Indistinguishable from Magic: Lessons Learned from Creating Merchandise for Alto's Adventure

[Music] hey everybody it's 11 o'clock I'm gonna go ahead and kick it off but we'll wait for some folks to come in as they sort of mill on and we'll go from there my name is Eli sometta thank you so much for taking the time to come today just off the top I wanted to kick off with a few standard reminders if you have phones on of course and you need text alerts meetings to come feel free to keep looking at them but if possible turning them to silent helps anybody else in the audience take notes and focus and absorb the information in addition your badge was scanned as soon as you came in the door today which means you'll be receiving an email sometime during the day which contains a survey about how I did how the talk was what you feel you learned please definitely fill that out as it helps the conference and it definitely helps me so as I said my name is Eli and I'm the lead producer at a small Toronto based studio by the name of snowman and we'll be talking today as the sort of intro slide says about our creation of the merchandise collection for one of our flagship titles Altos adventure and the lessons that we learned including not to knock over your water bottle as you swing your hands around so I think for

me what I'd really love for anybody in the audience is that by the end of this talk I hope that if you're a producer or a designer and artist a merchandiser or anyone at your company that's interested in or curious about merchandise for your game you leave feeling like you know a little bit more about it you have maybe some wider eyes about what goes into it and you realize that there are ultimately a ton of skills and tactics you can use that don't require any specialized knowledge so before we really get into it and get into the Aalto collection I wanted to as I said give you a little bit of info about snowman we're a small Toronto based studio that grew recently to just the size where we felt like we needed a mission statement the sort of encapsulation of what we do and who we are and we settled on this notion that we like to call ourselves a small studio at the center of artful experiences what that means is that we like to collaborate and be involved in projects that you might sit with for a short time but that sit with you for a longer time after and linger in your heart and in your mind and feel special to you long after you finished the game the games were most known for of course are our flagship titles in the Aalto series ultimate adventure and the recently released ultimate Odyssey which came out last month though we are collaborating on a really exciting suite of projects

coming out well into 2018 and beyond including titles like where cards fall skate city and distant but the title we'll be focusing on today of course is our sort of flagship most known title Altos adventure which released in February of 2015 and for which I was the lead in crafting the game's merchandise before we get into the merchandise though I want to give anyone who might not know his sense of what Altos adventure is and why we felt it was a game that was special enough to craft merchandise before we started working on Altos adventure in a collaboration we like to call team Alto with an artist and developer in the UK by the name of Harry Nesbitt together with Harry we wanted to craft a game that was designed to encapsulate a feeling it's it's in the endless runner genre but our hope was that it would feel more like an escape to somewhere familiar and cozy and warm and that players could go to it for a few minutes each day to calm down and relax the game came out in 2015 and in the three years that have followed we've been very very fortunate that it's been downloaded across all of its platforms over 30 million times but this isn't for me a vanity statistic attack it's actually sits at the center of one of the very important lessons I'm going to revisit

later in the talk that ultimately ended up deceiving us when it comes to merchandise so before we get into the collection itself I want to set the scene set the tone and for anyone that might not know the universe of Aalto play its launch trailer back from February 2015 to immerse you in that game's universe oh but I will first actually do it right [Music]

maybe [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

[Music] so ulties adventure came out nearly three years ago or rather just over three years ago on February 19th 2015 and what we were most blown away with in the months that followed the game's release was the way that players identified with it the way we felt about when we created it as not just a game that you played but for a small amount of time each day a place that they went to experience some serenity and some calm we started to receive fanart physical mail in some cases from players reimagining our characters in ways that we hadn't even envisioned and letting us know that for them that was something they could help them cope with stress or in some cases illness and this for us was a real signal that there was a universe here that we wanted to be loving stewards of for many years to come and one of the first thoughts we had in sort of crafting an extended universe for this Aalto brand was of course the idea that we might be excited to create merchandise that players could feel like they were reaching into the world of the game and pulling that merchandise out of but before we really

