of the solutions how you can get around and build up secondary funnels and increase your distribution we have a number of partners that actually are setting up web stores so basically these are browser-based stores that are selling micro transactions or whatever they're selling and getting out on a secondary funnel uh this is something you're planning for your games as well for educat that's what you've got us for 2023 for i haven't played with this specifically but you know i've gone through uh the possibilities of this and i'm pretty excited by it so i feel like you're vanna white right now i'm vanna white is it because i'm like touching you you're doing this uh so web source like you basically do this is what the flow would look like it's like you can actually create this flow yourself and you're actually doing it yourself right so so basically you're accessing a login system you're basically going in and

you're identifying your players so you now have 360 degree viewpoints on what your player base is doing and what your acquisition is doing you also have a mailing list now so you can actually be marketing directly to it um and you're you're making in-game purchases and and subscriptions as well and you're taking advantage of a way wider payment method with um there's also other studios that are actually making pc versions uh of their mobile game or web-based so basically they're going to cross-platform play and they are able to again reach new audiences and grow their market uh and basically using our the our solutions to actually create this seamless transition between the two methods and monetizing them on both

are you planning to use something like that for your hyper-casual games i mean it's just i mean it's something i've thought about what all right i'm gonna mention somebody's name go ahead albert lie okay albert uh big viking games uh you know the guy for a lot of years and he just recently came out with something that i feel is is a missing piece of what zola offers and what he envisions okay talking about the big epic versus apple um dichotomy and uh it's basically it's allowed it's bypassing the whole apple ecosystem completely even to play the game uh in android and uh yeah please buy them what is your it's admissions though company that they just found is called parallels if you haven't checked it out you should it's really exciting i can't wait to distribute my my games on that platform

tell us more about it so we have the tools and services to help accelerate your game globally so it's basically these are the tools that are allowing you as a developer to actually create these funnels yeah i use the platforms but at the same time kind of break free from that right and actually could be able to not only understand what you're doing with your marketing money but you're also understanding how you can move them in create your own funnels and actually monetize in regions that you normally would not be able to reach in so um having extra money to put back into your flywheel into your ua machine is what i love obviously um it just it just increases the snowball so that's the advantage that's the elephant that i feel that not enough devs are thinking about they're going too traditional with the

easy uh easy way and it's not necessarily that easy or it's not that hard to think to go to another solution i should say no it's not that hard and and that's you know it's still it's not thinking about it that is actually the detriment here right it's actually being able to utilize these tools that exist as an indie myself when i was doing my games and we were doing it on steam right it was a pz build i was like we had nothing like this right there was no way to do it right and these tools work for any platform right so having this already we could have you know changed the course of our studio radically and not be confronted by uh you know it also allows you to um make more mistakes and to experiment a little bit more since you do have you know the actual percentage of capital to do so to apple and google's credit when they were forced they were forced ultimately to go

from 30 to 15 for smaller studios this gives you even more um right right and you can definitely do a b testing traditional you guys are being five percent now you know what now we it's five percent five percent transaction uh but are further than that like because we give you the tools to do this you can create your own landing pages you can create your own source so basically you are filtering out being buried by you know thousands of games being released today you basically have a captive audience here's the game here's the thing you're doing right and you're basically seeing it through so that you don't have a drop-off in your funnel when you see you may also like this right and so if you see that then you're just dropping it out right now the one challenge i will say yeah to prove that i'm not a paid man away a paid show the one challenge uh that you can

overcome off the bat is the trust factor when you do a ua campaign it goes to an ad they click on the ad it takes them to the store that they trust apple or google in this case it's another store um hopefully your marketing is strong enough and your your efforts are good enough and your your creatives that they will lay out a credit card you don't have that embedded credit card on a first time uh lander so you just have to nail that conversion um but it's still part of the machine you're still still part of a different flywheel but you also mentioned when we met that you actually want to use these infrastructure for your next game and the one after that so basically what you're planning is long-term future proofing you are you're you're you're telling me that you're basically saying hey you know what audiences that are bought from you are 30 more likely to buy again right and so you're basically creating this community and you're understanding nearly 100 of what they're doing

right you sending them emails you're nurturing them you're building them and you're building that trust with your brand and your game so that later on you can sell to them again and again and again right it's not a restart here's a new app let's go right that's it i mean that's where the epics uh and and the uh hayes.com uh inspired the smaller ideas he said you know we can never fight against the big guys this gives us the tool to the tools to be able to do that and basically build your own you know uh flotation device to see if you can get out there into the big ocean and and make it based on your branding and your great game and build your audience