Go Direct to Your Consumers & Earn More - Jan Kuhlmann, Xsolla.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] we've got uh Jan Coleman from exala here to talk about going directly to your consumers to earn more are you here ah perfect so please a round of applause for uh for yam that's a clicker perfect so hello everyone how's everyone doing you're good you grab food you're not hungry starving great cool so uh yeah looking at this image I think I look a little bit younger than now but this is just a year old so what happened in between I lost a little bit of weight

which is good but on the other hand I also have two kids I'm chasing around are they chasing me around so I feel like I'm I'm aging way faster now so a little bit about me before starting to the speaking session I'm now working since 10 years in the video games industry I worked at Ubisoft always on the business side and joined xolar two years ago and yeah now I'll be back here in Helsinki for the third time a place which I really like I like the community I like the people being here and um so thanks for joining in within the next few minutes we're gonna talk about some Trends some statistics and then talk about how you can apply and get your own web shop in place to go direct to your players or to your consumers so first of all what we do at exola we are global Commerce video game Commerce company so we help developers and Publishers go

direct to their players around the globe we offer more than 700 payment methods which can help you open up new markets offer the preferred payment methods you want to have and your players enjoy and with this opening a wider audience you ought to be able to collect more data points and better understand user behaviors and this can all help you have more data available to make the your decisions we are headquartered in Los Angeles and we have branches and offices around the globe foreign first of all a tiny look back to 1995. I think it's amazing to see how far we have come as an industry overall in 1995 we were looking at through 32 billion in revenue and roughly 100 million of players now in 2023 we're about 200 billion in our revenue and 3.2 billion

in player size though this means they are there are more players there are more ways to engage to play and um this is happening around the globe so there are more places where gaming takes um where gaming is happening so some of the mobile market changing conditions we're seeing is that last year we saw our first decline a first ever decline of 6.7 percent based on the new Zoo global market report and we are in the post idfa and ETA era and then there's a couple of regulatory changes coming in in the European Union with digital markets Act taking a closer look now to where we are at the moment this is based on the new Zoo global market report 2023 so they are comparing June 2022 to June 2023. um more game

revenue is making up almost half of what what we see in at a global scale so even so even so we saw a decline last year we now see that it stabilizes and it stays above uh what we had before the covert pandemic if you conduct another research done by data Ai and IDC you see that their prediction is even more positive as they believe that we will see 108 billion in revenue for the mobile game industry by the end of 2023 and this would be a surplus of what the revenue has done by all the other platforms and overall we know that the population the human population is growing and gaming is being kids are now raised with games and mobile phones are the easiest way the most accessible point to start gaming so there's a good prediction that in the

next years to come there will be just more players and therefore more people enjoying your games another thing that changed over the past decade is that the nature of sales is changing for the video game industry overall but of now we still have that you as a developer as a publisher you have a reseller in between you and your players and entertainment we see that this is a changing this is um is changing you know this from streaming movies series music and sports and so on so what does it mean to go direct to your consumers it means that you have a direct connection to your player base you're gonna market sell and distribute your games and your offers directly to your audience you will collect more data points and better understand their needs so what is it that exola can do for you we can help you set up a web shop so that you can go direct to your players to generate more Revenue you complete

you control the user flow and you have the potential to tap into new markets and widen your reach for your games and this also comes with way more data that you can analyze uh you get opportunity to set up your target audiences differ by the different the different ways they interact on your webshop the stuff they buy they offers they really like and eventually you have a set more players available to bring into your game and to create repeated purchases and uh improve your retention so one figure we see for top grossing web shops we are working with right now is that up to 45 of the top grossing web shops getting uh now 45 of the revenue coming in by those top grossing uh workshops

it's like that's that's doable that's achievable when you go direct to your players another metric is that 60 of the players make repeated purchases so once you have driven them over to a webshop they understand you offer they are more likely and inclined to come back and do repeated purchases and we see that on average during the course of a month they are doing up to six purchases and the overall player conversion we see for one of the best web shops or on the cohort of the best performing ones is between 40 to 60 percent so let's talk about one partner in particular which is a tilting point so tilting Point started their webshop for the game Star Trek timelines as well as Warhammer chaos and Conquest and the challenge they faced is they were looking for new revenue streams so

they wanted to enhance the player intention for their game Star Trek timelines so they launched without the webshop and approved their player metrics as they catered specifically to the needs around there around their whales around the Dolphins and new aspiring newcomers and the results they have right now is that a quarter of the revenue they're doing on this brand is already coming from the webshop the webshop that they brand the webshop that they control and where they get all the data points they want to take a closer look at so and over a half of the shoppers make repeated purchases so they are also on the same cohort as we have seen for the best performing workshops and this is part of our primary Mission we want to help democratize the video games industry as we believe your games should be accessible as possible playing should

be as easy as possible as well as pay and the solution we provide is completely customizable to your needs adaptable to your brand and Assad you control the user flow you get more data out of this you will be able to plug in 700 plus payment methods which can open up new markets and more errors around the globe and you have then the audience analytics which helps you to make good decisions moving forward so some of our Partners we have here I said we have 150 web shops right now with 90 Partners some of them those are the ones you can see in here and one of the strategies we truly believe in is that this is a change of understanding and mindset coming from the players so the mobile is where you play where the web is where you're going

