Grow Your Mobile Game Beyond Traditional Platforms

we are moving along looking at those conversations that really give you something you know something you take back with you maybe not to the office because we're work from home but taking back some insights and we continue we do not disappoint our next one coming up grow your mobile game beyond traditional platforms this is exciting because hey this is the time isn't it and we have for this talk we have mika luotillo i hope i didn't ruin that name mika director of business development europe at sola sola operates as a merchant and seller on record of record for major gaming entities including epic games and since the ruling in favor epic of course over apple who better to tell us this and uh tell us how we can grow our games beyond traditional platforms i think i will just leave it to you mika to take it away thank you uh and you totally pronounced my name correctly so

uh well done yeah yeah i got it uh i'm just gonna share my presentation here really quickly um yeah so uh hello everybody and and really hope that everybody's doing well today um that was really interesting interesting panel previously so uh a really great segue segway into different monasteries and strategies and that's why i'm here today so really talking about how to monetize your mobile games beyond the platforms which is a quite a hot topic these days with all the conversation going around um in the industry as a whole so we got only about 20 minutes today so i'm going to try to give you a little teaser on on on how the landscape looks like and what's possible today and kind of give a given opinion from our point of view what we're seeing from our partners doing so we see the whole mobile market obviously at dexal as a huge opportunity um and uh as as a veteran in the industry i've worked for for 16 years now myself so i

think it's a very exciting time to to to be actually living these days so yeah so talking about myself so um who am i um so i'm ecology i've worked like almost 16 years produced about 16 different games mobile games specifically anywhere from google rovio popcap little chocolate and etc so a bunch of mobile game publishers so um and today what i do uh at xoli i work as a director of business development for europe um and what that means is i'm looking after our partners here uh so i see everything our partners are doing all their interesting projects um and then i get to talk to a lot of interesting companies that are you know asking about our services and definitely the phone has been pretty hot the last couple of weeks i i can say that and a little bit about exo lap very quickly before i move on so xola has been operating in the video games took

over 15 years exo is basically a video game business transaction engine so we we focus on video games um solely and we operating over 99 countries with over 700 payment methods working with partners like roblox twitch epic ubisoft take two nexters nexon and much more pretty much over 1500 different companies um across different you know different platforms uh anything from mobile to to pc to uh console and online games and so forward so let's let's let's take a look into into uh the state of mobile game industry in uh 2021 uh which is which is really the interesting interesting um interesting topic i think for and i could go on for this for hours so i'm going to really try to convince myself here so what's happening

this year really if we look at the the the big change that has us overcome the mobile games industry has been definitely on the user acquisition side with the apple's att uh taking place which has triggered a 50 to 20 revenue drops on ios for some publishers i was reading from venturebeat um it was an interesting article so that has definitely made user acquisition harder and more expensive i think for for many while there are definitely ways to work around that and you know there's some really talented people in this conference as well talking about that uh from from what i've seen already um but you know ios advertisers generally experiencing a drop right so that's that's that's been a big difference user acquisition prices have always been on the rise more or less um and this didn't definitely help the situation so and and then we kind of go forward in the year and and we look at what's uh what what else has happened you know this whole uh apple versus epic uh case that's been

going on for a while now um uh kind of game came to some revelations this year so first of all there there uh was that was the latest latest conclusion where apple was ordered to allow the third-party payment processors and that that it would take into place in december uh while that sounds great it may take uh much longer than december for the app store to really open up because you know uh obviously uh it's not that straightforward right so it remains to be seen you know when and how actually the app store would open up for third-party payment providers such as sola and the other players in the industry it is an exciting exciting change definitely but i think one of the more exciting aspects that i've seen um i've seen actually recently you know this year came into the news was one of the kind of anti-competitive

um ruling from i think it was california california or something like that where they said that it is possible to basically apple allows you to contact your players about having um a store somewhere else outside of your gate so so that i think opens up interesting possibilities and and we've seen certainly some of our partners take action already and they're taking action in terms of finding uh monetizing strategies um that kind of use that new freedom while it's not direct uh going going uh outside of the the mobile platforms it's still a great way to uh get going and it's already yielding some great results to some of our partners and we've seen you know if you look at the uh if you've been following the the industry news you can see like you know supercell has their own web store as well and a few others out there some of our partners as well so people are definitely opening up these mobile web stores if you will