embarked on the road to merchandise we learned our first hard lesson that your game absolutely has to come first so as a tiny team then of three people at the time making a premium game that was the bulk of our studios revenue we needed to keep the product alive and make sure that as many players as possible were able to experience altered adventure so merchandise which we deeply wanted to do took a backseat to things like our Android version of the game releasing nearly a year after the initial release on iOS and a major update known as Zen mode which stripped away all the games challenges and let players really truly play with sort of no goal or a failed state in mind both of these things ended up being huge boons for the product huge boons to allow our studio to continue to grow but still continue to get in the way of creating that merchandise and I think I want to really emphasize here that that's a good thing and that's okay it's most important to consider merchandise as an extension of the universe of your game and a way to bring it into your players hands in a special and meaningful way not as a replacement for doing that with the game itself when

we did settle down on the idea of doing merchandise I as the team's producer was tasked with doing the research on how we might source product think about what products we might sell and ultimately mount the collection and I came upon two sort of big options that I feel like sit on one side of the same coin the first side of that coin was to do it mostly ourselves with CMS based platforms like Shopify Squarespace in big commerce platforms that allow you essentially to list a suite of products online process credit card transactions for those products and sell them to your customers one thing I didn't realize though at first as silly as it sounds is that merchandise doesn't just appear I kind of think I had some subconscious thought when I started on this collection that you press a I want Alto branded t-shirts button and they just sort of appeared somewhere and got sold to customers so I think the first thing you really want to do if you're embarking on a solution where you are really doing it yourself is acknowledge up front that there's going to have to be someone on your team or a task sort of set that spread across your team involving researching the act of getting products into players hands let's use that shirt as an example in the case of a shirt you have to source what are

known as blanks which are just the raw t-shirts on which a logo or branding will go and the sourcing process involves reaching out to companies checking on prices getting those shirts sent to you so you can touch and feel and wear them and think about how they might feel on a customer's body and then ultimately choose how you're going to die and brand those shirts are you going to use discharge ink which dies each thread but costs quite a bit more are you going to screen print at the source of creation so you don't actually ever have to see the branding process happen but when the customer purchases it gets sort of inked on and it sent out all of these things require a ton of research but I want to emphasize that this is research I really didn't have any knowledge of beforehand so it's accessible it's really doable yourself but I think you have to really acknowledge going in that you're gonna have to master the act of really googling essentially thinking of the question you want to ask and asking it in the right way and the process for that shirt alone can take as much as a month and that's one of many products that sit in the collection so the time really does need to be allotted upfront for a solution like these the good thing

though is that when you start selling that product on a do-it-yourself solution there's really no sense of profit or revenue share there's a standard basic transaction fees or two to four percent per transaction to the credit card process but you're keeping the lion's share of the profit for a solution like this and more than the upfront profit you're keeping the lion's share of your brand's ownership shopify bigcommerce Squarespace none of these teams require you to sign over any merchandise rights to them which means that if you do a do-it-yourself solution you have the flexibility to add more products in the future so that's something I think is really advantageous if you're an independent creator and someone who wants to really value your brand as it grows over the long term but if that upfront work is really just not feasible because of your team size or your desires or your next set of updates you need for the game they're all the other solutions where you do it sort of mostly with help these sit alongside the brands like I am 8-bit WeLoveFine fangamer them sure you all know about which are known for helping you source and create those products and selling them online in their own web stores where they sit alongside other branded products from series that you may know the huge advantage here of course is your hands

off for most of this process if you're able to reach out and make a deal with a team like this you're often having the expertise of a massive staff lent your way where they source the products create them and really just get the okay from you on making sure they're what you want for your brand and then they do the selling themselves by consequence though if you choose a solution like this you are giving up the lion's share of both the upfront profit and in some ways the long term flexibility on the upfront profit front many of these solutions do take between 60 and 80% of each sale for themselves giving you sort of a quarterly purse from what's made after that in an edition there's often this concept of category exclusivity so if I wanted to make say a plush which we did and I did it with one of these teams it might very well be the case that that plush and all plushies in the ultra universe have right of first refusal for these teams meaning what you can make and how you can expand that collection is limited in some degree so it's something to go in with sort of with true open eyes and know that as an independent creator you are your brand's hugest advocate and everything is negotiable so what you give up what

