How Will you Create More Value for Your Users in 2024 - Jan Kuhlmann, Xsolla.

[Music] [Music] [Music] hello everyone thank you for coming out thank you for joining this session I'm going to talk about a lot on web shops or other call it web stores and yeah my name is Yan I'm a business development manager at ex solar and I hope I can

give you some of the answers to how you're going to create value for your users in 2024 it's a pleasure and and awesome to be back at Pocket Gamer connects I I just love this event and the atmosphere around so it's great and yeah more people coming in great I know half of them okay cool all right um let's dive into the topic so today the industry is facing a couple of challenges so we took five of the challenges that the mobile game developers May face today one is the effectiveness and the cost of user acquisition this became more complicated over the past years then it's also about finding new growth opportunities for your businesses to strive and third one is you're facing High platform fees moreover it became pretty apparent

over the last I would say two decades almost that owning data is such an important Source in order to understand your players understand the behavior and grow your business overall and more and more games coming up so there's a growing competition within the market mobile games Market declined according to data AI on the consumer spending Side by 2% in 2023 uh we are in a post idfa and at era and there are regulatory shifts within the yeah within the Frameworks whether this is the dma in the European Union or in the US and so forth and this yields the opportunity to take advantage of those changes moreover we all or you all have been in a situation that there is always a reseller between you as a developer and your player base and this has even

been due for the past like when physical shipping and physical game distribution was a thing there was always a reseller like GameStop in between but broadly what we have seen in entertainment is that companies go more direct to their consumers whether this is Netflix Disney or music streaming like Spotify where you as an artist can upload your songs your art directly to the listeners or streaming Sports like NBA or the zone so you may ask yourself why should I as a mobile game developer go direct to Consumers so first and for first and foremost it's about creating meaningful relationships with your players moreover you have the opportunity to incentivize and create more retention and increase the average purchases people are going to make and thirdly and I think this is how a highly important one you control the

whole user Journey from a to that and therefore you will be able to attract your most loyal clients your most engaged fans your whales your dolphins and last but not least you get way more data where you can base your analytics on and um improve your performances so welcome to exolo EXO's primary mission is to help video game companies go direct to to Consumers we do this in multiple ways we're pretty known for a payment solution um we are working as a merchant of record which means that we take over the tax liability making sure that we are compliant to data protection laws around the globe and yeah we have an ironclad fraud protection in place as well as a 24/7 customer service and specifically for the mobile game Space we created uh the web shop uh for mobile as a solution and we we started doing this early on

like 2 years ago we're working with global clients and with uh major entities around the globe but we are also working with mider and also small companies as well so let's take a brief look on what a web shop is and maybe we need to do a distinguishment here so there are platforms and there are web shops some of the platforms are marketplaces b2c where your game sits among many others and where players come in to top up their favorite game on the other hand there are webshops webshops are your fully customized storefront where you attract your audience and get them into your world into your brand and where you own the whole player relationship as well as the data um from the beginning till the purchase and one of the things we want to do and what your audience may come to

when they use a web shop is that they understand on the mobile is where I play in the app and on the web is where I'm going to pay and top up my account whereby in-game currency and so on so the V webshop is a valuable tool for you it's a white label solution where players purchase in-game items virtual currencies top up their accounts and this is all happening on your branded website so let's take a close look on how this can look like an example video so here we are in Game there's a notification the notification is talking about there's new content you can discover as a player and alongside to the new content they also realize there's a shop on your website so they going to look at it and quickly understand that they may find an added value on this web shop compared to the game then they're going to buy in bring

in their details for the first time as soon as you did the process the first time as a player it's super easy to do it again because you can save up your credentials and easily purchase uh whatever you like this is just a short example video on how this can look like and here we we are looking now at what is possible so what are possible Transitions and and numbers you can create with this so we have seen companies doing on average 30 to 40% of their revenue shift towards their own web shop on the other hand what we see is on average 40 to 60% of conversion rate from the lockin to the purchase and it's possible to drive incremental revenue between 12 to 20% because you're saving up on the fees and and you will be also able to utilize the data

available to your hands to improve retention and increase our PPU and as we do this since two years we have launched a lot of webshops already and there's a couple of lessons we took from those launches and live running webshops so it's not just the launch but it starts with a clear messaging so creating awareness and and explaining the players that there's added value to be found out of outside of the app this is a very important one secondly you have to incentivize the players to make the first purchase to make repeated purchases and actively communicate with them and third is reducing the friction and creating a seamless flow for the users is key for the success and also key for having them coming back to your

Workshop so as messaging is so important it starts with the Community Management if you are on the Discord or social media or you have um email campaigns running your social media needs to be spot on addressing the whales other paying players but also give the opportunity to address non-paying players so in order to increase the awareness what we have seen what partners are doing is that they go out with a clear value proposition moreover they're putting a link directly to the web shop on any communication outside the app social media Discord newsletters and so forth and ingame you can utilize in-game notification about upcoming content you're going to talk about what what your players are interested in anyway going to drive them out they're going to up show up and and check out your

website and also find out okay there's um good offers I can find in a specific shop and another formula to success is reinforcing this communication so people really going to understand that there's value to be found for them here is a couple of examples on how this can look like social media whether it's paid or owned communication a newsletter for the start or ongoing with new content Rel releases and there's one significant element reinforcing the message is Al about converting the players for the first time you can offer them something for the first time perchase you can offer better deals for repeat purchases or you also start giving out free items on a daily basis on a weekly basis on a monthly basis in order to create this

retention and yeah if you form a deal which is hard to um hard to resist that's a good way on driving up your Revenue in your web shop as well as content you bring out on a seasonal basis or offering prices which are beyond the 100 US dollar as much as using promo codes for specific activations for specific Seasons That's all valuable and um providing good um good uplift in your in your revenues moreover you can also create retargeting campaigns where you specifically advertise the whales the Dolphins and retention can be pushed up to 62% or rpu by more than 30% so if you ask me what can a web shop

do for you it can help you to create a cost efficient user acquisition aside to what you already do on the platforms it can provide you incremental Revenue at a lower fee with more data and data to analyze on on the user Behavior as well as create a strong brand and brand recognition uh for your game and there's a lot of Partners we work with and we have launched more than 150 webshops in the last two years so we can talk about this for quite an extensive time we have a booth out there so swing by make sure to start a conversation we are interested in interested into your business your challenges your questions you may have and help you on the monetization part and last but not least there is a super interesting panel following after this session um we I really encourage you to stay in the room

and listening into this thank you very [Applause] much