Keynote: Mobile Games Monetization Beyond App Stores in 2022

[Music] we've got another cracking session coming up now for people that like money they'd be like money here hopefully you do um this is about mobile game monetization um and the new opportunities really that are opened up by uh stepping outside the wall gardens uh the new regulations um and i'm delighted to welcome uh both uh hannah and nick from zoller well first off i want to say thank you for everyone joining us it's great to be in person i don't know if the summer views is your first conference back or not but it's so nice to see more than just you know people's uh

faces and actually see body language so i know if you guys are entertained or bored or or like that um my name is nick yamuchi and a lot of people call me yama i mainly focus on all right i'm a business developer with xola my main focus is pc and mobile everything that's going on has really brought us into the mobile industry and hannah zhang here is my wonderful co-host thanks yama um hello everyone my name is hannah zang i work as a bd manager in axola so i had several years working experiencing a mobile game publisher and right now i'm helping axola to onboard mobile game partners and provide a webshop solution for them to monetize their game outside of app stores thank you so before we start uh i'll give you guys an overview of if you don't know who we are axolo we're a global video game

commerce company we try to help create a white label store for developers and publishers to sell their game keys their their virtual items and currencies we're headquartered in los angeles and we have offices all over the world and we keep growing and expanding and it's been a wonderful journey it's nice to be part of a company where i feel like what i'm selling to to you guys uh is a great benefit versus selling something that's just a quick cash grab i guess i would say we have partners that range from aaa all the way to indies each integration has been different and unique so we have a lot of experience trying to help you guys do different things we understand that not every integration is the same um even though it's payments but there's different ways to do payments and we we're here to help you guys do whatever you need when you need it so first we'll start off with hannah talking about the challenges that mobile developers have been facing over the last couple years yeah so there always

have some challenges facing mobile game developers and publishers well they try to monetize their game outside of app stores so first challenge is a high percentage taken by app stores as everyone knows apple store and google play store take 30 percent per each transaction from mobile game developers and publishers which means mobile game companies will have less budget to do ua and marketing which are very important for mobile game to grow and also attract users and second so it's very difficult to uh the the discoverability for mobile games is is also an issue so uh from the data from last year uh there are uh 500 games launched every year

every day so it's uh it's very difficult for a mobile game to get features and get exposure to a lot of users and also it's very difficult for users to fund specific game within the app stores um lastly uh because of apple's idfa regulation so mobile game companies has some issues to um fund their user data and information so it's very difficult for mobile games to do ua player segmentation um and marketing yeah that's that's a difficult because the difficult um epic games is having the lawsuit with apple so i know yama you also monitored allows you very closely do you want to share any uh like insights about

uh this lawsuit and how do you think this will impact the mobile game uh industry and monetization um thank you for that i think this is actually going to revelation revolutionize the mobile game industry because uh it's opening the door for developers to be able to reach their players in more markets right being able to only be on the app store the google play store really limits what you're capable of doing you have to follow those regulations versus when epic said hey you know what enough's enough let me let me stick it to the big guy by another big eye it opened the window to say okay what can we do and developers now are able to kind of market themselves which i think is super important i don't know if you guys ever heard as developers where someone's like hey have you checked out that steam game or have you checked out that game on google play or apple and it's pointing towards them instead of giving the developer credit that they deserve right it's a better roi especially if you're paying for marketing to send it to yourself so you know who they are so

what's great about this and it's opening up is you get more online payments you get to be in more markets you get a market yourself you get to create a custom white label page for yourself and it really allows you to get more out of what you're selling versus just selling on the app store and it being what it is you know yeah yeah exactly um and what's wonderful is we're seeing governments kind of open up to this we're seeing countries open up to this and um you being in the publishing you can kind of talk about some of the great new openings for it yeah so uh from last year as somebody maybe monitored the lawsuit very closely um we could find that it really the lawsuit really changed the dynamic and also the regulation for the in-store ecosystem so from last year around august apple has announced because the pressure from the lawsuit apple has announced that