contracts you Inc and how much exclusivity you give over your merchandise really depends on what your net desire is do you want to stay hands-off and see cool things from your game make it into the hands of players or do you want to really run that process from top to tail and have control over how that grows I want to sort of insert a quick caveat here which is that we make mobile games primarily although we are branching into other platforms and I don't have all the answers so if you're a maker of games for platforms like Xbox one ps4 and most recently Nintendo switch teams like limited-run are known for their expertise in bringing these games to physical disk form in a limited sort of capacity and this is nothing I have any experience with or for example if you have more minor goals of making one-off product release of something like 100 to 200 products and you want to work directly with Etsy artisans you can do that as well cotton bureau there on the right is sort of a known for the similar process and that's the artisan but for shirts just a one run sort of product release so depending on what the goals are for a merchandise release for you it really isn't only a choice between

someone doing it for you or doing a whole collection yourself and I'd encourage you to explore the range of options that exist so with all that out of the way we embarked in the summer of 2016 on creating what we call the auto collision something we were really privileged to have is a very hands-on very doting designer and creator of the series in the form of Harry Nesbit he and I worked together over the course of about six months to craft and design our product line but it's very important to note that if you don't have someone on your team who's designing these products with you you might have to reach out source someone like that and bring them in-house to get to know your brand spend some time acclimating to your team and really find a way to translate that from game to product so Harry and I divided our product line into what we sort of think of as three categories there are artisan products which are meant to feel like true limited-edition pieces of merchandise come directly from the Aalto world that you can't get anywhere else and in many cases can't even get for that long so we had two products at this category the Aalto toque which was

designed by Harry with a very stringent series of specifications you can see there on what colors could be used what fabric should be used how the tassel should look and a run of 100 limited edition felted llamas that looked like the llamas you saw on the trailer that you catch as you go down the hill these products were made with individual organizations respectively and then shipped to what's called a sort of warehousing solution or a sourcing solution we use the sourcing solution by the name amplifier which is based in Texas but I encourage you again to do research for what works in your price range and where you want to ship your products to and from the majority of our players to sort of demographically and statistically sit in the United States so we made the conscious decision that if product was shipping out it would likely be going into the hands of a US purchaser amplifier is a team that stocks your product in their warehouse sends it out as soon as it's ordered by hooking into our Shopify solution and then manages that process by sending us a bill on a monthly basis but there is also the option of taking any product you create and shipping it directly to your office or to your home it really depends on how fast you want to scale up and the

long-term vision you have for the brand as a whole in the case of our tux we made them with a non-government organization by the name of threads of Peru which pays local Peruvian artisan artisans I apologize in remote villages above market fair wages to create authentic ethically sourced products from real alpaca wool and we created 50 tubes the result of which you see there on the left in the case of the llamas we worked with German needle filter by the name of Annika Brenner to create that run of 100 llamas and custom brand everything from the stamp that went on those boxes to the sort of unboxing experience where you're pulling those llamas out of the snow we bolstered this with what we called our bespoke designs things that could be easily reordered if they needed but which also had a sense of care and craftsmanship we created a sort of custom set of all toe socks in a design that Harry spent a few weeks with me doing up and a series of posters which we called our mountain memories we have a photo mode in our game where players can snap and share photos with each other and we want to sort of make an ode to them by custom composing screens we felt we would have done if we were in the game ourselves and here too we tried to embed to the tone and the

