Growing Your Audience in Alternative App Stores

um on to something uh slightly different now um we are the in uh alternative app stores behind beyond kind of the google and apple um are another more important feature of the modern marketplace um hardware vendors and various other partners are kind of creating their own specific stores and there's more and more opportunities for you to to reach audiences in a different way um and we're going to be talking about that specific situation uh now with uh pedro dennis or denise is it what is what is it how should i pronounce it it's closed so yes um you're here to talk about alternative app stores and how you can work with uh with catapults taking advantage of them right is that that's the gist yeah that's correct that's correct well um don't worry we're a little bit behind but but

that's fine we've got exactly 10 minutes behind but you'll get your full time for talks and and questions after so don't forget to rush or anything so just whenever you're ready to launch in i'm going to disappear into the background and i'll come back with questions at the end if that's okay are you uh are you all good to go yep can you see my screen already it says growth that's just beautiful like growth where are you pedro i didn't i didn't ask you i was very remiss of me where are you portugal lisbon oh another country today fantastic beautiful lisbon beautiful it is it is all right so we've been we've been spain island uh shanghai and now uh we're in lisbon in portugal so over to you pedro the stage is yours yeah thanks chris um and yeah just keeping on the on the growth topic and obviously no matter what being a small developer or a big publisher eventually it becomes a topic of your day-to-day strategy and operations and that's no no different from us trying to move my slides but just

okay it's not too different from us but whereas 99 of businesses in the mobile gaming space are all focusing on the two main channels we decided to focus on less competitive markets looking for opportunities other than google play and and ios and right now it's been representing for us close to 20 billion downloads a year opportunity and this is exactly the the alternative app stores and that's you know what i'm talking about today how to grow on these alternative app stores and essentially sharing with you our experience uh on dealing with alternative app stores and some data points and decides about the market as well as some use case scenario some cases and real real cases that we are working on and what is what is catapult catapult is a distribution and the publishing partner for alternative app

stores and we have been helping developers and other publishers to distribute and scale on these channels we essentially partner with with developers on a distribution oracle publishing business model taking their game their google play game their android version publishing it and distributing it in in these channels and when we started we faced a very big challenge of trying to work with all of these app stores simultaneously so having to integrate you know several sdks having several apks to maintain for for every single store and it became a nightmare very very fast and not only it's it's a lot of fork but uh working with with these channels it's been improving but uh it wasn't always the easiest task and and that's the challenge we we focused on solving because one alternative app store individually

doesn't represent that big of an opportunity but all of them combined can can unlock a very interesting potential audience to reach and our solution is is simply a technology that allows you to distribute your games to all these channels with a single integration single apk control everything on uh on one console and making at least the operation is easier on your date today and that's you know that's the the first the first insight that i want to share that this is you either get a partner or i or someone um unfortunately this isn't a growth strategy that can be managed in in autopilot um and i will show you why in a minute but the idea of getting your game in just more stores and start getting some traction without either the time or the investment is is unfortunately unrealistic there are no shortcuts and this will require time knowledge and and some investment at least

obviously the the follow-up question is whether it's worth it or not um and at least what we have been seeing is um a big growth year on year in the number of downloads as well as users from these channels um so we ended up 2020 with close to 20 billion downloads across all the apps that we work with and all the channels and what we can see from the early numbers of 2021 is that it's not slowing down so the market is growing already representing a good share of the android users and given the the investment of the the oems in their own stores it's very likely that um you know they will keep this momentum and take some share uh in the android market as well and obviously this grows throughout the years this is relevant to two things one is obviously more and more stores

getting into the market as well as taking some some share from the android market and two is we are starting working with more and more developers and distributing more apps and essentially this will organically generate more downloads but um when it comes to uh to where these tunnels are coming from um currently we are seeing a lot of traffic being generated from india south east asia or asia in general that's definitely the region there is more that is represented the most um but it's also growing a lot and portuguese and spanish-speaking countries um but a very interesting uh behavior that we we have been seeing so far is also the increase in penetration in this tier one markets so united states uk germany europe in general um in the last few years we have been seeing a relative growth on all of these

countries which all of a sudden at least makes it more appealing from a revenue perspective because obviously it was very easy for us to generate some some downloads but sometimes it wasn't that easy to gain the the revenue traction that we want to generate growth and because of it because of this the split of revenue per country has been changing slightly we work a lot on having localized payment solutions so that users from countries which struggle to make transactions on google play have at least an alternate an alternative solution to download the the the games that they want to play um and because of this uh plus the huge number of traffic from tier one and tier three markets um we used to see for a different split that we that i'm showing here in this slide but the united states has been growing uh significantly and obviously getting the the place number one uh from the country that generate more revenue with us

