Good Deeds Through Games: Integrating Features to Address Climate Change

[Music] thank you hi everyone I'm Hunter bokley and I'm here to talk to you about a bunch of trees charity features and what we've done on one of our games at tilting point in how to help the planet overall and integrating features into your game of profit neutrality so what we did last year was We integrated a feature into Terra Genesis one of our games which plants trees based on certain player actions completed in the game and over the course of the past year we've planted about 500 000 trees in Mozambique Madagascar and a few other countries and what I want to talk to you guys about is how to leverage basic free-to-play techniques to benefit some sort of actual real world cause with profit neutrality so it actually doesn't cost you anything most of the cost is passed on to the player and your CEOs

and finance team don't come down and say shut down the project it's costing us way too much money and the basic steps in order to do that are figuring out how you choose your partner and the cause that you're actually going after what you actually need to consider when building out a social impact feature as opposed to building a normal feature and then how do you actually communicate this with your players which is a little bit different than you do with normal features and yeah so the first up the cause and the partner so the important thing to remember about this feature is it doesn't matter what you want to do here you are not the one spending the money spending the time in actually benefiting the world it's your players and so the main focus needs to be on what cause your players actually care about rather than something that you want to support because it's good for the planet and so you've got to figure out what do your players actually care about and so easiest way to do that is just

ask your players fairly simple um just run a survey in-game survey generate it out to a survey monkey run in a poll on social Pages a lot of different ways there but you can just directly ask them list out a whole bunch of different causes the other way one way that we went as well is thematically you already know your players care about your game because they're playing your game they downloaded it they care about whatever the theme of your game is and so you can tie a cause that matches the theme of your game for example Terra Genesis it's a game about taking a Barren Planet into this Lush Garden beautiful human supporting planet that fits really well with reforestation which is all about planting trees across the planet and in one of our games SpongeBob Krusty cook-off it's a game based on a kid's IP and it's a cooking game it made a lot of sense for us to partner with a children's food app a food company that benefits children

so once you actually have your cause you need to actually find a partner because you're a gaming company I know this is shocking but you are not an expert in actually benefiting the world we make money from a bunch of people downloading our apps you are not equipped to deal with government regulations permits advocacy groups mass-producing food I've never worked in a kitchen in my life you need to find a partner that sole job is leveraging capital towards a specific end and who actually can do that and take that burden off of you you're the capital Source they're the actual integration and the benefits of the world and the other thing you need to keep in mind is this is your player's money this is not your money this is not your time you need to make sure that it's going to the right place because your players are trusting you with it and unfortunately there are a lot of not the best Charities out there or who don't maximize the impact and so you need to go through the Charities and

figure out what's the best bang for your buck make sure that it's not the money that your players are giving you isn't getting spent on government regulations government corruption or getting skimmed off by unfortunately the Charities themselves to maximize their own bottom line so you want to make sure that there's a very clear line between your players money and integration and benefiting the world the other way to do to think that is you're gonna have to be working with these people on a day-to-day basis or month-to-month basis you need a very clear line of communication and very clear established steps of how you're actually going to be working together like you would with any partner so the classic way to do this is basically the player spends some money in the game spend some time in the game something to that effect and every week month quarter year you go through you run a query and collect all the data and see okay this many players completed these actions this is the trees that I need to plant then sending the order over to your

partner and then they send it over to their partners and integrate it and actually get the benefit out in the world other ways because there's some more tech savvy Charities out there is that basically the player completes some action the charity has an actual API and sends it directly to the API which will send it directly to the charity who will then put it into the game super easy and clean um depending on how you want to work how long term this part relationship is and what your goals are really so we partnered with a company called ecology which you should all check out because it's a fabulous company and if functionally why we decided to go with them they're a subscription service that's mostly targeting non-businesses although we're one of their first business clients and they planned a certain number of trees for a subscription per month we basically partnered with them for a more direct relationship reason we did this was because they maximized their impact at every single level of the partnership so