where players are able to basically purchase virtual virtual currency virtual items subscriptions and etc um to their favorite mobile game so allowing them to give more options for their players to choose the payment of payment methods that they like uh like the best and without having to stick with the ones that uh the mobile platforms offer so one of the interesting things i was looking at you know when i joined excel about a year ago i was very interested coming from mobile industries really wanting to understand like you know uh what what is the situation in terms of the payment method coverage with with the mobile platforms namely apple and google i i was quite impressed by the fact that xla had quite a lot of uh a lot of coverage in different regions so i kind of i talked to our payment team and i tried to understand like if i would be a mobile publisher like what sort of increase in coverage can i be looking at like what what's the potential ltv

improvement that i could have uh to my gain if if i would have support for more payment payment methods so one of the the key key kind of outcomes of that research that i've and the comparisons that we've done is we realized that there's there's a lot of gaps that that the current mobile platforms have in terms of payment while they cover international credit cards you know the popular e-wallets like paypal pretty well and etc they kind of you know there's a big luck in terms of alternative payment methods like local e-wallets local banks installment payments and other types of alternative payment methods that are not covered well and it actually as it turns out you know these alternative payment methods um can result into about like 60 difference in in some regions compared to the mobile platforms what they offer so for example in we're seeing in russia compared to the mobile platforms we have

a coverage of 60 increase compared to the mobile platform so and then latin america in general is about 40 increase in terms of uh the payment methods offered by the mobile platforms by default um and south korea is also about 40 percent europe actually 20 increase in coverage so one one thing to me is like it's reading this whole news that that there is this you know at least the direction is right you know where where uh governments and and regulatory uh organizations are like pushing to open these platforms up for for more choice for developers and one of the revelations for me is like i was looking at latin america like 40 percent russia 60 and i was realizing that wait a minute like you're telling me that my one of these games that i used to publish uh you know back at rovia or somewhere i could have theoretically had uh 40 60 better ltv in some of these territories

that are traditionally pretty low on tv and it turns out that that it's really an artificially created problem so something that i didn't realize because i was used to and i took the payment methods that the mobile platforms were offering as a kind of rule rule of that's the way how it is i didn't even know that i'm missing out on anything um so after doing this study i kind of realized that it's it's actually a very good thing that this topic is opening up um and and the you know direction is towards uh having having more choice for publishers and developers to choose the payment methods and payment providers they really want to use in order to get the best possible possible payment method coverage in those regions that they feel that they they want to have better coverage so that having that ability to choose i think is opening up um massive potential in terms of monetization a lot of people talk about like hey how can i avoid the platform

tax but you know platform tax i think it's just the tip of the iceberg you know if you shave off like i don't know 25 or something or 22 of your profits um uh and and and you make make that that much more profit per transaction more and that's still tip of the iceberg if you if you think about that the fact that um you know the mobile platforms don't support those alternative payments so i think that's the really exciting thing to look forward uh in the future especially not just the fact that you don't have to pay commission so much to the platforms you know that's obviously the topic that everybody talks about and everybody hopes for but i think there's a bigger benefit to to the industry as a whole to controlling the the payment methods that the players can choose you know you look at latin america a lot of people just don't simply have credit cards they don't have paypal so they use local alternative payment methods same in russia and and those are really fast growing markets and i think um

that's that makes it very exciting for me um just coming from my background and seeing our partners do really well in some of those regions so so what what's possible today you know that's the biggest question when i go into a call with you know a mobile publisher and they're they're asking me like you know how can i use axolotl to to improve my monetization um what can i do today you know there's there's obviously the question about mobile purchases but as i said before you know that's that's a waiting game you know there's at this point it's still uh waiting games so i have to wait and see well technically um even even uh we have xola we have uh an ios and android sdks ready to go um but it's still not there right so so we have to obviously wait for these platforms to you know open up uh and and that that's gonna happen in you know who knows three months six months eight months but definitely my best personal bet is probably sometime next year and

how exactly that's going to pan out remains to be seen so the kind of relevant topics of what you should what can you do today is what we're seeing from our partners in terms of in terms of really good roi and their efforts into kind of branching out their mobile games outside of the the kind of shackles of the mobile platforms um we're seeing with many of our partners taking their games from from mobile to web mobile to pc so essentially some of their you know especially core games when when you find out that you have a lot of players who play your mobile game using bluestacks or other type of desktop emulators you know that's a great telltale sign that you should possibly you should actually consider a a desktop version of your game obviously the roi is quite high so you need to know for sure that that um sorry the cost cost can be quite high to actually make a port for pc