voice of our game in the product and I want to sort of emphasize that this is something I strongly suggest I think that there's room for a wide swath of merchandise from branded mugs to keychains to stickers but I think the merchandise that is sold best for us as we'll see him later in the presentation and that continues to warm fans the most is the merchandise that feels as if it's speaking to the player in the same way that our game does so on the belly band of our socks we say that we hope they stay warm on their next adventure and we try to keep sort of that Pleasant loving tone voice that we feel the game has and finally rounding out our collection we started there's a sort of standard fare approach with shirts and other merchandise you might find in stores or on racks we started with four shirts branded to look like the colours of our night and day and weather sequences and we stocked them in sort of a series of colours sitting at $25 or 18 on sale if it sounds like there's something missing here you're absolutely right one category we have yet to explore and I think I would strongly encourage anyone to look into as well or true impulse purchases things that cost players between five and ten dollars and don't actually cost that much to make stickers buttons diecast pins one thing to really

keep in mind when you're exploring these products though is that the bottom line on a true Paul's purchase is often a little risky or at least a little less advantageous the cost to source create ship and sell stickers often leaves you with something like a $0.50 to $1 profit on each sale which ultimately shouldn't be your only angle but if it's something that's important to you and your team is something you should keep in mind and for us the ethos of Auto as a well-crafted beautiful game that we feel sort of SATA above in the genre was one that lent itself to a collection that was a little more dotingly crafted but ultimately a little more expensive and and that's really what I'm sure one of you are curious about so we'll get into that right now this is the cost breakdown for the first run of the Aalto collection our two are llamas our socks are prints our shirts giving us roughly 750 pieces of merchandise or you know something a little more than that sat at sixteen thousand US dollars approximately with a projected profit potential of thirty-five thousand dollars and this is something I think I

really want to sit on for a second and starkly contrasts against that 30 million player base I floated that lovely metric everyone loves to talk about because for a brand that we felt was beloved and valued the profit potential wasn't in the tens or sorry I'd rather hundreds or thousands of dollars or millions it really was the low tens of thousands and I think you need to consider that when you're selling merchandise doing it as a purely profit driven endeavor is something that ultimately might not be a success because when it comes to selling merchandise for games especially the game is your primary business that caveat there too is really important every bit of the cost you see here excludes time investment on the part of myself working during the peak of the collections creation between four and five days a week on it Harry's time and effort helping me design and craft the products and even the effort of our in-house artist and photographer Mathias on creating the sort of composed product photos you see online in our store and with that in mind you really ultimately get down to a very slim margin of profit that it's realized over a long period of time and that's another important point when you're crafting merchandise this

$35,000 was what we could possibly make if every item in our collection sold out and that's something you have to consider when investing a large amount of money up front that if you're going to realize profit in the case of a team that isn't Nintendo that isn't snapping their fingers and putting you know branded merchandise in department stores across the country you really have to assume that that profit will be realized over a longer period of time so from the summer of 2016 to about the late fall of that year we spent to the time craft in the product building the store and mounting it online with Shopify and what we resulted was sort of a Alto collection which was we felt clean and sleek and minimalist in the same way that the game was and I strongly encourage you if you are taking the do-it-yourself approach to try to associate each product with a feeling or a slogan or something that really sells it in one image and I think doing that across your store is a great way to draw players in and draw people into exactly what they'll feel when they touch and hold this product and what's really exciting here is that while as game creators and you know independent designers and developers were often dependent on the whims of curated

storefronts like Google Play and the App Store we get to be our own curated storefront when we're selling merchandise and so I think taking that time to editorialize is also really exciting in the case of our to here and many of our products but especially this one we wanted to dive deep into the actual creation process and I think what really delighted players and delighted fans when we launched our store was a sense that each product had a story to it and that that story was linked inexorably to the feeling of owning the product so we launched in November of 2015 or 2016 I apologize November 25th specifically trying to target the holiday Black Friday shopping craze and I think that's also something very important to take into account we're all told not to launch our sweet little indie mobile game on the same day as a Call of Duty and I think the same rule applies when you're launching merchandise you want to take into account the trends of the market when people are at they're sort of shopping best and try to target releases even if it might result in a small artificial delay around when people are most interested in merch and our launch months were really exciting we burst right out of the gate and this