first of all down to the trees they select they plant mangroves which absorb a very large amount of carbon emissions once mature which takes about eight to ten years the mangroves specifically are unlikely to be impacted by wildfires or natural disasters because they're on the coastline in the wetlands not going to catch on fire or it's very unlikely and they're also very deep root systems so it's deep into the soil and on top of that beyond the actual carbon benefits they create habitats for local Fisheries which benefits the local economy they reinforce the actual sediment on the beaches and protect the coastline from natural disasters tidal wave tsunamis so on from erosion over time and ecology works very closely with local communities to ensure that the Charities are not just going to get chopped down because the last thing we want is our players trust us with a bunch of money and then the trees just get chopped down so we have to plant more trees and rinse

and repeat and it benefits no one on top of that they're also very transparent so unlike some Charities we're not guessing as to what we're impacts actually doing we can go through on these spreadsheets that are available to everyone online in their FAQs and see every tree that's planted all of their minutes to their board meetings all the carbon offset initiatives and even the total amount of Revenue that they've generated for the past several years so it's completely transparent on every step of the process and then finally I like that they have an API um it means that there's less manual work on our end in order to actually ensure that there's a link between our players and the service it creates a very direct relationship between our players as they do an action in game they can go online and immediately see it taking place in ecology so functionally how the integration works for us is our player completes some sort of action or monetizes in-game we do some checks via

our anti-cheat system that we set up through lean Plum and then send it over to the ecology API which sends it directly to ecology and within a day everything's starting to get planted so okay we have our calls we have our partner we know what we want to do and how we want to do it with what are we actually doing that's kind of an important thing so when we're doing any feature especially on this scale there are sort of two decisions to make first of all is how you're going to do it and second of all is how long are you going to do it for so we're going to tackle the time one first you can never do this on a permanent basis which is a lengthy or undertaking which is re-theming your entire game to a degree towards this which is what we chose to do ontariogenesis or you can do this as a limited time event and so something that's a little bit lower cost as you do on a short-term basis so limited time event what are you going to think about here well you're not going to make an entire new feature just for this limited time event just to

benefit the world that's a lot of cost a lot of energy it'd be Engineers art resources reworking your entire content pipeline so what you instead want to do is what do you have already you have to utilize your existing live operations infrastructure to build this feature out so how do you run the normal events can you if you're a matchery game is there a side mode that you run periodically can you just make that every player who completes that we plant a tree for you that's very simple and easy to do that doesn't require huge effort to you other than just some communication to the player uh can you repurpose existing features so examples of that are all stars from supercell for example back in 2020 they introduced a koala Nita skin which was meant to help the Australian wildfires so 85 of the revenue generated from this skin was sent to the Australian government and that's a really easy form because it works within their content pipeline they're making skins all the time just requires art resources and

overall it doesn't cost them anything other than the resources to develop it and a new one mostly just a game that I love playing um is Horizon forbidden West so Sony did a promotion which is for the first month of the game's release anyone who completes the tutorial will plan to tree for you and it's another very easy thing for you to do which is just set a goal in the game and say if number of players who complete this we will plant a tree and you can communicate it again in just messaging around the game now if you want to go to the more complicated route which I love doing and I propose you want to follow basically it's a permanent feature in your game you want to follow the exact same procedure that you would for any permanent feature in your game which is what need does this actually fulfill for my player why does my player care about it beyond the fact that we're doing good for the world how does it fit within the player Loop what are we doing to direct the player towards it and what kpis is this is

actually going to uplift aside from planting trees which can be a kpi so what we did in Terra Genesis is we identified for a long time now that we don't have many progression points Beyond completing levels and so we wanted to introduce a more permanent progression system as well and we've done this in various ways throughout the years in addition we wanted to add an additional currency that we can use to give out in bundles and as rewards beyond our hard currency so those are the two player needs that we had to make bundles more interesting and to provide long-term progression so we came up with the my Forest feature and so basically what it is is it's a forest very obviously um it is a bunch of rows of trees that the player plants and you can see very visually the actual impact that you're having on the world and see it grow over time as you progress through the game they plant trees for acquiring carbon impact currency so we'll get into the exact sources of those later on

and then once you have enough currency you plant the tree the API sends the call out to ecology who will then plant the tree in the real world and on top of that we reinforce it through rewards so every four trees the player plants we give you a very small in-game reward that's just a few hard currency maybe a character to sweeten the deal as it were for the player and give them an actual reason Beyond altruistically helping the planet and we also do some fun animation stuff which is we change the background so here you can see destroyed awful climate disaster planet and then when you've planted one tree the snow goes away the sky becomes a little bit clearer buildings are a little bit less destroyed you plant a second tree again or tendries cleaner atmosphere more trees buildings get a little bit rougher then we get to Blue Skies a little bit greener grass when we get to 80 trees and then finally we get to this beautiful Metropolis when you've planted

