Gaming for good – Why games companies are collaborating with charities

[Music] cool hi guys my name's Adam I'm part of the gaming team at Warchild we're a international charity that support children affected by war we've actually been working the game space for just over 10 years now and in the mobile game space for just over two years so we're best known for a gaming fundraiser that falls every November that's called Armistice and basically we collaborate with war games to raise money for children affected by real life war so today we've raised three million dollars and from the games industry we want to do lots more and we feel the

games industry can do a lot more for kids but today we've actually got a awesome panel of people who are really leading the space when it comes to gaming for good so panelists do you want to introduce yourself my name is Harriet Hughes I'm the CMO at play stack which has a london-based games publisher I'm taking care of app monetization at Woolgar which is a casual story driven games company based in Berlin hi I'm Byron I mean at social point in Barcelona I've been there for five years we are simulation game company and my name is John Burke I'm the Country Manager for UK Ireland and Nordics that's a long one for Gameloft we have been publishing games the last 20 years hopefully all aware of who we are and it's a pleasure to be part of this so before we dive

into the panel just a couple of stats that wanted to share so 87% of gamers feel that developers are perfectly placed to do more for charity and 88% of consumers would buy from a company that supports charity so those are two key stats to keep in mind as we dive in so and to get started why are you guys why your company's supporting charities and how do you select the charity that is support in social in case we are family games so we receive a lot of stories of grandparents that I process to the grandchildren because of our games we have a big percentage of disabled people playing our games and last but not least a user acquisition

efforts are not unlimited so we are always trying to find new ways of acquire so it kind of made a lot of sense to move forward and find new audiences to towards charity and as a result we got a lot of new users reactivation of users and an unexpected consequence is that people in social point is more engaged teams that work in these kind of fighters work harder on them so it made a lot of sense and how we choose them is the better ratio our users feet and user acquisition impact for us I guess we have to be thankful for people to play our games so our games the games that we included in this arms this event we used will plan it

online and also march of Empires and the audience just really resonated with what your child is trying to achieve with it so that's why we're working world child I mean we will be working with other charities as we move forward because if you know it's just a responsibility we feel that we have to give back and yeah why not kind of our players are really keen on us doing it so the more we can do the barriers in our program yeah we definitely see like game to partnering with charities that really align with the key theme of the charity so for watch I love see war and conflict is one of the themes but also like play childhoods and things like that so any kind of game that's on the yeah plays on the played theme or on the war theme we're really keen to to kind of collaborate with awesome so Harriet place that curve William breaks working with charity last year do you want to

share a bit of what what you achieved and how you went about doing it yes so we've been partnering with all child on the Armistice campaign which is of a serum remembrance day 11th of November so spans a week around that period we've got two games in particular that we've really pushed Armistice Day with which is our VR titled it wild which is an arcade shooter in VR so we've introduced things like keep his love arrow in that game as a one of purchase and then sniper versus thieves which is a mobile game which is based all around bank heists and wearing masks so we introduced a lot of Armistice themed masks the developers absolutely loved making the content the players as he say loved the content and yeah that was just a really really nice initiative all around and then more recently we've published help the game on behalf of all child which was a series of mini games that came out on the back of a big game

jam event so that's been really really nice as well to work with the guys on that and yeah we just want to go from strength to strength and make arms to stay much more of a a calendar event if you like for the games industry because it seems to be the most relevant one yeah yeah we were shared loads of images of people playing Snipes versus thieves with the masks on and yeah it's really cool to see the community kind of get behind it is really good I love that game by the way part in arms this last year why did you choose to take mine our mister how did he get involved and how did it form for you guys well I think it was really you threatening us to say if we didn't take part that you would start repetitive HQ just really want to do more and we publish games not to take

money from people and it isn't kind of like a smash and grab for cash we develop games like most of the people at this event because we love gaming and we want to want to kind of put something in people's hands it is really fun and if we can then have another benefit from that which is giving back and it shows all our players as well what we're in it for that were in it for the long haul were in it for the player were in it for the community we're in it for the wider space and yeah that generates a lot of money globally so why shouldn't we be doing more and as you say we've grown how much players have given through in-app I think a hundred percent in the two years that we've been doing conversation the other day these things take time to build up momentum I think as you said earlier that if we can keep that momentum going we should think to Adam actually our first went to a talk after the farmville initiative in in 2010 which was after the Haiti earthquake and I think Zynga raised

about 1.5 million with with in-app purchases they had a Haiti fish and various other items that you could buy and when I listen to the talk I just really thought it was going to just escalate massively and that all gaming companies we're going to get involved because it just seemed like such an obvious one and as I said that was 2010 so it feels like you know it did it has kind of taken a while to kickstart and I just think now is the right time hope so and pour a social point have been doing a lot in the charity space actually probably since 2010 you've been doing quite a lot but you've taken a slightly different approach and these guys kind of usually go down the in-app she thought she was on like community events and things like that in game and to share a bit more about that some of the charities I think that we can group