make your mobile game into pc or or web version using webgl so there's there's a lot of work involved definitely so you need to know that your audience is going to be there so there's only a certain segment of games like that tend to be hardcore core games um uh that that uh you know had a good example of star trek star trek fleet command uh by scope play i think that's a good example they went for pc launcher just recently but that game is totally you know i actually i played it on i tried it out and it works really well on pc so no wonder right so so the audience was there and they wanted to play it on desktop why not and this allows you to monetize outside of apple of course because your game essentially becomes multi-platform today you go uh release a web or pc version of your mobile game and that way you you can control the the kind of uh there's no platform tax so you just have to find a playmate provider like xlr somebody else like that and uh essentially have them uh process the

payments to them um and uh yeah so i think that's that's one strategy that is definitely working and it works for us specific type of games you know people games that you know people like to play on desktop and the other other approach i would say um which i was already kind of mentioning about a little bit is the web shop or web store so this approach i think is interesting because you know if if apple says for example you're allowed to contact your players through email so so uh announcing that you have like some sort of web store or you know where you basically contain all the virtual items and virtual currency packs and everything so you can allow your mobile players to actually go and buy from the web store so i think that opens up already some interesting possibilities to monetize and i'll talk about it uh in this slide so basically uh the setup that we're seeing from some of our partners and and being really

good in terms of return of investment and roi um is definitely this webshop approach so many of them are who were previously considering like yeah let's make a pc person they they've actually tried out web web creating web shop and that seems to be uh you know enough and doing good results and we've even seen one project that we are working with with a partner that has actually a web shop and it's been live for about six months and the web shop is producing more revenue than the mobile version of the game so they've actually pretty much successfully transitioned um most of the monetization to web shop where they are making you know uh easily over 20 more profit for each transaction they have better coverage in different markets or their ltv is generally higher globally so they're they're really winning there so so this is not just like a random schema that i'm saying it's actually what we've seen so the interesting part here is

essentially what the webshop is is really replicating your in-game store into a mobile responsive website and when you when you actually do this so so you can actually have players going to a mobile responsive website either from desktop or directly from their mobile browser and when they get in there obviously they can log in using a facebook on dedication or user id or something user login system um that you may have um and once they've logged in there they can actually purchase these items that they would normally see in the game they can see their inventory they can see what is their virtual currency balance um and you know the exciting part here is that this also allows the fact that you're you're making more profits uh there than you're making on on on the mobile platforms it allows you to also get a little bit more um wiggle room in terms of um

in terms of having uh more enticing special offers so what what i've seen is one partner who actually um they decided to do you know basically a mobile responsive web store which contains all the items and also web exclusive offers so that they're like bundles that are better priced and people get more for the same money and i've seen this this particular publisher how they were actually directing players into this webshop they were essentially showing in-game interstitials that were promoting some of these special offers limited time offers and and special offer bundles with that were disco discounted more heavily because you know the publisher making more profit in the web they can actually give better offers so they were targeting really they started that by targeting like a very narrow high ltv group of players within the game and showing those high ltv players interstitials about hey check out our

webstore you know we have cool offers there and this actually proved to be really good in terms of results so this particular project actually then you know a few months later afterwards surpassed uh their mobile revenue uh so the web store is making more money than their mobile version and they kind of expanded the the funnel seems and um what's happened is um they uh they're seeing still great success even if they're targeting a larger array of people using the in-game interstitials now obviously you can do what apple said is like what was stated before with the apple uh apple ruling and the california part uh that you can contact your players by emails but emails as we know you can't really attribute the traffic and uh it's not that effective right so and many publishers just do not have email addresses of their players right um so so that can be the case so what are the tools that you can use for this so you can use

you know obviously in-game interstitials uh if you have like uh some sort of a game blog that's even in the inside the game of course you can advertise your your web store why not um if you have game forums you can use that to actually gather that and ultimately like when you're targeting you know really high ltv player cohorts um when they're happy those people they usually create a good word of mouth anyway so you will start seeing organic traffic and people will religiously go in there especially if you're doing timed offers that are changing you know almost on a daily basis people will kind of go and check out the great value offers there and they will monetize through there so if you if you use this the right way what you can also do is if you if you look at some of the regions where maybe your ltv has been artificially low because of the mobile the the how how uh the mobile platforms do not support some of the alternative payment methods in places like latin america russia emerging markets basically um