at the moment um followed by a lot of countries from from from europe normally um and that's the the insight number two that i wanted to share is there's a lot of growth potential in in southeast asia in the asia in general um but also it's becoming very very interesting uh from an opportunity perspective in tier one markets um as well as well united states and europe in general now when when it comes to your way in marketing so the obviously that's a very a very important part of our strategy you know once we have a new game to distribute what we'll start doing is cooperate with with all the alternative channels that we work with um to to essentially start promoting the the the games that to work on and start to scale it up on these channels and it's definitely an interesting experience because a lot of these stores obviously is they are not as developed as

the as ios and google play um so 90 of them still run on direct deals um so you won't be able to buy traffic programmatically um and what this means is you know cpi's ended up being very predictable but operationally it's an extra effort obviously it's very demanding to run and manage all these campaigns um on a direct deal basis and it's uh also makes it you know very interesting opportunity for games to potentially acquire valuable users at the lower cost but also challenging for games which rely on very low cpis and just to exemplify this is we have been seeing this behavior across a lot of different games uh that we are working on um obviously audience segmentation is just one possible variable of the cpi but thinking taking it as an example and two

different game genres with different ua profiles one with narrow audience and tendency for ircpi another with low cpi and broad audience when we try to scale these on alternative channels the scenario we find is that since we are working on the on a basis on a direct deals basis our range of possible cpi's tends to be smaller uh so which is a good opportunity for some but a challenge for others for games that for these games that usually ciu cpis it becomes an interesting opportunity to get cheaper valuable users um as you won't be seeing as high cpi's as you would see programmatically but on the other hand for games that rely on lore cpis it's you know uh and i various factors it becomes a challenge and they need to approach it very smartly and there are some interesting strategies that that can be applied one interesting behavior we have been

noticing is what follows after either pausing or reducing spend on these channels and this is a short visualization of the daily new users for one game that we are currently co-publishing and what we have been noticing is that it's easier to sustain the level of organic downloads after the initial push because obviously there is way less competition than in google play store so having less competitors to worry about trying to get on our spot in the in the shards it becomes easier to at least maintain it and get this level of organic download stable throughout a longer period of time and being able to play with these factors makes it possible to have great margins on the investment once you know once you are able to sustain a good number of organic downloads even if at an early stage you are running on a low return on ad spend if the game has

a solid arpu then you will be able to at least play around with it and eventually on the long term it might be able to get you some very good very good return on on the the money that you spend trying to acquire these users on these channels and that's that's one of that thing said about the this topic you know challenging force well i said hyper casual but challenging for games that rely on on on lower cpi's uh than uh than average but can be very favorable for games with with solid arpu and obviously showing some of these visualizations it it might um pass the the idea that it's very easy to uh to gain some traction but uh i don't want to sound to make it sound that way uh it's very easy to achieve great results because in sometimes or in some cases it can take it can take time

um this is just an example of a game which took us some time to gain traction and we started working together like two years ago though so a lot of things changed since then because um a couple of years ago there was a lot of bureaucracy working with this alternative channels operationally was way more complex than what it is today um and also some of the the stores back in the days didn't even have any any way to run some campaigns um so it was definitely either to at least getting this momentum of growth um and it used to take way more time than we are able to to do it in today so just be patient sometimes um it's not always easy to to gain the traction you you are looking for in these channels and because of this experience we had with with these games in the past while trying to scale them um we had to come up with some growth

act strategy to leverage and that's essentially just using content and influencers um so we have our own platform so aptoide so catapult is a distribution company we are in the same group and essentially aptoide is an alternative app store which is which is currently seeing around 350 million users per year 10 billion downloads per year and close to 1 million of different apps and games um and obviously this is a very piece of of the puzzle for for our strategy trying to grow these games on these stores because our platform allows us to gain this early traction by doing some localized articles about the games you distribute so whenever we have a new game we start producing this regular content on our store and normally what we see is that engagement is very good so this is definitely at least a

low-cost way to start you know getting in touch with the users and trying to engage with them and getting them to play the game and see how it looks and as a follow-up uh what uh what we do is pair it with our influences program whereby we partner with several content producers mainly from from youtube to create content for the games for the games we publish normally when we search for content creators that are already producing uh videos from the games that we work on um partnering with them then on a regular schedule of releases for four videos and we also have this bonus game that then creates so essentially the the influencer himself is able to get some some reward from the the users who download our game so obviously this creates just a loop to sustain and make this this growth go on

