Panel: Is it Still About the Whales? Getting the Most of Your Users

the next talk is going to be about uh is it still about whales getting the most of your users um so that's uh something that uh i'd also love to hear some some of my peers talk about um you know i i own a publishing company myself and uh at time lucky publishing we kind of have a you know uh we publish casual games and uh not a lot of our users are considered uh big spenders and a lot of them where you you could say not a lot of whales um but we do have sort of a interesting um concept of ad whales like people are willing to watch a lot of ads for for free stuff um and that's fine with us because that's that's revenue as well um so anyway that's you know that's kind of our our little take on on wales also within my company and i'm looking forward to see what the other panelists have to say um about how they treat whales how they

define whales um and uh you know what's uh what's been the sort of the recent developments uh in years uh around uh how we also are treated and defined so right here with me already are uh tony from gameloft edo from fiber and basel from imperia online and we're just waiting for uh roland from ohio uh he will be coming in shortly but um perhaps guys we can already uh start with some introductions who would like to start sure i'll i'll take the podium i guess uh hi guys it's uh it's great to be here and it's uh it's lovely to be part of this panel it's um first time it's my first time uh as a panelist so uh my name is basil gus pudinov i'm part of imperial online have been last year and a half and um a little bit more about the company before i say a few words about myself is that we're actually the

one of the biggest game production studios in southeastern europe we have 27 games in our portfolio with 50 million users across those games we concentrate on mmo titles and and when we started back in 2005 so that's 15 years on the market we started with web with web games and then roughly about 10 years ago we moved on to mobile so um lately we've been uh you know we we became part of steel front group two years ago which has helped us you know further consolidate you know our position as one of the biggest developers in southeastern europe so it's uh it's it's great to be part of them and um actually a little bit more about us what we're actually kind of looking for now we're actually in the m a business we're looking for assets to acquire so maybe if um any of our uh you know audience is interested could drop me a

line about it and now i'll be happy to share more from that one um but about me i actually don't have a very very big uh experience in uh in the gaming industry only a year and a half um this is my first job but hopefully it's going to be a you know a very very long one and so far i've really really enjoyed being part of you know the gaming industry as a whole right thanks uh tony how about you hello hello everyone and i think i'm very thankful to be here um i'm tony sala i'm the monetization lead in gameloft barcelona studio i've been in gameloft already for seven years and more than 10 years in the in the gaming industry my main goal at gameloft is to supervise the monetization strategies of our games currently mainly my main focus is online legends which is our

our live game uh i also take care of the supervision of the economy design progression system design and modernization system design and also take care or make sure that the liveup strategy is strong enough to to well help our games to survive to many many many years which is uh our main goal all right thanks ego yeah hey everyone my name is idol hofsteder i'm an israeli american i lived in france but now i live here in london i've been in fiber for about four and a half years i actually started out at interactive which was acquired by fiber what i do is i'm in charge of all the supply emea account management so actually on the publisher's side at fiber we um we monetize in-app um using different ad formats

such as banners interstitials rewarded video offer wall we also have our own in-app mediation platform called fairbid and most importantly uh since lockdown has started i've been working from home and my five-year-old daughter has been giving me haircuts which we can only half see because the virtual background is swallowing at half of the time looks great thanks right um i just heard that our last panelist has some uh trouble entering the room uh so i hope that you'll be able to join us really soon um but uh yeah i'd say let's already kick off with uh with the first question um and i think before we start talking about anything else i think the first question is like how do you or how does your company define a whale

so maybe we can start with this one you know the the romantic way of putting it is that whales our biggest fans right these these players that enjoy the game the most they spend a lot of time and they spend a lot of money but the formal definition of course is based on how much uh they spend this depends a lot on the game and a lot on the objectives of each team but this is what traditionally we've been using in game of basically we have different spending cohorts that are defined by bracket of lifetime spend recently we've we've switched to a model in which we instead of considering lifetime spend we are considering average monthly spend for example so to try to catch to grasp the frequency of the spending of our players and in specifically in barcelona we are exploring right now to incorporate in

our definition of whales and spending cohorts the rfm model which is used in many industries the recency frequency modulation model so that we incorporate in the definition of the whale how frequent are the purchases they do and how recent was the last purchase and with that we have a scoring for each one of the players and then we define the brackets so that we can then have an enriched way of definition of wales and just as a side funny note our data analyst that was working on this happen to have the idea of naming those brackets as after birds instead of after fishes so we have pigeons parrots and eagles like minos dolphins and and whales which is fun nice i would i would definitely prefer to be an eagle over a whale but all right you know how about you how about your company right so it fiber it's slightly different um