our actions in for the first one is the one that we are we have done with world child for example or with some other food programs that we integrate into the game we for example we generate a monster of a dragon or something that users come by and all all the benefits goes towards the charity option and this is very engagement for the community the second one is obviously the ones drive by the stores mostly I use like red or apps for it that required a little bit more of project integral integration so you need to do in apps game events but

also changed a little bit that the theme of your game to go towards the theme of the this event particularly we also do community events as you said fundraising events that are less this require less work in games because you you don't need to do anything in game you need to do it towards the fundraising page and the only thing that you need to do is generate noise and traffic towards the page usually the community you just need to tell the community and community will make the job done and the third one a we worked a lot a lot with youtubers in regular basis and we work with them in different ways relating with charity one is Yasmin telling them the charity thing

that we are running right now so they commend them in the video for example for the fundraising with world child all the youtubers of December and January have commented in the in their videos maybe 15 youtubers and also we instead of telling them to talk about our game in particular in the video sometimes we tell them to talk about Authority options and then in between mention our game that has masala super profitable for us for example we did wrong with my service in December and was super profitable both sides so yes all of them results in featurings active users community engagement everything's good yeah fantastic I mean from a charity site you can never underestimate handful and awarenesses so for us we would love to have tens of millions of people that are engaged with our charity obviously you guys have that with with your games

so being able to share that with the charity is super powerful and I think the you - besides really interesting as well because youtubers do so much for charity already they donate lots of their own money they do lots of streams and things like that so can we kind of piggyback off that and start doing some like mobile game youtube collaborations on the charity side I think that'd be really interesting yeah and Lisa you also took kind of a different approach we got for how you support charity last year do you want to talk a bit about help and how you guys took part so we'll go we don't have a very strict policy around charity and we basically have a lot of people internally who feel like supporting certain causes so then that's something that we that rouga booga helps with and then in this case we were approached externally by watch out so the help app that Harriet mentioned

earlier the game Jim that's something that we got took pardon and we made one of the games called Rupert so for this project everybody at Google was open to take part in this so we had developer we had analyst we had animators with game designers who came together and all built this this mini game for the help app will go and next to that I take care of at monetization at Volga so once the game was out at the end of last year we yeah we let well we use our remnant inventory to promote the game to get some extra exposure through the games that we have it will de yeah awesome we put was amazing it's really really good fun you basically plays a elephant in the china shop and you have to collect viruses without

smashing anything so it's really cool and we're actually exhibiting it at the Victoria and Albert Museum on Friday so if any of you are in the area come swing by and take a look and you can play Rupert in person so cool and yeah on the Benin inventory thing I mean again the charities really they're looking to raise awareness as much as they can so remnant inventory is super valuable to charity try find one that's a good fit for your game and yeah if you are willing to give some inventory up for them for the charity it's gonna be super beneficial so that's great so guys any best practices for how to work with charity for from your experience may be how how devs responded I think I mean it's like anything it's just having enough time for acted in getting it in front of our developer partners as soon as possible that it's going to be something we want to do which is why as we've discussed you know focusing on Armistice Day within the games industry

seems like the right fit and you know the more the more games that can be a part of that obviously you know the more players will become aware and it'll just it'll just really start to grow I think so from best practice from our side is just getting everybody involved as early as possible so that there's no sort of last-minute surprises and we can bring as much content into the game as possible to celebrate the event it becomes something that developers themselves really want to do so there's not really much of a conversation that has to be had about well for gaming off anyway between HQ and the development teams they really love taking part in this and also the game jam as well and putting themselves to the test in creating a game in seven days and then putting it out there and seeing how it performs but again it's about how do we leverage each

other's reach as well all child have been incredible about mentioning us externally and we try to do all that to show the partnership and anything that we can give in terms of inventory to promote these endeavors is also worthwhile as well you know it's not going to get out there on its own we have to promote it so I'm glad that we can work together to you yeah there's definitely been a trend of publications featuring kind of charity partnerships a bit more it's definitely a hot topic in the industry so yeah like you said there's I guess there's a benefit charities can bring in that we can get hopefully some more exposure we can tell these stories and why we're collaborating and to a bigger audience so and also when I say war child really understand the gaming market and it is also that understanding that has brought all these people to it so if you get a phone call from your child take it and have a listen because they do have a lot of knowledge about it yes that would be me

guys looking ahead to 2019 and beyond have you got anything exciting coming up when it comes to charity work would you like to see any any new trends emerging in the charity space what do you think so for us we don't have anything specific coming up as I mentioned it's more starting from internal internally people who have certain things that they would like to like to support and see if Google can help supporting it so not charity specifically but we do a lot on diversity vogue as well so for example we two of our developers started girls girls make Games Workshop so this is something that that Google helps support by offering our office to host workshops ordering food for everybody who attends and another initiative that we that we

