Is this really all there is? More ways to monetise mobile games

[Music] the question is now we've talked about IEP we've talked about ad is that it is there anything else and hit tell us all about is my clients from ISM after that great question is there anything else actually it's really great following this panel because one of the things you guys get now is that in order to make in-app purchasing really work well for you but it takes some work doesn't it I mean it's not just as easy as building a game and then after you finish deciding to throw a store on top of it no I mean we listen to to some very experienced leaders here tell us about how they need to redesign our game and re-architect game loops to make sure that you can get good in-app purchasing experience and that's that's hard to do making money with ads is hard to do I mean you can't

buy users fast enough to earn enough money and ads to make up for that well then there's premium premium is difficult because boy the cost of the do barrier to entry on premium is really significant and if somebody does decide that's worth enough to pay well you've just capped your total income now haven't you unless you can scrape together some money for revenue and this is a significant enough problem that what we found is that depending on the app store you're in somewhere between 40 and 60% of the indie developers out there are not making enough money to to actually support themselves to the studio so at Amazon 60% of our developers actually make enough money on their last game to fund development of their next game vision mobile calls this the app poverty line and for indie developers it's about $500 per app per month and really only 40% but only 40 to 60% are making it that's really hard and

that's really sad so one of the things that we've done at Amazon is taking a look at how we can actually generate additional sources of revenue and so that's what I'm going to talk about Who am I my name is Mike I've done four different startups I've worked for two fortune 500 companies if you have some pain I've probably been there struggling with you on that so feel free to come up to me and talk to me afterwards about any of my experiences that might actually you know be informative or maybe serve as a cautionary tale for you the three things I'm going to talk about today are actually selling more things building a fanbase and then turning that fanbase into revenue generating spectators first thing some more things like t-shirts and no I'm actually not kidding about t-shirts I mean really now most of us spend a lot of time focusing on how to make money inside of our game in-app

purchases adds premium I mean we and we've have a very intense inward look which is why the handles on the inside of that cup not very often do we look outside of our game and look how we can actually use things outside the game one to support our in-app purchases but also to generate revenue and t-shirts actually do a really good job of that they help establish our brand improve retention and engagement yes that's actually true and they can generate additional revenue so let's go ahead and take a look at some of those details by establishing your brand basically I mean you guys have seen t-shirts with Nike on them right and well Nikes like a shoe company right no great that they make a fair amount of money now I think on t-shirts and shorts but they're getting a lot of brand awareness out of that and you've seen your favorite car you've seen your favorite sports team maybe even your favorite beer logo on a t-shirt that's done so that people who aren't consumers of that brand see that

other people I have an affinity for that brand and hey it's interesting if you see a really cool logo of a beer company on a t-shirt you might ask that guy about it same thing if you see a really cool image from a game you know especially if you're a gamer you might ask about that and that's pretty cool and that's where we're going to help improve retention and engagement because though that image you can put on a t-shirt if not altogether unlike the t-shirt you get from finishing a 5k I mean Oscar you finished a 5k yes I'm going to pick on you when you finish your 5k did you get the t-shirt she got the t-shirt okay the 5k is over he's done but he bought the t-shirt anyway because you know what he's proud of having finished and honestly when I beat the boss at level 10 of my friends game dude I'm not sure it was harder than the 5k but it took a lot of time and it took a lot of work and when that boss death happened I mean we're talking blood and guts and bits of zombie everywhere I mean it was pretty cool I want that I want that shirt because I

beat the boss at level 10 and I'm going to wear that shirt around people are going to ask me about it or if I'm part of a really high performing clan or high performing team and we've got some skins that we've purchased or we've got some really unique avatars make those available on t-shirts and as part of that clan or part of that group of avatars hey I may want to self-identify with that I mean think about the Seattle Seahawks I mean they actually want a Super Bowl not too long ago people buy the t-shirt not because they forgot what you're the Seahawks won the Superbowl but because they want to identify with that they have an identification need and you can generate that now when somebody buys a t-shirt they have an investment in that game they're more likely to stay in that game for longer when they have a larger financial investment in it and they're more likely to tell their friends about it too that's a very strong mechanic and finally you can actually use t-shirts to generate revenue now not one of us got

into the business of writing games because we want to have boxes of t-shirts sitting in our kitchens or living rooms and then have to mail them out and deal with returns that's that's not good but what would be cool is if the 97% of players who don't want to spend ninety nine cents on i-80 item hey maybe some of those people would be willing to fork out 20 bucks for a shirt Bryan mash entire from formula backflip studios he found this out that he attracted an entirely new audience when he made t-shirts for dragon bail people who would never spend ninety nine cents drop 20 bucks to get a t-shirt a t-shirt is easy for a grandma to get a grandson not so much power-ups so all of that's possible and it's going to be easy because if you just supplied the game art Amazon acquired a whole bunch of t-shirt printers when we bought a different company a while back and we didn't know what to do with those t-shirt printers well we said tell you

what if developers send us game art we'll make t-shirts for them and we happen to run this really big online e-commerce website it's really easy for us to put up pages to sell things so tell you what send us the art and if somebody orders something we'll go ahead will print the t-shirts send it out deal with payments will handle returns we'll deal with all of that so tell you what you set the price and when someone buys it we'll take out our cost of printing and sending it and then we'll cut you a check for the rest it's actually really that simple so we'll give you the tools online to do that and actually Amazon's not the only one that does this I mean people like Cafe Press do this as well they'll pretty sure we'll go ahead and maintain that page for you on amazon.com which is something on the amazon does and we'll take care of providing a tracking station so that you can actually see how well your t-shirts are doing and find out how much money they're making for you what you do is simply provide print ready art that means using Gamper means using Photoshop