around 250 trees with clear skies and sort of pushing towards the future so again we reinforce this through visuals for the player as well so okay we've talked about the duration how do we actually make sure that this is profit neutral so that our CEOs and finance team don't come down on us and say guys why are we spending hundreds of thousands of dollars benefiting the planet which is not helping our bottom line go turn it off um which is a conversation I would very much like to avoid so there are two ways to do that one of which is more direct than the other first of all is you can just make it very one-to-one your player spends one dollar we spend one dollar on planting trees very simple you can do that either via iaps or ads because then other people are paying you can tie it to a certain percentage you can make a specific bundle there's a lot of customizability there and the benefits of this strategy is it's very easy to not cost you any money it's very clear

the exact mitigation points are the only risk really is that it might cannibalize your existing iaps in some areas or your existing ad placements so you're going to need to do a lot of a b testing we did about three months of a b testing for this feature yeah something like that to get everything just right to where it's not actually costing us money then the engagement this is a little bit trickier route which is you want to tie it to Milestones or events in the game so you can do an achievement system where if the player reaches level 20 you give you plant a tree in the real world level 40 so on you could do a limited time event as we saw earlier in the matchery example um yeah there are a few different ways to do that and instead of motivating the player to progress via in-game rewards you're providing a higher motivation for playing the game which is benefiting the world and being a good person it's a little bit more difficult here to tie in the direct monetization aspect

because it's not Direct so what you're going for really is a retention play which will hopefully extend your LTV by keeping users around for longer periods or you tie it into directly to difficult events which will monetize because they are difficult which you already know are monetizing because of that so there is a little bit more of a risk there that you're going to have to be very careful with but if carefully managed you should be successful so what did we actually do in Terror Genesis were you getting this carbon impact currency so you're going to get it from their specific iaps specific bundles in the game which give away only that currency so this is for the true altruists that really just want to plant trees then we also give it a very small portion away in our hard currency packs as well so maybe one to five per pack which is very small amount to sort of have an added bonus to our existing iaps then we have an ad placement which will

give away a certain amount of the currency we balance this based on the ecpm of the ad placement because of different countries have different ecpms on average so for example us will give away more of the currency than in Brazil because U.S ads are more valuable to us I mean the goal is profit neutrality and then finally in our difficult limited time events we give it away in end Milestones of those as well so that the user has to complete the very difficult monetizing end event to get the currency okay we've talked about the cause partner feature we're all ready to go how do we actually make sure that the player understands this is what it does we're actually benefiting the world we are good people because they have a lot on their mind we are asking a lot of our players all the time and trying to pull their Direction and their attention in a dozen different directions they're getting push notifications from other games to go play those they're trying to get messages from their friends who are like

why are you playing games come help us and hang out um how do we actually make sure that they not only understand this feature but that this isn't just a feature in the game it's actually benefiting the world and that's a difficult little proposition to make the simplest version and these are some quick tips you need to tutorialize it as you would with any feature walk the player through what it actually is how detailed and directed tutorial you want to do is up to you and what works best in your ux flow you're probably going to want to reinforce it with notification badges call to actions to drag the player's attention back to it periodically to make sure that they don't forget it completely and the only real odd thing here is you're going to want to get your players out of your app I know we spend most of our time trying to keep our players in our apps and keep them engaged with us you need to direct them to the website of the charity that you're partnering with so that they actually have a very clear connection between your game and the charity

um and get them out there and to understand it it's yeah it's a little bit more difficult and different than you would in a normal game and then on top of that you're going to want to leverage all of your social media channels to be also engaging them on the community and social side as well to reach your most engaged players and in all of this communication at every step in the process you need to repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat that this is a real world thing when we plant trees in Terror Genesis we're not just doing a cool little side feature where you plant trees you're actually planting real world trees here not just a side animation so how do we do that in Terror Genesis well the top little screenshot is a pop-up that we show pretty early on in the game so we give away about 15 carbon impact points at the start of the game just for installing the game then about three to five sessions in we explain here is what carbon impact points are after you've learned the basics of the