they will like developer to email their users about the third-party payment options and also in the earlier of this year apple has announced that they will let developer from south korea and netherlands to provide the third party payment options to their users so the trends are apple may eventually lifted restriction for many more countries to that developer to uh provide third party payment options for their users and also uh developers are more aware of the options to contact their user to pay directly to avoid the platform fees so i know yama you also monitor the new regulation and and also the loss do you have any recommendations

for developer like what they can do or cannot do nowadays based on the news yeah i do if you can see so some of the simple ones i'll start with the negatives because this is what i really was hoping it will change right once once these two rules um hopefully come into place and i know that there's uh korea's already being able to or they're talking about is one being able to link your store from in-app to your actual website is going to be a huge deal right i think a lot of players when they discuss well how am i going to get people to my website well if there's a link directly to it how much easier can it get well i'll tell you you can actually put payments in the app and that's the part that we are hoping to with these two changes hopefully coming in the next few years it really is going to change the mobile game right you're going to be able to have those direct payments in your app you're not going to have to inconvenience your players it's going to be there it'll be easy until that happens what you're able to do is you're able to market to it

i think this is an amazing change it's a great start is that you're able to email your users who downloaded it from from apple that you can say hey by the way thank you for being a user thank you for subscribing by the way why don't you come support us on our website why don't you come directly to us and get your name out even more a lot of people are using intermediaries they're using influencers they're using their discord channels to get their markets out there but it really opens the door for your users to come to your site um and because of this like i said more markets equals more sales and who doesn't like more money um so hannah hannah's going to go over quickly what's uh what you're capable of selling from your webshops using our xola tools yeah so speaking of the web store um so xola is currently provide a webshop solution for mobile game companies um this solution allows mobile games

mobile game companies to to create a web store outside of their mobile games to let their users to pay uh to purchase inks in-game item and currency and subscription directly to their website so um developer by doing this they will have a lot of benefits and advantages uh by using xola's web store so first uh developer can create online new uh destination for their players to purchase in-game item currency and subscription and it's allowed developer to create a new revenue stream beyond the app stores so second um this solution also helps developer to avoid the 30 percent uh

shares with apple and google because for the web store developer will have the option to choose which payment provider to cooperate with they have the flexibility and options to um to to to choose which partner they want to cooperate with yeah and with that um because you don't have to pay the the 30 platform fee you're saving up to 20 with the solas platform we become the merchant of record which pretty much means become the agent to take over for selling your items which means it incorporates selling sales tax and vat i don't know how many of you guys are accountants or enjoy doing that but we do we'll take it for you and it saves you a lot of time also because of that we have over 700 different payment methods and i don't know if you guys know that there's a lot more payment methods than credit cards but users in different countries don't always use apple pay google pay credit cards right and if you are selling a

game and you're not having the payment methods your users are using you're not going to capture those cells right and so with that coming off the store and making your own shop apple has a limit of 99 so most popular games have these things called whales and what they want to do is buy as much as they can and make it as easy you can create like a concierge service for your whales and say okay well this package is going to be 125 130 and really give them more for their buck right so you're capitalizing on those players that are going to spend more by allowing them to get more for their dollar and so they're going to then tell the other wills hey by the way have you checked out these packages so word of mouth is one of the best ways to spread your game's popularity and you have a shop to go to it so those are some great benefits of it so talking about payments uh i think we know what we're doing when it comes to payments um for instance if you go to even the us there's over a million

users that don't just use credit cards they have gift cards they use cash payments in mexico they're they're they use like oxo in brazil which is almost 75 million users they use flac or pix and flaco flash or something i might be saying that wrong i apologize in germany it's pay safe card i mean in china they have uh alleypay and wechat pay yeah yeah so opening up to that um it allows you to have all those payment methods and technically you could create your own web shop and technically you can talk to these payment methods but the problem is then you're in charge of all the regulations you're in charge of making sure you're doing all the taxes so it just makes sense to have a company like a solar that can take care of all that for you at a wonderful low cost of five percent um so now what we're going to do is because we've talked a lot uh and we didn't want to over or bombard you with everything we can do but mobile i think that's what