represents the November December sales leading up just to the New Year for the Aalto Collection as a small indie team that wasn't looking to shatter the earth with our merchandise collection we were very optimistic here 125 orders right out of the gate for a total net sale of $6,200 an average order price of 50 bucks which is really exciting because that told us that the love we thought fans might have for this Aalto universe held true when they went to purchase something in our store and that to them this was a brand that was worth a high amount of Vettes or value to them and a peak sales day of around $1,500 and at this rate I feel like I kind of was ready to kick back relax myself a glass of wine because I'd done it at this sort of profit rate I was going to break even in three or four months max right except that's not exactly how it happened what you're seeing here are the ensuing six months of the stores collection definitely some post-launch sort of stomach sinking feeling for us over the six months that ensued we sold roughly 16 products or 16 orders rather for a total sale of 790 dollars

and a peak sales day of one tenth the peak sales day of our previous period for an average order price of $49 and it was this last point that kept us optimistic and sort of helped us turn it around we could tell that fans loved Aalto and they loved the merchandise they purchased from the universe and felt it had high value but nobody was purchasing anything anymore and I think in reflection this taught us a few key hard lessons that I want to pass on one is that you should never ever ever operate on anok data and when it comes to the sale of merchandise even the sales of your game are Anik data the fact that we had 30 million players across our platforms didn't in any tangible or meaningful way I mean that we had 30 million merchandise purchasers across all of the Aalto brand and that love here that second point that love does not equal any sir of tangible sales guarantee players emailing us by the hundreds telling us they buy merchandise if they could or they really love to buy a plush llama aren't necessarily going to have their feet held to the fire when the time comes and nor should they it's not our sort of you know it's not the

players responsibility to buy a thing from a game that they just happen to like and I think we've convinced ourselves a little that it would be and they sort of embrace it in the same way we would and at that our love for the brand in the collection would be their love and I think it's this last point that really really sort of makes the difference time and distance ultimately trumped for us and I think Trump for anything a sense of craftsmanship and quality and this functions in two ways so it had been about a year and a half since Altos adventure had launched before we were able to launch our merch collection that as I mentioned is because our game came first and should always come first but I don't think we readily acknowledged how much that year-and-a-half created a sort of distance for the most die-hard players from the love for our brand but most importantly there was a ton of friction and distance for the actual act of purchasing a thing to begin with so before you even bought something from the collection you had to put down the game if you were playing it visit us on social media where we I guess hoped you were following us look at our web link find our webstore go through a product click on add I mean it's boring already

I'm falling asleep just saying it so I think the realities are that at every point of that process players could get a call decide they were hungry get bored realized an $18 sock was a ripoff anything that they felt in their minds or guts wasn't worth it or was the better use of their time got in the way of that purchase process so we kind of took things back to square one I think thought a little bit about sort of taking our licks and ultimately we're ready to just assume that the collection was a lost leader when we're profit is concerned but that it was a worthwhile fan investment for the love of the brand and for sort of an ode to our players what came next though taught us a few really exciting lessons that I'm very optimistic about the Aalto gift shop is sort of the next phase of our all to a merchandising sort of journey I think and for us this happened in around March of 2017 when we were approached by our platform partner Shopify where we were sort of running the store and they had for us sort of a debut prospect that they wanted us to consider they had what they called the unity buy SDK which was an experimental early prototype of a way