so what we're seeing is some of our partners are doing tests they're basically setting up a web shop just for brazil and they're one of their games and their hypothesis that they want to target you know the brazilian players they want to tell their brazilian players that they have now a brazilian web store um that's fully localized in local pricing and everything and the experience for the brazilian players is that uh they're they're seeing this with also the payment methods that they like to use because as i said you know in in south america many of uh there's a lot of uh players that you know just do not use credit card for for microtransactions they use uh things that are pretty strange for us in the west like bank installment payments they use direct uh bank application um bullet deponcary or for example in brazil so you know this hypothesis is interesting because they're they're seeing a greatly increased ltv growth also because of that in that region so and this is

simply to do the fact that you know they chose a partner for payments there who has a really good coverage in that region um you know better coverage than apple and google has so i think that you know those kind of monetization strategies and tests i think is is really interesting because this allows you to kind of um not only figure out if this in in general if it's a good idea but also if it could be a way to improve your ltv in specific regions where it's being artificially low um because of the limited payment methods that you have that the players have uh to through the modern platforms um yeah so uh that's pretty much pretty much it actually from my point of view i'm actually really eager to hear um any questions at this stage and really thank you for listening it's only 20 minutes i wish i could talk more there's way more to this i'm happy to do an offline meeting with anybody listening here who wants to learn more i

can show some case studies that i couldn't show here thanks mika that was really interesting i think it is disruptive from what i can tell here because we have some questions about people saying okay great you know how do i set up a store um so so people are thinking about this one question and i think it's a good one to start with is do you recommend because part of this is having the web shop let's just start with that do you recommend that developers publishers build their own shop or what do you do if you're a small company what do you think about something like um setting up a store on saw on software like steam for example yeah i think uh in terms of uh if you're talking about mobile and web shop i think the really good way to measure it if you have a game that is already at scale um so definitely for new games i i think like you got to go mobile first and you got

to prove your success there if you have a game that's really proved your success on mobile first then uh and you're kind of hitting a ceiling maybe in user acquisition in other levels and you want to find more ways for that game to grow i think the obvious obvious experiment that i would i would ask is like is my game going to increase the ltv if i open up regions that i couldn't monetize before am i going to see improved traffic um if i'm allowing uh these people from these regions that i haven't been able to reach before uh start monetizing suddenly and and then obvious obvious thing is you can also look at it from a question that what kind of special offers can i offer to my players if i'm making a significant amount of more profit per transaction myself so all these questions i think is something that you should ask yourself um especially if you have a game that's at a large scale

yeah you explore some of those workarounds you had for example you said okay if you have uh do you get email addresses lucky you but there are ways to uh to work around that and one of them i was picking up on was you know if you just have these amazing timed offers that people word of mouth will spread and it'll sort of be literally billed and they will come that's one way you want to just review a couple of those work arounds because again you want people to come to the shop but you don't always have their email address but there are other smart ways of getting them to come in yeah and most you know this i think the most effective way that i've seen from our partners is just me looking at the the results from our partners um is definitely like promoting um your your let's say a web store for your mobile game uh promoting it in some way in game and that means like whether it's an in-game blog or news sticker or in-game interstitials the decision really is up to you

but when you contact those people and you target the the right type of people you target obviously the high ltv players first which which will be more interested in compelling uh special offers that maybe you know the price is better than they would normally get on mobile maybe they get like 10 more virtual currency if they buy it from the web um so this kind of uh these kind of approaches i think um i encourage a lot of experimenting um especially during these times when things are truly opening up uh i think if you start experimenting now you will have a much better knowledge of what can you do when and if uh the app stores uh truly open up for direct third-party payments and uh somebody wants an update on this and i'm not so clear about this myself so i'll ask you mika you'll know it um are developers already able to utilize third-party payment solutions in ios or is that pending legal appeals etc so