we don't have one definition for a whale whales are defined by our demand and are translated into ecpm performance the more available diversified wells we have the better performance we will see which means we actually do the matchmaking between our demand to their requested wales the idea is to make the most of all of the games you the game's users some of the whales are in fact just like you mentioned at the beginning they're actually ad whales which are users that watch many ads and download and engage with ads yeah nice things azim um yeah so it's um this is actually quite interesting because i think for every developer and you know every publisher every studio in general that they have a different way of kind of it's like a different definition i guess

and for us is no different um we actually only look at lifetime revenue that they've spent in in the game the reason for that is that uh we also we also track the users that spend a lot of time in our game because as i mentioned we focus on mmo games so they usually they have a very long time you know very long period of time where they stay in the game so those users that's that stay for a certain amount of time we actually track them and we call them the smoking meat actually so we have a term for those as well and that's uh we we just look at wells by uh money spent because it's just the easiest way um as actually tony mentioned we do actually have uh three cohorts um in terms of spenders and so there would be whales dolphins and minnows and of course we have the non-monetized which is the fourth cohort but that's um yeah i i guess this is pretty much uh

on our side but at the end of the day we we value each and every player whether they spend or haven't spent simply because the the players that we so called the smoking meet at the end of the day they do act like a glue and they fill the game you know in terms of players so it's um you know wells usually represent like very very small uh fraction of the total players so you you really can't have a you know a good game if you don't have those those type of players right yeah exactly you know if you have all the gear you want to show it off to the rest of the players there need to be other players to show it off to yeah um i was wondering and this is uh stick like staying with you basil mostly about the the mmos um looking at spending patterns like in the game project that you currently work on most um is it mostly really about a few huge whales or is it like you know more loads of minnows and how's that balanced yeah actually that's um for us it's not

so much minnows i mean as i as i mentioned we have three different um you know cohorts you know whales dolphins and minnows and when i was actually looking at some interesting some data it was actually more about whales and dolphins and it seems that about 70 or 80 percent of the revenue that we we collect is from dolphins and from wales and it's uh i guess it's about i don't know 70 30 kind of distribution between whales in favor of whales um so with that it's not really about the minor players we do have a lot of we do have a lot of people that you know are classified as minos but uh it's actually more about the dolphins and uh and wells it's uh that's i guess about a fifth of of of the players who monetize is uh you know under the name of uh

dolphins tony uh do your games follow a similar pattern it's uh yeah i would yeah i would say so speaking of revenues yeah probably 20 percent of the population generate uh 80 of the revenues in our specific definition of wales we have around 5 of people that we consider whales and these people generate 60 of their revenue but if we add up together whales and dolphins then it's more or less 20 80. um but in volumes it's completely different thing you know that's that's the that's the that's a cool thing or well that's how it goes uh we have very very few people that generate this amount of money but in terms of percentages i think yeah we have pretty much the same distribution interesting well i have to say coming in from like really sort of the casual puzzle game angle we just see uh much of a bigger spread on the you know sort of the small monetizers kind of more more minnows and definitely

a lot less whales but i guess that's that's different to be to be expected um do you have any kind of market insights on this i mean of course you're not working on specific game but you do work with lots of clients that have different games right so at fiverr we believe that these assumptions and patterns are going to be challenged now by apple's idfa deprecation on ios 14 and we don't really know when google will follow their lead um ios 14 makes it less about the iap whales if you ask why it's because it's just going to be much harder to identify and buy these whales game developers might have a hard time to achieve these uh like you mentioned five percent of spending users um what will they do well they'll probably blend more ads ad whales can still be identified with

contextual signals using contextual parameters which are non-ideal phase signals such as the device level data the battery audio on or off headphones uh using wi-fi 4g now 5g um other signals of the app level such as uh game category or subcategory or the most interesting part is actually the session level the session depth of the user how many impressions did this user see he's playing 10 minutes he saw two rewarded videos does he complete the videos he's watching how long has it been watching when has he clicked did he click on the end card that he clicked during the during the video these params can tell us a lot about these kind of users we do besides that we also see a trend wherein many big iap buyers are actually buying

users using only contextual signals they are already able to make certain predictions okay so you're saying that they are already sort of um post idfa ready yes many of them are some of the bigger buyers the iep buyers they're buying um no idea faint scale yeah that's uh it's an interesting point to uh to to bring that up and i definitely also would love to hear uh the points of view uh from from tony and vazo about that um the big idfa change um does it does it change anything for your studios and how you approach whales let's start with tony well the yeah the the biggest impact or let's say what we are more strongly considering is that because of these change changes we will probably need to at least consider how to monetize