um and with this strategy our most success case has been lord's mobile which has been growing very rapidly with us and you know when compared to google play this is it's already some some older data from last year but um by the middle of last year we were already able to at least reach 25 close to 25 percent of the google play google play revenues um and this was very interesting for us because we were growing on markets where the game wasn't present still so it was the game was trying to grow in some specific regions we were helping them and at least reaching audience that they weren't able to reach um and we were able to at least see some very nice numbers you know mother month and currently what we have been seeing is sustainable growth um across all the stores that we are partnering with

and that brings us to the last question you know when we when you you grow this rapidly on alternative app stores you have to wonder whether it is incremental revenue or if you are cannibalizing your google play traffic um and what what we found out is when comparing the google play data since we started working with lars mobile is that the revenue and download numbers from google play didn't see any negative impact so revenue kept stable donald's kept stable why we why we were able to grow on on the alternative app stores which was great and uh making it a very very interesting new stream of incremental revenue um so this is this is our last insight um and essentially what uh what i wanted just to just to wrap it up is

uh just taking this this two three notes which is you know it's not always easy to work with these alternative app stores um sometimes it can take it can take time to get some growth to at least get some traction but it eventually just becomes a very interesting new stream of revenue sustainable and it what we have been noticing is definitely that from these channels games are able to at least reach audiences which are which they wouldn't uh just keeping them being distributed on google play so obviously this makes it grow more just globally than when compared with a single android store only so hopefully uh this was um hopefully this is get you some better better views on how to work with with all of these channels uh open to any question if you guys have any uh hello there hello hello i'm chris i'm back and i've got i'm gonna try and uh and

manage a number of questions that have kind of come in uh it's about six or seven some of them i think you might have covered but i'll try and try and uh try and get through those that was great uh pedro that's really uh really interesting i was busily noting things down as you were going there thanks for sharing uh for being so open and sharing so much data and and specific cases it always kind of helps when it's you've got actual kind of uh numbers and specific cases and yeah it's as i said in my little brief intro as you were coming into the room i i it's it's a rapidly kind of growing um growing space and and and hardly surprisingly well one question i'm going to leap on related to that in the middle of these questions straight away obviously in china which is a huge market and has its own rules and stuff third-party android stores are are you know the dominant distribution platform because partly because well largely because google play you know he's effectively uh banned there but do you think we could ever see that sort of flip occur in other markets you know i'm not

sure when you know obviously ios and google play are very dominant but do you think you could ever foresee a time where there's the third party still start to really kind of challenge yeah i mean it's definitely obviously it's very speculative right but um again i think that i mentioned this but uh we have been noticing a big investment from oems on their own stores yeah and again with huawei an app gallery ditching google play services so it's already a sign right so at least they are making the steps in that direction uh we have been noticing the number of users growing in countries which they weren't there two years ago uh so number users from united states have been growing very rapidly yes so outside the asia has been growing very differently so although it's it's maintaining or the biggest market still asia asia i think that uh in the next few years we will definitely see growth in america europe um the question is whether it will be able

to take a significant share of the market from from android and eventually compete with ios that's a definitely a very good question but but the growth is uh um so i've got a question here i think you've probably covered this but you've sort of mentioned a bit let's just get to it what we're talking is a you know there are a lot of different um kinds of of third-party stores for different reasons from different people uh presumably is the oems that the huawei and the samsung's are leading or not are there other are there other kind of what other types of of um of sort meaning how many of how many they're out there and what other types of stores should people can consider yeah there are a few which is very interesting obviously um some of them rely on their their the you know their phone sales to to grow right so because they they selling their their phones they will be able to get into uh to a bigger market but also there are some stores which are very localized for example you have one we have cafe bazaar which just distribute for for people from iran

uh which obviously struggled to get content from from a google play um you have oppo so which is very popular in india vivo as well so there's a currently a very big list um i would definitely uh pay close attention to xiaomi huawei opu vivo and eventually yeah no fair enough um and i don't know if you said this i did i i was i was i was making notes so i might have missed it is there any uh any sort of rough scale at the moment or a percentage of how how these alternate app stores you can compare like are we talking about you know four or five percent of the the global market or is it i guess it will change obviously in china it's very different from place to place is there is an idea of sort of scale currently where we're at so that's one of the the challenges that we face today which is you know getting some data from this from these channels is very