or something like that to create a really good high-resolution image you don't let your t-shirt looking crummy no one wants to buy that you need to pick the type of shirt you want the color you want your design printed on and then you just send it to Amazon that's it it doesn't cost anything you don't have to spend any money you don't have to take any t-shirts when someone orders one will present will send it so even if the only person who ever buys one of the shirts is your mother ask me how I know you'll still make money you'll still get you know if you set the list price for 20 bucks your choice what you want to set the list price for we take out art costs for printing the shirt and then you send it we'll send you a check for the rest or actually we'll transfer the money to your bank account anyway so yeah I made seven dollars and sixty cents from my mother who actually bought one of my shirts for my game it was kind of cool I wasn't anything except the cost of sending the art up to Amazon but now at least my mother's wearing my game shirt around her knitting community this is what your page will look like on

Amazon dragon Vail has this really cool prism dragon that they've put up there that sells a whole bunch of shirts now if this is something you want to do get a copy of this presentation afterwards because or you actually take out your phones and take pictures of this because I get to share with you the tips that we've seen that make really good t-shirts and how to make sure you can actually sell a whole bunch of those t-shirts both in your game and out of your game so I'm not going to read through those but you can get a copy of the presentation later next is building a fan base okay what is the fan base a fan base for people who are going to watch your game spectators and then people who are going to be influencers and content creators for your game now I have a whole nother 30 minute presentation on building a fan base and how valuable a fan base can be what I want to do with the short time though that I've got is I want to cover spectators now you all know that eSports is a thing right and it's not just filling the World Cup Stadium in Seoul

South Korea for a league of Legends Championship it's also doing things like filling Madison Square Garden for a semi finals but it's also little people in little games too I mean it's it's certainly there's a lot of money concentrated in the big games but everybody's game can get some traffic just to give you an idea of the kind of traffic that's out there I'd like you to play along with me on this for that how many hours how many man-hours did it take to build a Great Pyramid of Giza any guesses shout something else all right quiet crowd not a problem 33 million hours is how long we think it took to build the Great Pyramid of Giza now the most popular video on YouTube does anyone have an idea what that is yes I'm not kidding seriously gangnam time is the most popular video on youtube and we have spent a hundred and

forty million hours watching that video which it's a little embarrassing right up until you think about March Madness March Madness the college basketball tournament we have here in the u.s. got six hundred and forty something million hours of people watching college basketball and if someone says they don't have time to put the dishes in the dishwasher justjust think about that number for a minute all right now how much time do we spend watching other people play video games four point eight billion hours four point eight billion hours and that's just on twitch Microsoft is getting into the game Google is getting into the game it's not just twitch anymore even though that number is just from twitch those are hours that people are spending watching all kinds of other games and you can monetize that with ads

you can monetize that with subscriptions and that works really well at scale but there's another way that we can monetize without you doing this at scale and that's by turning those spectators into participants now what does it mean to turn a spectator into a participant well it turns out that this is a fantasy for participants for spectators everywhere [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you have to be here alright so I've never actually done that but I have changed the outcome of a game I've been

watching because twitch now lets you connect to feed the the viewer feed and you can actually fire off events in the game based on things that the users type in and it looks a little bit like this no not like that it looks a little bit we do hit play on that for me thank you [Music] there - goodness yeah on except the occurs can't go out there just join yours so those two are the leaders in the warlords and now they're going to recruit got caters to play with them Scout sell many up all right we have an entire team of scalp it's definitely amazing soldiers accept all these viewers these

participants are independently thinking entities and they don't necessarily do with the Warlord's want at West a five pounds good get trucks definitely got its we need to point again watch off with our warlord again new to the right so the warlord is hoping all of the individual participants are doing the right thing however sometimes they don't got a joke CJ [Music] so it's not hard to do this for example we can create an object in this is lumberyard for example you can create a sphere and then once you've created a

sphere it's really easy to go ahead and create a impulse object create the impulse object that will make the sphere bounce up we're going to go ahead we're going to drag a onstart object over we're going to instantiate the twitch stream here and we're going to go ahead and look for the word keyword bounce down here and when we launch it it's going to go ahead and instantiate the twitch channel look for someone typing in the word bounce and when it sees the word bounce is going to go ahead and fire the impulse object on the sphere and it causes the sphere sphere to bounce okay that's really how easy it is to set this up and with twitch you can ask people to pay for it so that if you've got a a battle going on your participants your spectators can say hey for 99 cents you can buy three power-ups and you can drop those power-ups on teams via like kind of like you know you didn't Hunger Games you're one of the sponsors and you're dropping these power-ups and your tributes inside the

battle arena and for $0.99 if you can get some small fraction of that four point eight billion hours to start paying you to participate in the game pretty soon you're not going to measure success in player retention you're going to start measuring success in viewer retention kind of like every other mature industry is counting viewers and Perez as opposed to necessarily participants so the three things I want you guys to think about to generate more money from the intellectual property you've already developed is doing something insanely easy and low cost like selling t-shirts oh by the way the waiting list for that is seriously 12 months long if you want to be put into the front of the line send email to me my email address is on the next slide send me email send me a link to your game and I can make sure you get to the front of the line so that you can get in the program build a fan base it will help generate more activity for your

game and then turn those fans into participants by taking the game that you're building now and actually put in some ways that they can participate that you can monetize guys I hope this has been helpful I hope you actually can run more profitable successful businesses and include more people into having fun with your game as a result thank you very much for your time I appreciate it thank you much great [Applause] [Music]