How to train consumers to use webstores | David Stelzer from Xsolla #PGConnects

[Music] we are back at po gaming connects London 2025 this time and we are starting the day off with David stza from exola how are you doing doing very well thank you for having me fantastic we spoke last time you had just come from a talk you were talking about web stores and everything that goes with them we'll kick off with the standard what is it exola does just for those who aren't familiar sure sure sure I think uh I've been here about a little over a year now and I think I have this a bit more refined in terms of the way we talk about it uh so people used to really think about us as the payments company and I think we've grown far beyond what is the payments company now and the way I like to position ourselves is we're the payments company but we're also the monetization company and so when when we talk about things we're the monetization company and what do we do we help game developers and Publishers make more money with their products and then we help them keep more of that money that they make gotcha well we actually talked

about the potential of web shops last year you were doing the talk of it as I say since that's happened we've had the European digital markets act which has come in to kind of prevent this sort of monopolization the idea of two huge web stores dominating the marketplace what's your reaction to that because it's reinforced your position I guess yeah it's been great because as that has come into effect it's really legitimized uh the business around what a web shop is and the fact that it can be done it was always talked about and it was a way to kind of do a workaround from the stores now it's a legitimate way to actually do business and we've seen an amazing uptick i' upwards of about 30% an increase on income for Publishers and developers by working with web shops as a long as uh instead of just working standard with the Google Apple and the other stores that they're bound to now is that just because of the maybe the less commission you don't have to pay that section to Apple or Google play or whatever is that purely where the Reven come from or is it to do with other things like discoverability it's a

little bit of both uh the discoverability definitely helps you have to remember that this is now all of a sudden you're able to have a direct to Consumer relationship with your end user where before you would put up an offer into the store in Apple or Google if somebody wanted to buy something they got whatever that offer was but you didn't really get to kind of collect that data and have that communication with them now you can actually put campaigns through your web shop and you can test those campaigns and see what's doing better and how you're consumers react and you can figure out how to give the consumer more value than what they would have gotten had they been in the standard shops and by giving them more value you hope that you've trained them to do more of their transacting in this web location and the more transacting that happens in the web location the less that you're paying that additional 30% tax to Apple and Google and the more money that you're able to keep from what you make so it really is about incentivizing the end user because the incentives for yourselves and the developers platform holders are kind of

clear there's an obvious Financial one but there's also the data that comes with it so is it really about targeting the offers directly to the consumers and that's where the value lies for them what what's the the benefit that they see from using your store so for the consumer it's it's really been this training type of thing right what we do is we we've had to really train over this last year that you're going to play on your mobile device which you're going to pay on the web and that behavior pattern has brought them to this place of yeah yeah yeah this is where I play but if I want to get the most value so that I can play longer and I can pay less then I'm going to go over here to the web and that's where I'm going to get the best offers so it's a value proposition of of and this change of behavior this mental change of like yeah I don't have to do my transacting in the middle of my playing I'm going to move over somewhere else and yes it's an extra step but I'm going to get so much more for doing it and that extra value keeps them coming back again and again do you see a future where this leads to people pulling their games or their apps

from those large main stores entirely and relying exclusively on web shops or is it always going to be a hybrid situation I mean it really depends on uh what the future of of those stores hold or alternative stores that pop up uh there would be questions around will it be easier to do a web-based distribution um I don't think that that's the near term but that's something that you could see uh my web shop is directing you to the game you like to play but hey also here's some other things that maybe you didn't discover and here's how you can get them if you can make it easy and put less friction in it where it's not hard like side loading still is uh then maybe you'll get to that point eventually but I think still the easiest way to get the game distributed to you and onto your device is through the app stores where do you see this going when in other territories so let's say the us cuz the idea of alternative payment methods and web stores is a very familiar Concept in the Eastern Main region and places like

that much more so than it is in in Europe exclusively and where we're all just standard conditioned to go to Google Play Let say um things are changing legally in the US as well do you think there's a shift towards this kind of thing over over there oh absolutely uh we're seeing growth po like incredible growth in this area altogether in the last year we've helped onboard over 400 web stores uh and those web stores are doing incredibly well and we don't see this process slowing down and once kind of this is kicked in 100% once everybody's kind of adopted this idea and we've got a proliferation of web stores there do you think that's going to cause more friction more problems with the consumer because at the moment maybe there's a couple there's only a few they're dealing with if the consumer has to go to a different store for every single game that they play is that not going to cause a different kind of issue I don't think it's going to be a different store for every game because we still have a lot of consolidation right where a publisher May hold you know 10 different games that people are playing

and that's not really taking you to 10 different web stores so it may take you to the EA web store and on that EA web store you can just go into the game that you want from their Library so I don't think that that's the issue I think the big thing you're going to see is how does uh how does UA and attribution start to change over time is how do you start to push that through your web store funnel uh along with your traditional store funnel and figure out what is doing better for you and how gotcha and when it comes to new things on the horizon 2025 we're at the beginning of the year it's we only just started we're fresh what do you have in mind going forward are there new initiatives you're planning to launch or things you've got to roll out I mean that whole funnel that I'm just talking about I think is going to be really important we have a a new integration with apps flyer okay and we think that having apps flyer is an MMP that's kind of built into the system of what we build for web shops is going to be a real strong way for the Publishers and the developers to more smartly spend

money into those web shop UA funnels they'll start to see the effectiveness of them as they see how effective they can really be they'll start to push more money into them and so I think you'll see web shops growing bigger and bigger as the attribution methods become more uh solidified also [Music]