to pay for the game so let's end with a small video on how the purchase flow can look like so that's pretty simple isn't it um you just Branch your store you bring the people in and then they once they go through the this flow they can save up their preferred payment methods they're going to lock in with their ideal and uh then the next purchase is going to make uh pretty easy for them so the key takeaways I want to give you before we start into the Q a session is that you can get more audience with more payment methods offered you generate to

write a reach which increases your Revenue You're Gonna Save up on the reduced fees with us as you gain from the markup uh from from what you usually pay to third-party platforms and then with the webshop you gain more control over your user audience and more control also means more independency for you so that's it from my site we have a booth in here so if you want to know more please stop by we have a couple of bitstep managers here you can explain in more depth on how we usually work with uh with prospects and with partners and what we can offer and also help on some solving some of the technical aspects of this solution thanks everyone open for questions great thank you very much Jan we've got

to we've got plenty of time there I think for questions and there'll be a yeah so yeah we've got to we've got five or six minutes so we can take a couple of questions does anyone want to uh uh to pick Anne's brains while he's here we've got a question from the from the audience actually I have to say I can't see because of the lights but um what do you what do you think of questions how did the um how do the platform holders feel about uh about giving more Independence to the to the game creators and then being able to go off and sell things through webshops so I think so what I stated before um we believe that the video game industry should be more Democrat democratized and we believe in that the developers and the Publishers so should have more power more control overall um I'm sure they're taking a close look of what we do and offer but referencing to the digital markets act for example uh in the European Union um the regulations tell them that they have to open up to third-party payment providers but not all not just this I mean uh it's also we would see what

happens to site loading and all of this so I think there's a lot of changes coming in and as I see it being a European citizen as well um I see maybe the European Union is up to something which we will see distribute across the world and um yeah you can set up your webshop why shouldn't you be able to do this there's certain constraints you have to apply to the platform rules that's sure uh to to make sure that you that you that you're good and and all of this but I think besides the revenue we are talking about there's a lot also about the first party data you gain um I worked for three years on the web store at Ubisoft so this is their PC store where they go direct to their players and driving the traffic to the store and um companies like Ubisoft and others have benefited a lot from getting more data better understand their audiences

creating better um yeah yeah better offers better relationship with it directly with as well if you understand them yeah yeah absolutely no that's interesting so it sounds like with the regulation under the microscope and things going this is actually the perfect time to be considering yeah yeah for sure and I mean we have 1990 partners and we know that um some are a little bit hesitant at the moment and we understand this and this is why we have just a few of them uh being here because they are fine with uh we've been publicly presented and but I think it's it's a it's a trend we gonna see and I believe the platforms are going to adapt to the trends the one way or the other and now is the time to yeah to look into fresh ideas see into where fresh revenue streams may come from just to stabilize as well yeah perfect does anyone have a question from the the audience for uh yeah we're here oh there's one oh there's one at the

front there please can you take them back there perfect thank you I wanted to know how hard it is Implement your webshop for the developers so the business answers it's super easy and super fast it is but the technical experts would say yeah it takes some time I've heard that on average it's possible to do in six weeks to create a web shop can take just 30 minutes it depends on how how easy it is to get your assets been uploaded we have a few as the case rather for PC so it's unreal and and unity but also Cocos SDK which makes it more more easy but yeah creating a webshop is not that difficult still it will take time yeah but we're talking about weeks and then it's done great perfect thank you that's great question I think we probably we've got we've got a couple of minutes got time for one more down here yeah hello I have a question can we use those uh laptops

and mobile games so yeah that's some of the the particular things we have to pay attention to so your webshop is on the web what you can do within the game is you speak about the next content coming up in your game and you're gonna send people to your website because it's about the content coming up eventually you have a webshop on your website you're not allowed to have a direct link from in the game to the webshop that's not allowed and um but you can talk about you the content you have and I think in belief since I'm in the industry it's for me it's often enough content first and if you have interesting content set up communicate about this and what you can absolutely do is use your social media accounts use your opt-ins and newsletter campaigns use your Discord or whatever Community related tool you have to communicate that you have new content that you have

the best offers to be found in the webshop this is what actually the top graphing brands are doing they're talking in their challenge in the channel Nails where they can do it they talk openly about what kind of offers they cover out and your whales your Dolphins they understand immediately what the benefit is when they go through a webshop where they get bigger bonuses or whatsoever on a specific package great thank you great question um do we have another question from the audience before we've probably got time for one more maybe I know it can be sometimes it's hard to think on the spot and also put your hand up in front of everyone so what I suggest is uh it's your email's right there so if someone has a question for you after the fact they can follow and maybe you're in Meet to match as well and as you said there's a booth here right so people can have a chat with you so around the corner just to five and we have a great team of experts who can help you and and answer your questions yeah great so if you have any questions come to you as you leave the room as

kind of always happens to me you can walk straight around and ask you there it's look perfect John thank you very much thank you very much thank you thank you guys [Applause] thank you