Levelling up in the new era: Unlocking Success Amidst Evolving Marketing & Privacy Regulation.

[Music] [Music] without further Ado I want to Welcome to the stage Jesse anus from RE actor who's talking about leveling up in the new era unlocking success amidst evolving marketing and privacy regulation I tell you this is good give him a round of applause [Applause] please

so yeah in addition to the just going through what the regulation changes that we're talking about are I'm going to look at some of the things that we have seen that companies do that work even in this new environment and maybe even because of this new environment and and we're going to see I have Cherry Picked some of the things that that work and maybe they work for different kinds of companies at a different level maybe they work for different different companies different kinds of games some of them work for casual for some you need a bit of more hardcore game to for it for it actually be for you but and and if there if you don't find anything that you see that works for you then just come and talk to us and also after this there's going to be a panel discussion about the topic with some of the industry experts who actually actually work with this every day so

stay tuned for that as well so first we're going to take a look at the regulation landscape and the policy landscape a bit so where did we come come to this and why should we care about care about this and especially we start start with the why because I guess many of you have seen this graph it's from the data AI gaming Trends review last year uh and you can see the top line mobile gaming consumer spending it in 2021 or since 2021 there's been a dip in that and data AI former app Annie their analyst attribute most of this dip to Apple adding AB tracking transparency the ATT in iOS 14.5 so that's the thing where you get

the popup that asks do you allow this app to track you between web pages and different apps and based on some of the some of the industry veterans they say that the uh accept rate to that is something like between 40 and 50% depending on on where you go what's your game and that like those people who accept that they get better or or targeted ads and other people don't and now Google is adding their own or actually uh has already added their own version of this or kind of there's the Google content management platform the CMP that I guess if you work in mobile games and you have ads you have had to implement this by now already and that adds to this because now especially on iOS devices you get two prompts you get the at prompt and

you get the CMP prompt and that's possibly uh an issue for many of us from the user experience standpoint and of course during the past few years there's been a lot of changes there's the gdpr there's the Californian uh version of that and we've seen EU Tagle or or take their stands on the uh loot Box Thing that has happened during the past few years a lot of EU countries and the UK have their own stance uh they see it has gambling perhaps there's been a lot of uh court cases especially I think in Belgium and Netherlands for several years now and a lot of EU countries European countries have taken a stand on that and also this relates to uh

minor protection as well so there are stricter rules for miners now and of course if you have your game in China then you have seen that they also are doubling down on the regulations so it has been a bit difficult there for Western game companies especially excuse me and it probably will get even more difficult in the future but the big things are the dma D and DSA that we're going to look a bit next so the DSA Digital Services act this adds some additional obligations to things that EU sees as online platforms uh it prohibits using sensitive personal data for targeted advertising that means like gender data or religion or ethnicity and and so on

and it prohibits the use of do pattern for these online Platforms in many cases uh ads targeted ads cannot be served to minors in on online platforms and so on and there are of course some very good things for for users as well because there's a lot of transparency to moderation and if there are automated decisions that the platform does there has to be transparent rues tools that they use if you follow any say YouTube [Music] influencer if you follow any YouTube influencer then you have probably seen them complain about YouTube demonetizing some of their videos and not telling why and after this uh people have have to have that answers to those questions excuse me

and yeah but we don't know how many games are online Platforms in this uh in this DSA sense sorry about that so most of games probably are not online Platforms in sense CU social platforms are are online platforms and uh Amazon like and eBay are online platforms because people sell stuff there but uh if you have a website with articles and then there is a comment section under those articles that does not count as an online platform so most of the games probably not some like like uh Roblox

or or fortnite probably maybe or maybe that's the gray area we don't know yet or at least I don't somebody probably does and then there's the big one the dma digital markets act comes into effect in March EU has designated six gatekeeper companies that have these big platforms that they control and they are listed here and they were designated on September 6th so there's six months after that that the all of these come into effect so probably March Sixth and it adds a lot of rules to what these Gatekeepers can do so how they can police uh people like for example uploading apps to the App Store and and so

on and it tries to they say level the Playfield so that other companies can join in and and do things that the platforms are actually controlling right now and they they are deciding who can do what and some of the things that it it uh gives us is for example on iOS it's possible to now have third party app stores and that's what we're going to look a bit as well now so of course this is Apple we don't yet know what this will mean in practice and like MDM might be able to block this alog together so if you have a company phone the company policy might just block all of these third party app stores but but of course on Android side

there are a bunch of different app stores already and we know which are the big ones and so some of them might appear on Apple as well I'm pretty sure there are a few games companies that have their own platform already almost ready for publishing at this at this time if they will be allowed as as we would expect oh thanks yeah oh this is very good service this is very good service I expect questions ler yeah okay so it's possible that there will be heavier sandboxing for these offside loaded or third party app store games and so on but we don't know what

that will that will be but of course we see a lot of opportunities as well so there might be different big app store brands you maybe don't have to be in the Apple App Store to be feasible in on iOS new advertising Avenues ways to attribute installs and so on then the second part so what are the things that we can do in this landscape what are the things that you can do and what things that have been done in and in different companies already and what people are doing right now so first of all like we saw in the case of Apple's at user acquisition is probably going to be a bit more difficult in this landscape although I heard that just today that with the

