Keynote: How to Monetise Mobile Games Beyond the App Stores

[Music] [Music] moving on we are going to now talk about how to monetize your mobile game outside of the app store so i think it'll be a little bit of a move around there are a few chairs although that's mine so uh let's give a couple of seconds for people to sort of who are leaving to get through if you're um if you're coming trying to get into the room could you let the people out first you'll find that it's going to make that life a lot easier and then if you are waiting to come in once those people have gone if i can get as many people to come in as possible and and fill up the seats so we have it's going to be much easier and we'll get less noise from outside if we get everyone in

so we're getting everyone to come on in come on down there are chairs at the front here and there's some chairs over here so come on through there's plenty of space he says trying to pack people in in the middle of a pandemic i didn't say that honest right lovely singing mika tell us all about what you're doing to help monetize beyond the app store so hello everybody uh my name is mikkelotya originally from finland um and i've been working in the mobile game industry for over 16 years now and today i work at exola as the original director for europe and my topic today for you guys i think i think it's an interesting times we're living in really like i think that uh when you talk about monetizing your mobile games um and you talk about app stores i think there's change there's change happening you know i think all of you guys who are here probably feel that that there is going to be some

change happening so that's my topic today so i'm going to give you a look on what you've been missing out on um and why so you understand a little bit the the what is the world outside of the the big mobile app stores right and this is more about coverage getting your players finding them allowing them to monetize okay so so first of all what you've been missing out on so you've been missing out on over 260 million uh potential players worldwide uh within the reach of the app stores that are not in the reach of the app stores so this is coming from people that you haven't reached because uh the the current app stores and including platforms like steam they simply do not support local and alternate alternative payment methods so and this is where the rest of the industry outside of mobile has been

doing leaps and bounds and they've been working uh a long time in terms of coverage we're talking about very large titles franchise titles like uh fortnites and roadblocks you know they are reaching they want to reach all the paying customers and the truth of the fact is right now if you look at the situation of the payment methods what is being covered by the app stores and this is i'm talking google steam uh apple you've been missing out on 260 million potential paying customers and these are the numbers i crunch for you so that's what you'll be missing out on i'm missing a slide here oh yeah anyways so i'm going to talk about our part global partner so a little bit about xola um so

excel has been operating for 16 years as a merchant record for video game companies on pc uh mobile um and all kinds of platforms so we're platform agnostic so some of the key partners that we have fortnite twitch uh app love intake two glue nexters nexon roblox pubg team 17 steam tilting point neddy's game at least goes on 1500 companies are using us worldwide so the data that i'm i'm showing you and and and this keynote that i want to make a point to is is based on the data of our partners uh and at dexola we're we're selling in the excess of uh for gross merchandise value every year easily over 1.5 billion dollars and this this this data speaks of volumes so the first time i joined xola one and a half years ago coming from the mobile space i asked myself what have i been missing out on uh in terms of working with mobile games

when it comes to payments reaching people enabling them to pay um so i'm going to talk to you about that uh in the next slide so first of all when we look at the the for example we have 700 payment methods at xola what does that mean so we wanted to come up with the delta and the difference between the app stores and for example the coverage we have uh at xola so this is like a thought exercise we wanted to understand really you know what have the mobile publishers been missing out on uh especially with the fact that you know the closed ecosystems have ruled uh this industry on mobile for so long and i think that time is uh you need to ask everybody in this room need to ask that question is that feasible anymore not only with the web 3 but when you look at the coverage emerging markets everything the control you have to your players direct relationship with your players right now

your relationship with your players is owned by those closed ecosystems is this the future is this something that you want to build your business on and i think the answer is overwhelmingly no i don't think that's where you want to build your business on you want to build your business on owning your own customers and that means enabling the ways to pay and the ways to play wherever what screen doesn't matter future is screens and not platforms and that's that's where uh these numbers come and become very interesting so that you understand what you're missing out right now when you're selling only through mobile platforms so in the united states for example um the customer base that we're looking such comparisons to mobile platforms google and apple you're basically missing out on one million new paying customers there um majority of us gamers own basically store gift cards so they use a lot of that which can stimulate the first time payments for loan payers and

improve customer retention has usage remains two times higher than western european countries which is interesting and then when you go to europe you're looking at 40 coverage increase what that means is three million new paying customers you're not reaching now with the mobile platforms that's a lot and these are people that can actively purchase things on your game you cannot reach because they cannot have they don't have access to pay essentially on the on the payment methods that you are getting offered by by the using the platforms that you're using so germany uk francis spain and italy are the five largest markets in europe uh respectively now germany is the largest single market with 20 percent of it covered by so forth as a payment method um and 15 by pay save card so that's huge and that's not being covered by by the platforms that uh you usually get when you work with apple or google