started doing is LGBT gamers nights at our office we started doing this last year for the first time and apparently it was the first ever host that's kind of events so we're we're hosting another one in February so whoever's in Berlin feel free to join us there and basically if we are approached and anything that is matching to to our core business we are always open to take a look at it and see where we can help and it's kind of our approach where for this year fantastic cool employee yourself.i I come for see a lot of mortality actions towards as recommended in the YouTuber Center we still don't know the causes but we will

do down for sure because community getting ball and it is a really big exposure it's a win/win 30 degree in some way so I think that we will focus on these four 2019 yeah great we would like to see a lot more data in this space we feel there's not nearly enough yet and actually as a charity we can't really raise that data so we kind of turned to you guys to to try and prove the impact that this stuff has so yeah if you're doing your you a at maybe we can look to add a charity message to the end card of your you a ads we can see how that performs compared to a normal you a ads we can look at like community and game events and we can see that's a charity event have more more people taking part than the normal one what impact does it have on retention and stuff like that so yeah we we challenge you guys to to start doing that I think you know in lots of

other industries or lots of other products that people are purchasing online people are getting quite used to the idea of rounding up so you know if you get Domino's here for example I'm using the Domino's app then it always asks you at the end if you want to round it up and there's a lot more companies doing this now so I think that could be a really interesting thing to look at within games you know the idea of rounding up the in-app purchase for example and that additional money going to charity and I just think there's there's lots more things like that that we can do that have become kind of the norm in some of the other sectors but they're still quite new for us within the industry yeah absolutely a great idea but something so simple as every penny I mean if you've got 131 million users around the world playing of games then it's kind of like we should do more we should be doing this stuff for them yeah absolutely in traditional industries choose a charity for a year for example and they'll kind of run fundraisers throughout the year and that

hasn't happened as much in the in the game sector so yeah that might be an error as well Sariah also I can't mention also looking to do more charity work with other charities and trying to get brands involved as role to add another dynamic to that reach because they have there audience and people that follow them so brands can get involved and just amplify even further so yeah it should just be about us it should be about who can we also bring to the pie and say your brand supports what we're trying to achieve and your audience and listening to you as well so maybe they can have some input to it that's it awesome I think we're nearing the end so would anyone does anyone have any questions they'd like to ask the panel

one of the problems we ran into when we looked into this a few years ago is the practical aspect of it particularly with regards to rounding up it sounds like an amazing idea but all of the while the API is that we could or we were using the time forced us to have very fixed prices and specific things that we were selling so when we try to look into the idea of letting a player choose to say an extra euro 20 euros or whatever for charity we ran into two problems one of them is the App Store wouldn't let us because they don't let you just give money and the other one was we weren't sure how to check all transparency right because the idea is fantastic right like the idea of selling a fish for earthquake in Haiti brilliant idea game

companies aren't brilliantly set up to then kind of display where that money went it's just not something that we do we don't have the structure for it so putting that structure in place was something that was just like we looked into it and quickly realise it's entirely out of our reach does any of you know how you guys tackle this this is something you found a solution to my name is Renault Venstre donk I'm currently working at paladin in the hague let's take that yeah it's it's a great question so definitely there's kind of two sides I guess the platform's kind of need pushing I think to try and do a bit more we understand that they're working in products like this so will be interesting to see if that actually happens this year or not on the

transparency side like definitely it's something that we should work closely with the charity on they're able to prove the impacts that money has so they should be able to and it's how do you communicate that to the players so it might be that yeah earlier in the year you announced that each in-app purchase that you sell you're going to donate a pound to charity and you communicate that through your community channels so Twitter Facebook etc and then you work with the charity to kind of prove the impact of that one pound how far can that go a book for a child for a month for example so yeah there's no exact way of doing it but I think if you work closely with the charity you might be able to find a nice way [Music]

we work together on this thank you the more we all work together on this there has to be some momentum and change that comes with it that if not the players themselves will start to revolt and they'll start calling for that change because they'll want us to do more so I think it's amazing that you're already thinking about this and pushing it forward technically for us what was this year it was to generate one item to serve for this purpose so all the benefits go for this purpose this technically is what work is the only solution yeah they would say what one other way social and chronic got involved was with their in-game events for everyone who took part in an event they donated $1 to charity so that's a nice way of kind of linking it to the event mechanisms that already in games getting the whole community working together for a purpose it's a really cool way of doing it as well beyond the kind of in-app purchase or micro transaction route so it's kind

of easier if you will see in a look for it yeah I think Oh feel free to drop and if these were some panelists afterwards and [Music]