Keynote Beyond Revenue - Teis Anker Mikkelsen, Founder OF Multiscription.

foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you everyone for showing up and taking time out of your busy schedules and this is the first Conference of the Year everyone's excited energetic got your 2023 budget approved and I'll go out and execute on the plans and then we'll panic when we meet in Helsinki later this year and about all the stuff that didn't happen but hopefully I can um I can help you with your subscription if that's what you're talking about just to explain a bit more what we do I think

we're on the last slide as can we go to the first slide I think this is the last slide yeah we're starting the last slide but anyways let me introduce myself um while we're reversing the slides here I'm ties I'm the founder and CEO of multi-description we as mentioned in the company behind Unleashed which is our subscription service for mobile games focused on free to play so my own background is actually in-game development so those of you who work in game developmental publishing I used to be on on your side of the table now I moved to this side of the table this side of the microphone you could say to talk about monetization so I worked with i o interactive worked on the Hitman franchise as a producer on that you're probably the most familiar game from them um with Movie Star Planet as the chief product officer there on the online game for kids and then for if there are any

Swiss people in the crowd you'll know this horrible logo it's it's a company called ricardo.ch it's an online Marketplace I put that in there because it's very relevant for what we're going to talk about firstly just to get the the sort of the Unleashed pad out of the way so you know why I'm talking or why we sort of claim to know what we're talking about is Unleashed that's our subscription service for mobile games is currently live on Android we have 22 games live right now and the way it works is that it works by integrating the subscription into the game instead of putting the game into the subscription going to come back to that in a minute we then make Partnerships with developers who then work with us on identifying what kind of benefits to give to subscribers and then become part of the network and they become part of the service I won't go into too much detail about that you're very welcome to either ask questions afterwards or drop by our booth downstairs and talk more about

specifically how Unleashed can help you so to move on to the topic the in-game subscriptions one thing that's important to understand as we get into the topic is the difference between an in-game subscription and a let's say other kinds of subscription first one there's these I actually call them publisher subscriptions even though you might say what Apple arcade how's that a publish a scripts description well it's it's a it's a type of subscription where your game is being brought into in other ones and other companies publishing uh how to say uh publishing arm so when you put your game on App locate um you actually it's actually Apple publishing your game right you don't have your own store anymore you know your own install page the same with Netflix Netflix is a publisher of games this there's nothing wrong with these two Services great Services great games

um one of my favorite games the last few years actually is what the golf it's an apple arcade I highly recommend it it's a great game but it's very different it works very differently from what I'm talking about the in-game subscription because as a publisher developer when you put your game into these services you don't really you don't work with them that much you sort of they they do the the work for you so to speak I know there's some live apps especially an arcade but still another one is the subscription Stores um some of our good friends here on the screen again this is where you put your game into a subscription store and you're typically not dealing with them um yourself on a daily basis you don't have to how to say figure out what to put in what not to put in great companies as well go check them out if that's if that's your thing and a lot of them work in search area markets and sort of additional Revenue outside of your primary markets so getting back to what the benefits are

often in-game subscription Beyond of course the revenue the first one is retention and retention is I think going to be the key metric then in the coming years uh for a number of reasons firstly it's because we see the user acquisition problems I think I don't go into all the details here because I think we all know the problems right with both Google and apple is making very very difficult for Publishers and developers to find the right users and to track the users in in the way where they can sort of do the the math on on basically making making the calculations on on the user and the return on investment we've also seen as part of this but also separately the rise of a new way costs and we still have the problem with it's really hard to get your game it's really hard for the players to find your game especially now after you see the likes of Apple arcade and Google Play pass because they now also take up space like apple

takes up space promoting applique and then you have all the the typical games you always see in the feature charts on the top charts and that means there's just less space for everyone else so retention is going to be impossible it can be important because when the user acquisition lifetime cycle that has been this um perfect symbiosis you've seen over the last couple of years maybe 10 years that's now being broken down because it doesn't really work anymore so now instead of putting the players into let's say a leaking bucket you're going to focus more on retaining the players that you already brought in and subscription will help you with this and I'm not just talking about at least we of course think we we can help you a lot but this is something that you see across the board I mean you see it probably yourself Let's Take It Outside of games let's talk about um Saturday night if you want to watch a movie well you go to Disney Plus or HBO

on Netflix whichever you've already paid for you don't go to Blockbuster anymore to rent a movie Case in point right because you go to where you already paid the reason for that is when you feel like you already spent you don't want to spend again you also feel a how to say a um a closer connection to the service this might sound counter-intuitive but um that's actually just that's how we work if we if we're paid into something we now it now becomes our brand now we feel that okay now I'm engaged in this brand in a different way than I was before when I didn't pay for it which means that you are more likely to come back so if you have a subscription in your game people the players will feel they're more likely to come come back to your game compared to any other game where you just had a number of in-app purchases having sold them in their purchase as you probably know is still a good indicator of whether or not this