10 by amazon pay so that's pretty interesting and then when we go to latin america that's that's also a huge emerging market for mobile i know brazil especially for many of our mobile publisher partners that's super interesting so in mexico we have about 50 million players that makes it very attractive to developers brazil has 75.7 million players in total local credit card brands have over 50 market share so local payment methods local alternative payment methods are not supported by the platforms and this is something that you've been missing out on that's my big message today you've been missing out on this you've been held in a closed ecosystem and that's what you've been missing out on so for example in brazil specifically bullet flash which is a local bank accounts for over 15 of the whole payment market uh in that large market pix being the

instant payment method and it's it's becoming increasingly more and more popular and then of course we have china so china is interesting right but you know distribution rights is a whole other topic but then what we've learned is that we are able to process payments in china for example so we do that for many of our publishers so we process in-app purchases in china and that enables you access with 90 better coverage means 200 million new paying gamers that you can access that neither google or apple can't support so that's what you're missing out on um and 54 of the payment transactions happen via alipay wechat and they all require usually a complicated kyc to even get there so our model of operation is a merchant record so we can actually help you sell for example in territories where you wouldn't otherwise be able to sell so that's that's what you've been missing out on south korea

you can increase your customer base there by five million new paying customers credit cards debit cards account for 55 of the south korean market and these are local really local credit cards local debit cards that are not supported by the big gaming platforms that's why we're supporting genji impact you know epic all of the big companies there because they want to reach those players that love their games but simply do not have access to international payment methods and i think that's that's what i'm trying to make the point here access to international payment methods the future in my opinion is where emerging markets are leading is in alternative payment methods the western market we're happy with our you know international payment bureaus because we have access to that but local markets emerging markets have been innovating on this much more than the western markets out of necessity because they had to but the fact is the established

platforms on mobile simply haven't kept up to speed so that's the news that i'm bringing you for today in south korea going back to that the mobile payments and prepaid cards account over 32 market share so um local digital wallets are in the rise with 10 of the market share in south korea and then when we hop into russia where you have 50 increased coverage compared to the established platforms you that means 5 million new paying customers 65 million gamers which is roughly equal to the size of japan's gaming population in russia russian gamers still prefer local payment options to global ones and that's again a narrative that keeps on going with these emerging markets so that's what i'm trying to try to get you guys understand and start asking those questions um 90 of the cards are issued by local banks again and when we go to japan mentioning it the customer base when it mean when

we're talking about 35 seems kind of slow so kind of small sorry but it's actually 20 million new paying customers you're you're not having people that don't have access to those international payment methods so you're missing out on 20 million players in japan every day when you're when you're reliant on on closed ecosystems and the the cash pay cash-based payment methods account for about 20 of the market share there uh also they rank the second in terms of the right behind the credit cards in terms of market share so cash is keying in japan funnily enough web money a payment method has 10 markets here mobile payments have have a quite large share as well at five percent and then when we go to a very hot market everybody talks to me about turkey right now and and turkey being hot market i see the numbers i see i see the numbers that our partners at a very large scale uh are

processing there and i it's exciting like even even turkey itself we're talking about 5 million new paying gamers that you're you're missing out right now so 5 million and that comes out of the 25 increase in coverage and there's 30 million gamers in turkey mobile game revenue in turkey is 145 142 million with an annual growth rate of seven percent so that's that's why everybody's talking about turkey and we see that but also the platforms the closed ecosystems are not keeping up with the demand in terms of access for people to pay in the games that they play they might play your game but they have they don't again have access to pay and that's uh really capturing the market of 30 million gamers in turkey mobile payments are also on the rise there because that's so simple and again emerging markets are really focused on innovating for people to find easy ways