this conference is about um we're gonna open up for questions because we know it's important for you guys to discuss it and we as much as i like hearing my voice um it's nice to hear from you guys as well yes so do any of you guys have questions just let me go we have an extra mic too there's a question here i'll i'll do i'll do the running thank you sounds good i could do the exercise know what you're thinking what's that thank you what's exercising hi um my name is daniel from spike in megaport in us office um thank you for your speech and it's very good information um speaking of the payment option for like not even us but you know company of country doesn't have payment option like brazil um we do have a lot of you know players coming from brazil even if they want to pay but um as you may know like maybe like 90 90 they don't have a credit card about five

percent they only have interest credit card uh meaning that even if they want to pay they are not able to pay so can you maybe apply those your solution to specific country where like you can do that too yeah so what's nice is you can you can also do regional pricing right so if you sell a package that's 120 or 20 in certain countries that's a lot so if you do regional pricing which are our publisher account allows you to it also makes it specific for that dollar as well or the ruble or uh oh my god what is it what what do they use in person mine blankets aletto yes yeah so you can make it in that currency as well and we have a couple payment methods like i said pix um blotto flash and stuff like that so yes you can do that for specific countries so i know that it is not legal right now but how does that maybe relations between like app stores at google and especially google um because what publisher or developer comes wondering is that what if we i mean if we work

with some other third party payment solution oh what if google may not like it so we're gonna make it a feature in the app store like do you see any other like cases like that so we we've heard that concern a lot but we've yet to see a partner be punished for doing it especially now with the new regulations apple explicitly said you're able to do this what you can't do is put the payments in the app and you can't link the store but you can announce your store you can say it and it's completely legal to sell your own currencies what we recommend is if you have like a base package keep that the same that that would help prevent them from trying to turn you off but we haven't had any partners get turned off from that yet yeah and also for the web store you monetize your web store outside of the game outside of the app stores so there's no conflict with in-store uh in-game uh in-store ecosystem yes so there's no conflict with apple and google thank you thank you for answering good question

do we have any other any more questions out there we have three minutes and 32 seconds counting down all right i'm gonna come over i'm gonna sweat on there it's just okay hi um thanks for the insights very helpful uh will you allow crypto payments so we have a a wallet called bitpay and that whatever payments are in there are allowed to be in it however we don't accept straight ethereum or bitcoin ourselves and the reason why is we just want to make sure if any fluctuation or anything happens we we keep you guys safe as well right there's a lot of things going on where say someone hacks your account they take it we can't do a refund or protect you because there's no way of getting it back so us ourselves no but we have a wallet called bitpay is the fluctuation in bitcoin i didn't realize just a little bit just don't look at your holdings today i'd suggest um any other questions out there i'm gonna ask them then so um sure oh if

i can yeah so i uh there's there's a lot i know there's a lot of services all that's like offering and i'm just pure on the payment side what sort of percentage uptick are you seeing from people that are utilizing this that that are making the most of going outside the wool gardens what sort of revenue increase can i can i expect as an average developer and those are variants right yeah so one it's a variant two i can't talk specific partners on how much more money but just expect uh your per purchase would be about 20 increase in revenue because you don't have to pay that 30 percent revenue right so it's rx solar fee payment system fee and then you know the standard taxes but you hope to because you're making it easier hope to unlock other revenue as well exactly well you're opening more markets more people are able to pay uh you're you're able to offer better packages so there's a better potential to make more money on your website than just going through the app store and how easy is this to do

um button press i think it's pretty simple especially if you keep it simple like you're selling just coin packages it can get a little more complicated if you're putting up a thousand items of course and you're having different price points and all that stuff but uh we our team has uh integration managers sales engineers product owners business owners to help you with that process if it gets complicated so you have a team to guide you into it cool and you are outside in the expo and here all in the expo you walk in you'll see a tv and it should be hopefully playing something and then we'll be there with three tapes and they're handing out free money uh at the store he's probably not doing that we're handing out free mouse pads if anything yes pads which is almost as good yeah they are i'll use two of them come get them please i do not want to take them back fantastic all right thank you so much uh guy thank you thank you everyone