player is going to come back once you've made the first purchase it's the hardest one they're more likely to come back and they're more likely to spend more but with a subscription they're actually more likely to be retained yeah put in this all you can eat buffet it's a kind of idea when you see people at a buffet right and they they just stack you know dish upon dish all they can have because they paid for it so they're gonna get the max out of it it's the same we do with our applicate Unleashed or Netflix subscriptions um yeah you basically don't wanna you don't want to lose out on what you've already paid for another related bonus to this is that once you have people in your subscribe subscription it's actually easier to reactivate them to come back and get the benefits of them because you can remind them of the benefits they're getting you can always remind players to come back to your game do you have a new event or you have a new theme out you have new levels whatever you do but that's more things that they don't really own yet but it remind them of things they already have that's just

waiting for them it's a bit like the battle pass idea right subscription is is very linked to a battle pass or season pass it's not necessarily the same thing but there's some of the same mechanics you remind that there's something waiting for you when you come back another one and this one I could do a whole talk on this is subscription builds Community it's extremely interesting and I think it's something that we're just scratching the surface of right now it's when you when you have a subscription service as I said we have a subscription in your game you build a closer connection to the game to the brand you become more how to say um more engaged in it you start feeling ownership of the brand and actually you become a brand ambassador there's people who will argue which service is better Netflix or Disney Plus which is a weird discussion to have because you should really be discussing which shows are the best but you start comparing now and now people get this

brand loyalty are you I used it used to be are you an HBO person or Netflix person I'm HBO okay you're a little bit Posh why do you watch the fancy artsy movies I'm more of a mainstream Netflix guy myself and that's the sort of brand loyalty that's being built over uh the community also over time with the with this and the the interesting thing is because people keep coming back and start building and sort of affiliation with the brand you can also start building a community on top of that so usually we see it the other way around we see that you start with the community and then you add subscription features on top to monetize that Community you probably do that in your games as well you build up a great game then you build a community on top of the game and then you maybe build some features to monetize that Community you already built but with subscription we start seeing things the other way around

so some examples of the first thing I talked about Twitter and Discord they started out as communities broadly speaking the starters communities and then there were premium features added on top that you could subscribe to and get benefits but really now it's the reversal this is what we are building with at least and this is we can see it other services well you start by having people create and attachment to the brand a reason to come back and then you can build the community and add Community features on that another benefit it's I sort of said beyond Revenue this is in in and also Revenue you could say but uh it's different from the recurring Revenue you normally think about which uh as part of the subscription because when we talk about this strike by the way I should introduce the track a little bit since we're sponsoring it we created this recurring Revenue track

because we feel that there should be more focus on subscription not just for us but also for the other great companies you saw on the screen for before and we also saw that there's a lot of how to say desire for more information I can tell you I've been doing these talks for a couple of years now and we used to be able to only feel like two two rows here I think and I I'm I'm very thankful forever locate actually I thank them a lot because they created a new a new room for me basically to stand here and talk to you was it not very blockade we would still only maybe would be three rows deep now but that would be it so everyone's talking about subscription to mobile games now and that's thanks to Avocado now Netflix as well um so that's why we created this track to explain okay subscription is actually more than just recurring Revenue it has a lot of other things uh in it as well and I'm just going to plug the uh the panel that's going to be here and

22 3 that I'm moderating where we have some really interesting panelists talking about um how they see the future of um subscriptions and the benefits for you guys so anyways going back to the sort of Revenue but not Revenue so it's it's not the recurring Revenue that you thought about but it's a additional Revenue one thing we always recommend is that you have in-app purchases in your game even though you add subscription in game we usually say that it should rest on Three Lakes humanitarization adds for those who can't or for some reason won't pay anything and then you have in-app purchase for those who are most comfortable with that which is a still the the largest majority let's be honest about that but but shrinking and then lastly subscription for those who who moving in that direction from movies and and music Etc and what actually happens is that people

once they start subscribing they actually start spending more um I realize this headline is a bit misleading it should be either spending sort of twice because they're also spending on in-app purchase but this is some interesting data it's actually a few years old now from the super data about um how people start spending more after they subscribe and it's very very important the uh the the cause and effect here they don't subscribe because I already spent you can ask the same question to to Amazon this is basically the whole concept of Amazon Prime they see that once people become Prime members they start spending more it's not the other way around it's not because you're a big spender and then you become a subscriber and the reason for this is as we talked about in the first um the first slides about retention right you already paid so now you want to get something out of it free Amazon Prime membership is like I have free