game and here's what carbon input points are here's where you earn them here's the fact that we're partnered with this ecology service here's photos of the tree planting actioning process and it's realistic actual real-life photos not matching the animation in the game itself to further emphasize that this is something outside the game in the real world and then once you've actually acquired 30 carbon impact points and are ready to plant your first tree then it will walk you through a more detailed tutorial of taking you through here's where you play on the tree here's the animation that plays here's the real world impact part and then we have a little tool tip if you forget any of that stuff because players forget or rapidly tap through things and don't read that breaks it all down again and then we also have a button on the top left which is the global stats button which takes you directly to our ecology website where you can see all the trees planted by all of the Terra Genesis players overall

time which is about 540 000 so far and it also doubles as a referral link so we get extra trees if you sign up at based on that so everyone should go in and sign up they start on our referral link and then beyond the actual in-game stuff we emphasize it on our social pages so we did a big promotion on our social pages when we first introduced the feature then we give the players regular updates on how many trees they are planting via throughout the various stages we use memes because memes are fabulous on actually educating the player on how the feature works and engaging them with it and then my community I love my computer manager um had the genius idea of the treater board which is a leaderboard of trees we run a competition with our community every month or so that's a week-long and it's a competition for who can plant the most trees in a given week and it's a lot of fun we call it the treaty board and it's a great way to engage your

community and get them to really rally behind the future Okay so we've gotten our feature we've gotten all that right did we as Terra Genesis actually succeed in this whole idea of profit neutrality and leveraging our audience for social good well we planted a lot of trees at the very least which I'm very proud of even if we did massively fail in any other aspect which we didn't um yeah just having planted a huge number of trees it took us six months to plant 500 000 trees or so we slowed down towards the end as players adopted and were like okay this is cool we saw a large adoption at the beginning and then petered out a little bit over time but yeah that's an awesome achievement that I think and I'm really proud of the team for the whole feature but did it again actually gain us anything or did it actually hurt us in the overall picture so on the left you can see the pre-ecology stats on the right you can see the post ecology stats and the

overall speech on the left side there is the IAP and you can see that's only about a two to four percent increase it really isn't a huge amount not many people are actually breaking out their wallets and spending large sums of money on the ad side however we saw about a 10 to 15 percent uplift based on ad engagement and ads watch per Dau without cannibalizing our existing placement so it performed as an additive bonus and that's pretty awesome so my theory here now I have only gotten to test this enterogenesis so I haven't gotten to see more hardcore games we make about 50 of our money in ads 50 of our money in IAP so I want to test this in a more hardcore game that's more IAP driven but my theory is that people are more likely to spend their time than money on given charity features you're more likely to sign a petition that costs you Bank maybe five minutes to sign up for a petition to go bug the government and have someone else do something than you

are to actually spend your money on something and so that's something that I want to test in other games so if anyone ever does anything like this let me know but did we achieve net neutral profitability well to see that we need to run through the math so on average our users planned about one tree per two users a little bit more and it costs us 18 cents per tree so overall the cost per install is 10 cents so we can break it down on the right there we see the LTV that was an uplift just based on our ecology ad placements adds up to about nine cents or so and then on the IAP side again it's about two cents so fairly small on the IAP side but it gives us a one cent install margin uh that's profiting and that we mostly have for what's it called supporting the engineers who integrated the feature and our own maintenance costs for making sure that the whole feature runs smoothly and the community

support for it so it's not really profit so we did it yay um so what we've talked about is yeah we've managed to integrate a feature that benefits the overall world doesn't cost us money my CEO is not going to come and tell me to turn it off anytime soon that I know of um yeah it's pretty fantastic and so what I want you guys to leave here this presentation with is how to think about it on your end and how to integrate these sorts of things as well to think about what the cause is needs to be what your players care about not what you care about and you find that out via the survey or tying it to the theme of your game and then finding a partner that will work as a good custodian for your players money and time because again this is about your players money not your money and making sure that this feature is profit neutral so that you can do it over a prolonged period of time and