Google's content plat content platform actually the case might be even even the opposite but it remains to be seen but what we have seen that people are widening net widening the net if there's a game that is not just hyper casual then there are avenues that can be used for uh for user acquisition outside Performance Marketing so of course there are online and offline ads like out of home if you have like uh a region where you want to get noticed influencers especially I think micro influencers so that's the those who have like 10 tens of thousands of

followers if you have someone who is specifically for your target audience influencer for your target audience it might make sense to have a campaign with them for a very targeted targeted user acquisition campaign CTV advertising the third party app stores might have something something for them if you have access to your users emails that's still a viable way especially for retargeting uh if you don't I have something for that as well and then there are brand collaborations like for example matal is known to do a lot of brand collaborations with mobile games and they rotate those games a lot then there's user loyalty so and now I'm talking a bit beyond just retention so loyal customers in in

addition to returning to your game they also support you and uh bring their friends with with them of course uh if I've learned something about sales currently then it's that personal connection to the customer is important so I I have also seen that in games so when the player has a connection to the game they are more loyal if they have some personal thing there and one thing that a lot of companies do is they have their own Discord server for the games that's where you can find the people that's where you can like pre show your new features and so on I think Discord is still I I I say there that Discord is a growing platform I try to find the numbers but looks like that it's still a growing

platform and of course there's Reddit if people are playing your game and they like it there's probably already thread somewhere there and that's a good way to find your audience and listen to their complaints different kind of community things can be done and all of this is good service if people feel that they have good service that improves trust it also impr improves loyalty So when you say you have a loyalty program it probably can mean something else than just uh having discounts in certain certain places then there's the question of web if you have a mobile game what do you do in web probably you have a landing page that doubles as a redirect page to app store or or your game but let's say you want to have a feature in game like like customizing your

character or a level editor or thing like that it's actually possible to do that in web just direct your players from from the game there and it might might make sense because your UI developers time is super expensive I guess but these web platforms you can Outsource them for not that expensive rates and you can try something do it quickly and then uh then if it doesn't work you don't have to rip it out of the game you can just take the link off uh so you can integrate your different kinds of websites to the game you can have uh integration to YouTube twitch and so on and of course one big thing uh is that the dma will make sure that it's allowed for you to sell your game content and stuff outside

the game as well and and if you do those play payment platforms that you need to integrate in the web web stores take a lot smaller cut than Apple or Google does in their app stores and I just heard it said today that if you're in EU it's a no-brainer to have your own store I don't that's a lot to say but but it's an interesting take especially if you're a publisher or or have multiple games so yeah you can do new kinds of stuff now that the regulation makes it easier to access the markets that only the big players have been in so far and then you can have if you have multiple games then it probably makes even sense to have your own system to log in your users so far many games use Facebook for this so it if you or or Google or Apple's Game Center if

you want to be able to move from one device to another but it's also possible to have multi-game accounts you can do new kinds of advertising you can do new kinds of cross promotion with this and you can do sell new kinds of items in your stores and when you collect that Google content it's possible to do that in one game and then it's collected for all your games and of course I mentioned the that email is good for retargeting and it's of course less expensive than AC acquiring new users so if you have your platform where you ask the players to log in they give their email and you at the same time you ask as the content for sending them some marketing emails every now and then so you then you can use that for

retargeting and you can collect user data across games give that data to the advertisers or or use it yourself for profiling the players to be better at Cross promotion uh I have one final thing on the approach that I use or promote to build these things because now I've said that there are a bunch of these things that you can build and try but of course that's time away from your developers or designers and so on so when and how this should be done my practical approach is that because we live in a changing world it's impossible to know beforehand which things work and which don't you have to do quick iterative prototyping or MVPs or things that are they definitely don't

have to be the finished product for you to get the information that you want if it works or not uh but if you want to talk about this I can talk with you a bit later we're running out of time and I'd like to have a chance for you to ask questions so yeah let thank you to the floor give Round of Applause to J please now to give his voice as much of a rest as we possibly can because he's going to be popping up on panels as well let's give him a break I got time for just one question who wants to come in with the winning question for me today anybody want to know anything about regulation I'm fascinated by the crossplatform stuff by the way I'll be grabbing you later I live in the metaverse it's very important yes yeah so thanks very much uh I'd like to know to your to your opinion which of the regul will have the most impact this

year or in the 18 month up coming I think that's the dma so it affects the whole advertising market and it affects all the big players and changes the rules how they will work so I think that's the biggest uh biggest change that we're going to see and it's very difficult it's because we live in a complex world it's very difficult to see what that will be in practice because of course uh EU is imposing some things towards them that they don't want to do and and we will be seeing fights in court about those things and I'm sure it's going to be very interesting thank you very much indeed thank you please give a around just see