that you could essentially wrap your products in a little unity wrapper put them into your game provided you sold them on Shopify and sell the products you made directly in your game and well it sounded exciting it wasn't an instant yes or really even a guarantee for us because we'd already invested time and money in what we thought might have been a loss leader on the merchandise front so we sat with it for a bit we talked to our designer we evaluated the product and ultimately decided that for the time it would take it was worth at least seeing if getting the merchandise into the game would have an effect and what result is what we call our gift shop the alto gift shop is a in game integration that allows you as a player to visit an area that sits right alongside our in-game workshop you enter from the title screen you press the menu where you go to your workshop to upgrade your digital items and sitting right alongside that is a little gift shop tab where you see listed in a grid in a very familiar visual sort of language that you would in the workshop the same products we have in our store you can click through into those products view them select sizes on your shirt and visit our cart online where you can pay with Apple pay and any other OneTouch

pay systems you might have such as Android pay and so in that way it was a way for players to sort of engage with the merge in that exit through the gift shop mentality where they're seeing the merge inside the universe of the game itself we worked on this integration and launched it in June of 2017 or July rather and what we saw next was really really encouraging so this was us sort of hitting our stride this represents the six months that have followed since the launch of our Aalto gift shop leading up to just about the month before GDC and I have some more data since I've arrived here so this is a total of 305 sales with 13,000 151 dollars in revenue and what's perhaps most exciting is this green chart for me that there hasn't been really a single day since the launch of the altar gift shop where we haven't made at least one sale and this functions in a couple of ways not all of these sales are through the gift shop though the gift shop has buoyed up those sales which is telling me that by introducing players to the merchandise inside the world of our game we've given them a sort of lingering

memory of it that they take with them and use to visit that shop at a later date and the purchase price too has stayed right there just at that almost below $50 level with this sort of profit over time we've just just now about a month before I came reached profitability on the collection our looking on any dollar we make being profit which is very exciting but it isn't the sort of rag Sturgis story it might sound like and I'll talk about this in a sec the thing that's most exciting though is this consistency that we're seeing this sense that players are finding accessing and purchasing our merchandise without any prodding encouragement or marketing dollar investment from us so since the launch of the Gift Shop we have 57 percent of all merch sales coming through the app itself and of those sales the distribution sits roughly where I think a lot of developers see the sales for the games themselves 82% of those are through iOS 18% are for Android what stark about that Android statistic though is that we have an order of magnitude higher number of Android players for Altos adventure because we chose consciously to experiment with making it a free-to-play SKU on that

platform rather than a $4.99 premium game so the fact that Android purchases still sit at such a lower sort of proportion is very worth noting among those who do choose to purchase on iOS over 90 percent engage with purchases through Apple pay which tells us that friction was a huge barrier in the way that we thought it was and as I mentioned that purchase price per user has stayed about an average of $40 so what does this tell us what are some of the broader takeaways here like I said this isn't a rags to riches story there really aren't many riches to be found in a collection that's made a total of twenty four thousand dollars and six thousand dollars in profit but there are some exciting opportunities and some lingering lessons for us that I think we're going to take into the future so in what is ultimately the biggest example of burying the lead in any GDC talk in history any sufficiently advanced technology is as my talk say indistinguishable from magic what you see here are a few tweets of players who are just extra excited to even access the store the day that it launched but ultimately what this sort of slogan from the futurists arthur c clarke represents to me is the idea that if you can make

the act of engaging with the merchandise you sell for your game feel in any way like the act of engaging with the game itself and capture the same feelings emotions and perhaps a little bit of magic in doing so you remove a ton of the friction that players feel when they're trying to think about purchasing your products and for us something that really really sort of was sold for us and I think we bet on and that really worked out was that merchandise as an extension of your games universe is the most exciting merchandise this doesn't mean that there isn't room for random t-shirts or mugs or simple products that are more practical but I think some of the places we took inspiration from like Campo Santo is pulp novel based notebooks that you see in the fire watchtowers around the game or the Retro City Rampage deluxe edition which has a set of VR sort of 3d glasses VR because it's GDC 3d glasses that you can use to see the actual game in 3d feel like they come tangibly from the universe of the game and stardew valley of course has its posters which you see around the the the town is you visit so these types of merchandise have been far and away our bestsellers and they've also been the ones that I think have engendered the