shipping but that's only worth something if I start buying something so I better start buying more toilet paper whatever it is to get something for my free shipping the same thing we see with games happening is that now I'm already spent so that's basically a new threshold you created so if you put in an in-game subscription you're just increasing the Baseline of your revenue and then you can sell on top remember you still have ads to those who don't subscribe and you can still sell your in-app purchase on top we always recommend that people do this we always recommend another reason for this is you have um your Big Spenders and they're always going to be there and you need to give them something to buy they want to invest in your game I remember playing one of my favorite games PC called Crusader Kings 2 great game I love the game I played the heck out of that game I wanted to buy more I couldn't there wasn't anything I could buy it was a premium game I was looking

at sort of paradox website and see is there anything I can buy from this company that I don't have iron across and I have all the others what can I do the only thing I could do was actually just uh I found I found their bank account on their website in the corporate page and you could I could transfer the money that's that's all I could do to to spend more on the game that I love so much don't don't do that don't don't be like that I mean great company great game but give me a give me a way to spend more on your game please I want to spend on it because I really enjoyed um also you can't make a subscription service that caters for everyone that's another thing because you have people with different um spending abilities uh in your game so you that's a way to create a baseline in subscription and then sell in-app purchases on top uh that covered this already so it's after signing up so when you go back and you do your Excel sheets you can calculate this and how much impossible to say but this is something that you're

probably going to be challenged with when you present this at home um this is but this is again look at look at I think Ubisoft or Microsoft I think is Ubisoft they talk about it as well uh once people start maybe it's Microsoft to forget one of the two that they see the same on consoles once people start become a subscriber they spend more as I said lots of opportunities for upsell in that um again I don't have time I have a whole talk about this actually uh from Pocket Gamer that we've got into drop down our booth I would love to dive more into details about what kind of benefits you should sell as an upsell in the game so yeah um beyond the revenue the benefits we talked about retention people come back to where they already spent the community building community on top of subscription and not the other way around and then upselling give people a way to spend more

in your game as I said we have a wealth of resources on our website so go and check that out this is some of them these are either talks or blogs and actually we have a whole blog on top of this where you can um where you can read more or watch more about the different benefits lots of different stuff there so uh thank you very much for taking the time to drop by um hope you have a great conference and now we have time for a few questions if you can just put your hand up so I can bring you the mic Ron oh we got one here um when you're saying when you sing about different like payment methods uh that you can use for the player sorry I can't hear oh sorry um obviously there's a lot of um really good like ways to get uh players to spend more but like what would be

obviously right now it's battle passes but if you could predict um a way that players could like spend more money on your game what would it be would it be like something like DLC or like um certain currency in the game um yeah guess what I'm asking is like uh what's the best way to earn uh a good amount of money uh from your game and from your project first of all um I think the best way to make money on your players is to give them offer them something they want to buy there's a whole you know topic around dark pattern and uh and and how to say about benefits some things actually helped you where you're just creating annoying obstacles that you want people to pay for I think it's a longer topic offer them something that actually brings them happiness and not just something that removes friction that you created from them that's the first thing second thing I think the battle pass is extremely strong mechanic I think it's one of the strongest ones we've seen and there's a reason why I

think it's like 90 of the top 15 grows in games all have a battle pass or similar mechanic I would probably link the battle pass with a subscription so make an in-game subscription that has battle pass like mechanics and then to to answer the last part of your question what to upsell that completely depends on the game there's no uh there's no there's no right or wrong for this but one thing you could say is that one thing that's wrong to put in a subscription is soft currency so if you put in subscript we have a subscription you put in soft currency and you give a thousand coins once a month you get the thousand coins and then you leave you could do it as a daily allowance but maybe not all games work well with the daily allowance in the game of the thousand coins so you could sell those on top as in-app purchases for example alongside the subscription I hope that answered the question otherwise Booth downstairs come down have a chat we might type question if anyone's

there's one over here how many months is a good Target for a subscription um again it did it depends um so much in the game I can say ours is a monthly subscription and it's recurring so people sign up and they how to say stay on I would say the um there's a huge difference again between hyper casual we have some hyper casual games on and we have some uh I think it's almost 10 year old really really solid award-winning games on that have very small amount of users but they stay it's very it's it's almost impossible to give like an average of of what is a if you mean like retention of subscribers is that what you mean yeah it's it's impossible to say it's impossible to say because the games are so different the game's so different

foreign [Music] [Applause]