earlier people and how to estimate what of these players that monetize earlier will end up being wells because we cannot really know now or we will not be able to know now so it will it's going to be mostly in estimating what could become a whale in the future we're still i mean we're working hard on this you know it's happening uh this uh these days uh for the last months um we still haven't not figured out it completely i guess that most people is in the same spot we'll we need to see how this unravels and how it goes but but yeah we are considering these sort of changes yeah we are actually we're in the same boat as well here um it's very we've performed some tests we've obviously we know who our players are we have um you know a rough idea what our whales are as as in people who they are what they do

so we're trying to kind of find a way that we can target uh you know those um those players and those users but it's uh it's it's gonna be hard i think as soon as um ios 14 rolls out i think we're gonna have a proper solution to it maybe maybe later but i think for now it's quite uncertain yeah yeah it's a it's a big mystery to to a lot of developers for sure we'll just have to wait uh that app pans out um before i move on to the next question i just want to say i've got confirmation that unfortunately uh bolin wasn't able to to join us so it's just gonna be the three of us um and i'd like to let the audience know that if you have any questions you can drop it in the q a box at any time and then i'll try to to to handle those questions uh in between in between the ones that i made up um so moving on down uh down the list of my questions is um there's always a bit of a

balancing act in uh how do you keep the game fun for non-spends and extenders for suspenders you know especially for example when you monetize uh time you know by selling time shortcuts and something uh or perhaps by you know in in in a multiplayer game uh there's this big sort of uh power distribution challenge um so yeah how do you balance your your gameplay and fun for you know the wheels and the the non-monetizing uh players who wants to kick off with that one i can go with it again um uh okay so it's you know i guess balancing fun and gameplay is always tricky you kind of have to be fair on both sides and uh you know i think as an example i'll use our latest game siege world war the second day world war ii actually and so actually in 2020 we released about 19 updates for this game and all of those included some sort of new feature

or an update to a previous one so that it improves the balance the whole balance of the actual gameplay and that the features that we add or are building upon give more freedom to the players so because a lot of those players when they go and play mmo games they they like they they like their freedom so you know at the end of the day games are freedom to a lot of a lot of users so we try and provide that um as it is and but you know as siege world war two is you know a matching matching game matches you versus another player we try to make sure that the matching system works correct because you can't really you know people players will not be very happy if you get dropped versus a very very large whale or someone who's on a very very higher level so it's we try to we try to make sure that all

of these discrepancies how however small they are we try to iron them out and make sure that you know there is the right balance sometimes we have to disbalance them in order to get them again balanced but it's um it's just one of those things um i guess with with the fun bit it's um you know it can be split into steps um again because a lot of your players would be playing the game because they're having because they're having fun essentially so that's kind of the first bit from there on you have to kind of build upon it and you know introduce as i said new features but you can improve you can improve the artwork and um there's just so many things you're trying to you need to kind of lift their happiness level um by by doing all of these things um giving away free stuff is is great is a great idea you can have a lot of players who who like the music in the game

and because it's a world war ii game you know you can have some very motivational kind of uh you know go and get get your troop and you know win this battle so it's um yeah always improve your content and try to and try and balance it in the right spot according to your players and not just one base but the whole the whole um the whole kind of player base i guess um so yeah it's um you know you should always have some sort of balance between winning and losing you can't really have just one person that is uh winning you need to make sure that at some point this um this person kind of gets to lose because essentially they'll get bored of the game and they're going to drop out of it so you're going to lose you're going to lose a player there and um you know as as newton said you know every every law should have a counter action every action should have contractions so um you should definitely definitely consider that

when you're looking into that yeah for sure for me yeah i think we go in a similar similar direction for us since we have most of our games and in particular asphalt 9 they provide on one side a very strong solar experience but then they also provide some multiplayer competitive game modes so we approach it in the different depending on which segment we are so for the solo experiences basically what we do is try to diversificate as much our offerings both in terms of uh you know gameplay game modes rewards and also offers we have different let's say tiers of time limited events that we provide to our players regularly so if you launch right now asphalt 9 you will see that there are several demands running at the same time but not not i mean not all of them are interchangeable they are completely

different they are targeted to different players so we have the the event that is for whales that are very engaged then we have the the event that is more for people that are more grinders then we have events that are more targeted to people that love the challenges and so on and so forth so so we basically design and target specific experiences for the different type of audiences that we have including non-paying users and on the side of the multiplayer it's a bit tougher it's a bit more complicated but yeah we favor our top spenders because they get access to better cars more regularly let's say so they have a competitive advantage there but we try to make sure that um the other players can also get access to reasonably good cars in that in the case of asphalt 9 for example so maybe they don't have the the same wind ratio so they don't win the same number of races at the end of the day but they have realistic chances to