most player excitement and joy and this is a point that I think is most exciting for us as indie creators if possible and this is a very lucky thing to be able to say so I acknowledge that 100% up front you need to go into the creation of merchandise considering the act of making massive profit or turning it into a whole new leg of your business a bonus not the thesis and I think there is a ton of goodwill to be gained by having your players engage with the world bring it into their world and feel like they own a little bit that game experience but I think ultimately you have to sort of approach the act of creating merchandise with open eyes and assume that in doing so you are building long-term value for your game and for the universe of your game not necessarily making a quick button because there are far better ways to do that if that is your goal this last point though is one I think is the most exciting to me beyond the charts and the numbers this is kind of a rough look at the lay of the land of an industry that I'm sure you've all heard before about fifteen fifty billion dollars a year gets spent on games you know subdivided into a small amount of paid a bit larger amount of

advertisement and an almost equal amount of in-app purchases and digital games and sitting outside games is this sort of indirect revenue stream thirteen billion dollars last year was spent on toy and collectible merchandise in many cases across stores like Game Stop which are making conscious efforts to rebrand a lot of their locations to merch primary locations this last point though is what's particularly start this in-app payment part of the direct revenue for our industry as I'm sure you've all heard 5% of game players represent that 43% of in-app purchase revenue meaning about 22 billion dollars for the industry and what this means to me is that besides the whole concept of the whale which i think is a bit of a denigrating term it really is just telling me that there are a whole ton of players out there that feel like beyond the act of playing a game that they love there isn't a law in that game that has value that's worth investing in and that there's a chance to create value for players that goes beyond the existing ways that we think of monetizing the things that we make and I think what we've learned even in small part from selling our Aalto collection is that there's a chance to sort of in any way

reshape to the future by bringing some of that indirect revenue directly into the world of your game and not only getting to do that but getting to control how it feels to players and to sort of ensure that when players experience your merchandise they experience it just the way you want in the same way you would want them to for your game itself and I want to return now to sort of the thesis lesson that we learned when we first embarked on this road to merchandise which is that your game really really has to come first I plan to come today with some learnings that we sort of absorbed from taking our lips for getting to make merchandise for a little too long and then sort of turning around by creating merchandise at the launch of our newest game all those Odyssey to tell you about how that collection fared but we know sort of last month stretch of making that game we had to choose between making it free of bugs or making it with merchandise and we ultimately chose that the best and most important thing we could do for the world of Aalto and for any future merchandise we style associated with our game was to focus on that game so I think what I would sort of encourage you to do is continue to focus on crafting beautiful things that matter to you and

hopefully matter to the players that play the things you make but that thinking of merchandise as a way to extend that universe bring it into players hands and trying to find ways whether it's through an integration like the one we used or something you rigged up on your own to get players access to that merchandise in a way that doesn't require them to sort of go through all that time and all of that distance thanks everybody for taking the time to come and to listen today it's meant a lot to have you I know we're like super short on time it's 11:33 and I've been generously running over time I'll look to the back of the room if there's any qualms with questions I have time for maybe a few if anybody would like to ask but of course my emails there and if anyone wants to reach out after taking time to think and maybe you know consider a question there that's good too but I'll hover around for maybe three or four minutes and see if I don't want to ask a question there are mics right there at the center row that you can walk up to [Music]

alright I'm just wondering if you guys maybe touch on this before but if you're planning on doing the same for Odyssey or is there yeah so for those who didn't hear the question was maybe we've touched on it before but are we planning to do the same experience for Odyssey we definitely have in motion plans to create a merchandise collection for Odyssey they're happening behind the scenes right now I think we wanted to do it day and date but it was just a small team stretched thin and we had to make the decision that merchandise well probably the most exciting part of the game for us and one of the most joyful parts cuz we like to see the things that we make had to come second but we definitely plan on releasing merchandise Peralta's Odyssey yet curious if you guys have thought about using merchandise as a retention or an advertising piece of the game you know perhaps as a reward for somebody in the game or something like you know to encouraging stickiness or for sure and