that's either deciding to do it on a limited time basis or a permanent basis and either making it to a monetizing feature or going purely for long-term LTV growth through retention and then finally just repeatedly messaging it to your player bashing them over the head with the fact that they are actually doing something good for the world not just having fun in a game although they are doing that as well and if you do all that you end up with doing a lot of good for the planet and benefiting not just your players who feel like they're doing great time your team because you are super motivated because you are doing something good for the world not just lining your own pockets and the world as a whole and yeah although if you do want to do something that's not profit neutral go for it I'm not going to stop you cool that's it I'm done anyone thank you thank you there are some mics here where you can shout really loudly if anyone has any questions

hi great talk thanks for um sharing your experience with the um yeah tree planting project no problem very excited about that um could you maybe talk about maybe the Quantified carbon emissions that are embedded in that number of trees planted was that part of um what ecology does do they measure that and I guess does that does that tree planting uh cover the emissions of players themselves uh okay so making sure that we're actually covering the emissions of the phones that are actually playing the game and generating this yeah so it's the reason I didn't talk a huge amount about specific carbon emissions is there's a lot of different stats in a lot of different areas so that's why I emphasize the reforestation part of it um it's hard to measure the exact amount of carbon emissions played by the game it's something I'm working on right now actually over the course of the next few weeks I'm trying to go in and see okay this is exactly how much time is being played this is how much the battery life would cost and so on

overall we do try and emphasize the I think one tree I'm trying to remember the stats off the top of my head it's some like 30 000 units of carbon emissions but it takes a little bit of time for them to reach maturity which is the problem of course one tree will end up planting five trees because they spawn out extra so I think It ultimately adds out to be neutral but that is something that you need to think about hello thank you for the talk so my question is about the part where you ask players a survey so does that I guess that means that it's something that you need to bake into your game to make it make sense uh like the charity that you want to give to and like how I'm not let me see if I can rephrase this question more clearly um how what if you can't think of a gameplay mechanic to match the thing

that you found in the survey that your players want to build charity to so in terms of how the survey works is you run an interstitial in the game that basically says hey guys we know you're playing the game we appreciate you playing the game thanks so much can you answer us a few simple questions to help us make your game experience better the same way you'd run a lot of different surveys you either do that via interstitial or you can throw it into an in-app message in an inbox if your game supports inboxes you can see this a lot in genshing Impact is constantly asking me to fill out surveys um yeah so that's how you do the survey side of things and you list out you can do pre-listed options of the causes or you can leave an other section as well at the end to let them write in their own cause in terms of and I mean remember if you don't have a gameplay mechanic that matches the

call as you want to support it depends how much you want to tie things together and what your game is so you could just do an IAP for example brawl Stars doesn't have any in-game mechanics really that support or that relate to wildfires too directly at least however they have a skin that they can re-theme to be related to the Australian wildfires or Australian themed and they can use that to tie the player's mind to okay this looks this is a koala koalas are from Australia it's supporting Australian wildfires so it's a clearer connection yeah so that's what you do you find sort of creative ways to work around the issue if you don't want to do a full gameplay uh aspect of it now first of all just congratulations half a million trees that's uh it's really amazing um I I was intrigued by your comment

about the non-monetary uh actions that uh perhaps we could incentivize players to participate in and just off the top of my head I'm thinking like flash mob protests uh you know plant a tree Yourself clean up a river take pictures but then I'm thinking that adds so much more uh you know verification and all that so I was just hoping you could speak a little bit more about that yeah so the non-monetizing aspects are a little bit more difficult we saw some increase in our long-term retention but there are a few things that happened around our UA that made me not want to throw that in the slides directly just to be very clear about the data and have very clear directions because it is a little bit more murky in overall aspects yeah it's a little bit more complicated the you need to judge basically long-term retention is your D30 is your D90 retention increasing and compare that with earlier cohorts and on top of that

you need to also make sure that your LTV isn't dropping as a result so it's possible that you introduce this feature it's great it's cool but people are stopping spending on other areas of the game and sure there or maybe they are sticking around longer but they're not actually monetizing the longer they stay in it's not actually benefiting you overall so those are the sort of things that you need to watch when you're doing the data analysis side of things I think you said something about flash mobs and real world impact of things that's a cool idea I didn't think about if you could somehow incentivize your players to come up with real things in the actual world to do I hadn't thought about that so I'm going to steal that idea later I think I am out of time but you can grab me afterward if you want to ask any more questions and bug me but yeah thanks all everyone for coming [Music] thank you