to pay where the west has stagnated in a sense but that's why the western closed ecosystems have also kind of they have some catching up to do and do will they ever catch up that's the question so what can you do today uh many people that i talk to on mobile they ask me like okay well there's the whole apple versus epic thing happening and i just rather wait in a bunker uh and see what happens and how the dice rolls i mean the truth is you know i read i read in the news that 35 states in the united states are are being bankrolled by microsoft to to go against apple so that's interesting uh apple proposed to basically say that okay here's our plan and here's the commission that we will take and i don't know what the plan was but apple got 5 million and they were asked to resubmit so that's what's happening so you're you

know you follow that space that's interesting but the question remains how can you reach that market of 260 million paying customers you're not reaching right now so some of our partners the way they're approaching this is obviously cross-platform so when you create a web or pc version of your mobile game that's when you have liberty to choose for example the payment methods choose a partner that can give you access to the payment methods to be able to sell to a really truly global coverage which is something that's completely understated right now with the closed ecosystems out there so the other interesting thing and gaining popularity by the day is uh what we coined webshop that's by no means it's just a terminology mechanical terminology where essentially mobile games create a in-game store if you will on a website and they sell specific like high-value bundles there usually so many

of our partners are selling bundles that may cost hundreds hundreds of and um they are making really they're basically migrating most of their whales to that platform because it's more profitable they get more coverage they get access to those players that they're missing out on and this is an easy venue for them to be able to offer also more customized offers for their players so we see our partners like you know scopely uploading uh tilting point doing leaves and bonds on that and then finally of course android sdk you know android and third-party stores somebody in my earlier fireside chat was nice enough to ask me like so what about the third-party stores many of them can't do in-app purchases right so my prediction is that in the future uh we look at this third part first party stores third-party stores my prediction is that the future is going to be publisher stores

i feel that in the future to enable metaverse there needs to be a removal of these platforms that are holding back the evolution of the industry and with web3 hyperlinks power needs to be coming through with whatever the platform is closed ecosystems do not and cannot exist uh to support web3 because the idea of web3 is to enable true access in terms of web3 that you get a hyperlink you can pay with that hyperlink you can play whatever the screen is whatever the device is instantly whatever screen you're looking at you can pay and play and do whatever in the game and i think in order to get there really that is i think the big big question you all need to be asking yourselves like what is the future is it going to be closed ecosystems open ecosystems you can already take control by creating your own customer base your own publisher id or developer id

system that legally allows you to actually hold those customers as your own so many many what we're seeing is across the industry people are creating their own ids id setups that exist outside of the mobile store so app stores no longer own your customers they don't no longer own your players so now is the time to look into that and ask that question do i want to own my customers independent of those closed ecosystems thank you thank you very much that's excellent um so i have plenty of things i could ask uh and you are the first person to say metaverse since we started this afternoon so dick uh anyone else want to ask a question before i kind of go on uh right so i'm gonna sort of post the thing so there is a lot of of momentum at the moment obviously between epic and steam and also you know app store apple and google i think i imagine all sorts of places are going to cause problems

we've had all the change with the idfa being removed and the issues that that's caused ironically putting apple arguably in a better position because of the process you're hinting that this is the start of a process not the end of it do you think that we're seeing the sort of death rattles of the closed ecosystem or is there actually a lot more fight left in the old girl yet yeah i think the the reason that you have to ask when you look at uh these closed ecosystems that the business model was created when i started in the mobile game industry 16 years ago we were first selling games directly to operators and then the good old days the good old days funny but you know not so much money right um and then app store came and it opened up a big venue for for selling in-game goods right like they created the microtransaction for mobile games and that really i'd already done that i did that in 2003. yeah and and then what what happened is like you look at that system was designed 10

years ago yeah so you have to ask is that the grandpa overstaying a christmas visit i i'm not i'm not perfect 20 years ago but i think i said that's we're out of time but i mean i think this is a really interesting area and i think a lot of stuff that you're trying to do is really interesting because we shouldn't we can't just stick with one store anymore we can't stick with the ones that are obvious i think there's there's so much inherent inertia and what we need to do is find ways to reduce the friction to get to players not put up with the friction yeah that's what web 3 is about right reducing that freaks and allowing access whether you believe in nfts or not that's a different subject we'll talk about another time mika thank you so much [Applause] [Music]

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