even giving them a free shirt that you know at some point so that they can kind of self advertise did you guys consider that in your model at all right so to be packaged in tighter form the question was have we thought as a team about potentially integrating merchandise even more tightly using it as rewards for playing the game and maybe a sort of signing a certain milestones in the game to the act of getting discounts or free merchandise I think for us it's definitely something that's been on our minds and it's something I've seen other games do to interesting effect but I think what's very important for us is that the games we craft are meant to feel like small world you visit for a small amount of time and we want those to feel deeply authentic and so our gift shop while not perhaps authentic is meant to feel as close as possible to the idea that you're visiting maybe a small place in Altos Village and purchasing something as you've spent some time there and I think for us we don't want to integrate merchandise in a way that will detract from the quality of the act of playing the game but I think for the right game it's absolutely an option thanks for the talk very fascinating I was curious you mentioned this pretty

dramatic spread between revenue from iOS versus Android and I was wondering have you noticed any differences in the products that players are interested in you know is it sort of you know this kind of thing is for some reason more popular among iOS players whereas Android gravitates toward this great question so the question was in the spread that we're seeing across revenue for iOS and for Android are we seeing a similar or interestingly unique spread for what's being purchased from those players in our store and for us while we're not seeing that what we are seeing that I want to draw attention to are the regions to which those merchandise items are being purchased a disproportionate amount of our overseas shipping goes to Android players among the shipping that goes for the in-game items the items purchased in-game so a lot of the items purchased in-game through our Android integration are done to Russia China Japan Vietnam whereas the disproportionate amount of the iOS purchases go to Canada the UK and the United States and do you have sort of unsupported countries has it become a

problem at all where somebody will order something from you know the far corners of the earth and you have to call them and be like we actually don't ship there that's a great question so are there any unsupported countries for us have we run into problems where players want to buy a thing but we can't send a thing there haven't and part of that is that for this particular solution we chose Shopify they enable the sort of e-commerce seller to sell worldwide and we are shipping solution in the form of amplifier the warehouse solution we chose also supports that but it's absolutely a thing that as a merchandise creator you have to consider because for example if you've chosen as somebody to not pay a warehousing solutions stock your merch in your house or in your office you're only going to be able to ship where you've set up the capacity to do so and have the bandwidth to do so so we haven't run into it but it's absolutely a thing you have to preemptively avoid by choosing scaffolding that allows you to ship worldwide awesome thanks thank you very much I think we'll use this as the final question as I've already taken seven more minutes of your day then I promised you not sure if you address this but how do you actually get eyeballs to it outside

of the game do you use paid advertising at all or is it just messaging on your social platforms do and do you use all of them it's a really great question so how do we draw a balls to our merchandise outside the game do we pay for ads do we put it on our social media do we send newsletters so for us I think we made the very conscious decision going in that because Alta was a game that was meant to feel very unobtrusive and not like it was in your face or pestering or bugging you and rather acting as a relaxation aid that merch was very much going to be a pleasant mentary part of our universe not a sort of big neon billboard part of our universe so we actually since the integration of the in-game store have spent no marketing money drawing eyeballs to the store beyond allowing players to access it when they play the game and we see the existence of our webstore as a pleasant complimentary piece of the puzzle for players who choose to access it when they're visiting us on social media or you know hearing about a new update or game in a newsletter we always do keep it there as sort of a coda to that but we haven't

consciously chosen to do that however we are a seven-person team so one of my huge caveats is that if you're a 20-person team or a 200-person team the amount of importance you're going to put on merchandise becoming maybe a tertiary part of your main revenue is going to increase and that way it would absolutely be worth creating sort of an in-house think tank around how to advertise and get that word out thank you again everybody for taking the time to attend Cheers [Applause]