where are we on that yeah so i see i see uh ourselves like kind of like switzerland here we're providing the tools and the processing for the money uh but actually we don't really have uh we don't make formal recommendations because we're just enabling what you want to do but what we also do is we try to educate people so we try to educate industry that's why i'm here and i think that the number one thing that i how i'm interpreting it is that the 90 days kind of deadline was initially given and that would be in december so my feeling is that we will hear more in december personally thinking like i'm sure that there are million ways to slow that process of opening up for example apple apps or down if apple wants to of course they can do that and there's many ways they can do that so that's also a scenario where you know even though december sounds really exciting it could

easily take longer than that and also how it's going to happen i think is the big question like obviously apple has intrinsic and google has intrinsic value in the fact that they can feature apps you can search the apps on the app store so i think it's it's it's it's really right to say that they are due to some commission they they they definitely should be paid out on some of that because that helps uh developers and publishers a lot but 30 i think uh that i think the public public opinion is that that's too high right and that's why this whole conversation is happening so the question is how it's going to happen and how much is the ask going to be uh in the end of the day because the process of how this opens up the third party payment methods can be controlled obviously by the owners of these platforms and i'm sure they will find and at least try to control it in in different ways so

wait until december that's that's what i'm doing uh we'll probably learn more then but technically it's possible technically you can do it obviously if you do it um the likelihood that your app gets banned can happen so that's just the reality uh even if it's technically possible now but sometimes you just want to challenge it and see is is what i'm hearing here um probably would make a very popular we won't say it on the record but it probably wouldn't be a very popular discussion out there if uh another developer sort of um took this a bit higher up or a bit more out to the community and speaking of the community you've got a question here where people do absolutely get that you know third party solutions are more effective in certain territories because hey guess what there are regions where the credit card you know is not the way that payments are made and you pointed that out in latin america and we knew that for ages because you know i remember um uh even earlier in the day and it was what would use operator platforms for

payments who pays and how do they pay someone wants to know how much more efficient it is to use a non-apple solution so trying to maybe put some metrics or some framework around that because it is smarter and it makes sense in some regions but let's talk about that efficiency for a moment yeah i think the efficiency that we are seeing you know with big partners like fortnite roadblocks and etc what we're seeing is that when you talk about con conversion and usually that's the first kpi of efficiency in any kind of payment transactions right so when players see um essentially what what we do for example excel we give you a preset of the most popular payment methods that we are seeing in that country from all our games so we are giving the players a pre-select of the most popular payment methods in their region or in their country and we find that this is a very very effective way to you know for conversion that people

actually end up paying ultimately after they see the payment window because they have more convenience uh it is really if you if you go to a cash only restaurant um and you see a big cash only sign there and even if the food looks appealing you might just not have cash on you that might might not be convenient for you so i think the the the fact that we're using our big data to understand what are the popular payment methods we are seeing great results our partners are seeing great results definitely so i think that the also the control is deeper so essentially you can also control and customize which payment methods you want to show certain regions and countries and that's something that the mobile platforms don't offer so if you know particularly that your players in this country really love this payment method you can put it as number one options so they it's the first one they see and they want to pay and and and you have basically that way you have more control over the efficiency as well so this is something that we are you

know obviously we it's an ever-evolving landscape because people there's new payment methods that come out they become extremely popular overnight or very in a very short time and sometimes in a long period of time and we're just looking at these trends and we are adapting um the kind of recommended popular payment methods uh for each country based on that and i think that is by default more effective than what the what many of the the platforms currently have because they simply do not have those conveniency options of alternative payment methods uh they don't you know necessarily upset you know bitcoin in some cases and you know there's there's a lot of um i think the fragmentation in terms of payment everything is digital in this world and it's going fast even more deeper on that set and and it's getting more complex so there are more complex payment solutions for people to pay things with and uh i

think the important part is that we are by our philosophy we want to cover all of it we want to be there and basically have all the options especially the popular ones for each country and i think that is efficient by default as a philosophy and also excellent point because it's about the experience we talk about the experience this is part of the experience this is even part of the targeting as you pointed out understanding not only your high ltv customers but how do they want to pay and making that you know remove the friction just make it simple makes perfect sense and i think you get the award for the best quote and takeaway of the session this afternoon uh you know high five for calling yourself the switzerland thanks as you will be remembered great discussion mika i would love to continue to offline in fact i think i will with you but i have to let you go because we

want to come up to the panel now to put all of this together and just digest all of this wisdom so thanks again mika thank you very much