it's very very difficult um so what we use what we do is obviously since we distribute across all of them we can kind of extrapolate um i mean but uh obviously just throwing out some some very rough numbers 10 15 20 best best-case scenario of android market share i guess eventually that's already a stretch but uh um obviously when we tried to extrapolate i would i would see this at least as of as a very rough number okay well that's i mean that's similar again it's it's it is considerable i mean that you know the this this is overall markets are multi-billions now um there's a question here which i don't know if you know but i'm because is there is there a uh i don't you might not know this but i'm gonna throw it to any way is there a best store uh for for startups in mina to talk to in the meaner market are there particular stores focused on in in uh the middle east market do you have insight into that you can say no if you don't don't worry

uh no no so that's the thing so there's there's definitely i'm missing the the name because you know that they are actually there are a few um but one or two might be they are relevant uh so if this is someone that is actually looking to grow on this market um feel free to i don't know if uh chris if there's a way to share my email but i feel free to reach me yeah yeah people can't just yeah if you can you can uh give it to us we'll type it in here if you're happy to to show specifically with them um if they can come they can probably come and grab you afterwards um after the after the after the talk i've now brilliantly answered that question so i can't speak to him directly but yeah if if that person either wants to email me or direct message me we can we can connect you and they and and pedro can assist you with that um okey dokey um uh slightly i don't know there's a question here from susannah lofrin who said would you suggest this for hype that she's a casual developer i guess is this is this space particularly useful for hyper casual um so it's definitely it's very

challenging is obviously i guess that uh in one end is way less competitive than google play obviously um but uh with hyper casual we will be relying obviously on on the virality of your game you'll be relying on the lower cpi uh and that's that's the basis which is very very hard to work on on these alternative channels so if the focus is hyper casual i would definitely keep focusing on ios and google play um other than just you know it's much more pure scale yeah there's no game there right yeah but i guess you know the the more the merrier one of the questions um i had which wasn't raised here but i i i maybe you've answered it again i apologize because i said i try and always chris but was with the um what's the kind of overhead for for developers well we used to work with um with samsung load projects when they were doing bada and tizen and try and work help help with the developer onboarding a little bit not not in the same way as you as you were not that sort of business but but we i know at the time one of the issues was it was quite and i think you

might mention this it was a little bit fiddly to do that is it is it much lighter now for developers to kind of get involved in this or is it all you know obviously a company like yours makes it easier i guess is that the way to do it um you know it's not well it it's slightly lighter but it's still operationally is very very heavy uh for for developers that's why you you are seeing or we are seeing a lot of different solutions to help you access all these channels simultaneously so that's exactly what catapults focus on right trying to at least getting easier to to reach uh to reach this all these channels yeah okay okay no and no that's fine and um uh yeah you've kind of mentioned the different stores already uh we've done that i i i think you've is that are there any i guess one of the things that you know you're talking about one of the benefits of this is because it's that they're less saturated spaces and and i guess these developers are these uh

platforms are often looking to to offer special you know to have you know special content for the users are there have you got experience of doing specific offers uh you know within for certain uh uh certain of these stores like i know offering extra in-game items or or all the um you know the the store owner the the sort of the uh absorber subsidizing some interesting uh interesting kind of uh offers for for consumers i i think there was talk of various in-game like you know five dollars in game and all this sort of stuff uh in the past is that is that still happening uh you see some of the stores you know working on that basis not that many um so app gallery eventually obviously it also depends of the the scale of the game that you you are working on right if you already have some numbers from google play and we are now looking to to uh scale it on other channels you'll be able to obviously build the business case to get some

eventually a very nice integration fee for for this for these channels but other than app gallery um from from away i'm not seeing this being done on a very you know regular basis yeah okay okay i think we'll probably we've just about time so under there if you can direct message me in the chat your um your email we probably got it somewhere but i can share it with the the gentleman here and you guys can connect separately about some specific questions um but uh obviously feel free if you want to share with everybody you can do that as well i don't know how oh you have fine fair enough you're much some people don't like that but you've done it um okay so oh that's nice to me that is to me right that's fine um all right well thank you so much uh pedro um obviously if you are looking at app stores um catapult are kind of one-stop shop a place to go to you should go and definitely talk to them obviously as demonstrated just now uh this guy knows he knows his onions he knows where the bodies are buried and uh he these are the people to talk to um and it sounds like a fascinating opportunity so so do

spend the rest of the week uh getting in touch with uh with pedro and other members of the catapult team and uh yeah and good luck on that note i'm gonna send you into digital ether and move on thank you very much