compete and have fun and eventually reach the top licks and the top positions in the leaderboards of of uh of our game get their hands from these dream cars any words of advice to add uh yeah well um well not that much to say about the multiplayer but in general regarding the the non-paying users so unfortunately on some games i am also a non-paying user but here at fiber we we think there should be some kind of blend between the pairs and the non-pairs and the game developers should give some enough resources for both of them to enjoy and win the game um the majority of the users are non-payers like that's unfortunately it's the truth and we suggest adding all kinds of rewarded formats such as rewarded video or the offer wall

to help also these kind of users uh enjoy the games um it's it's you know it's always this conversation when we say the users that are engaging with these formats these are not the iap users these are not the whales these are it's different kind of users um and you know there are no free lunches why not maximize revenue and find a sweet spot that combines both revenue streams in general we do predict that ad revenue will become more significant with the deprecation of uh of the idfa it just you know like we mentioned it's going to be harder to acquire whales besides rewarded video and offer wall we advise also game developers to test to test additional formats and placements such as banners

and interstitials they can they can blend in the game in certain frequency which is not too intrusive and retention is maintained games with good retentions can show less ads while games with shorter retention should achieve the expected ltv and could be possibly more aggressive with ads here at fiber we have our own uh in-app mediation platform called fairbid and we have different tools for a b testing different frequencies and different formats and we believe that it's going to everyone's going to be testing a lot during the next couple of uh weeks months yeah but um actually a little bit of a uh i guess a little bit of a follow-up on that also uh coming from the audience someone wants to know is the expectation that google will follow suit with similar idea face style changes can we expect further privacy protecting changes

what's your take on that um well regarding googling you know um it's too early to say anything um let's take it easy let's start with apple and then you know we're gonna see where where we are in a couple of months it is possible that the google is also waiting to see what will happen here yeah that's true i guess with the uh the revenue share change it also took them about two three months to react and then follow suit with apple and they're also that's putting uh 15 uh only taking 15 from india so yeah who knows that they'll follow on this occasion as well um yeah we got some great questions from the audience i'm just gonna uh handle a few of those um this one is specifically for tony and vasil from emma and she wants to know are you also considering changing your economy and maybe test new ways of monetizing well oh sorry go ahead sure

i'm sure okay actually we we have we have previously we've gone through a lot of different ways of monetizing and in our last project siege we decided that um you know we shouldn't just only rely on in-app purchases but we should also undertake we should also include in-game advertisements we've only started uh you know january of this year so it hasn't been a very long time so far it's going quite well so it's you can always mix and match different ways of monetizations so it's always a good idea to explore every bit but because we have used this we have we have tried this before with imperial online this is our flagship title we did find out that the advertisement often would eat up some of the ways for the in-app purchase ways that we've introduced so it's it's always a little bit tricky you should always try and test as much as possible and see

if you know if you're already in embedded way of monetization is gonna work with another one so it's uh you know we have considered it we've done it uh it's we're just taking it very slow right now yeah you know an arc i mean it depends a bit on the game but if i focus on on asphalt 9 which is the the one that is not right now more important for me um since it's a it's a game that is still in growth it's it's working very well and it still is still growing yes we do investigate new ways of monetizing but we are not very disruptive with it so we we try to not change the economy the economy because the question is we're talking about the economy and also monetization we try to not change the economy economy seems robust seems that it's it's working fine it's a good let's say baseline but yeah we're trying to monetize on top of it with different monetization

tools and strategies i consider that for example the diversification in the liveops is a different way of monetizing this was not the case in the beginning actually in the beginning the game was more whale oriented that it than than it is right now so we are trying to diversify our offerings so that we monetize different spending cohorts and one specific case that works very well as an example for this is that we introduced mid last year the battle pass as a feature um yeah it's not an fps but we tried to put the battle pass because everyone was trying it and independently of the engineer so we put the battle pass in asphalt 9 and it did work very well it increased the rpu baseline for by around 20 after the introduction of the feature and it changed quite a bit the you know how our high-level kpis look how do we build now our monetization because uh before the

battle pass our rpu was mainly based on our ppu so on the payers the big payers after the season pass the battle pass now we have more paying users and and we managed to grow our rpu more based on conversions and reconversions so yeah definitely we we always try to come up with new ways of monetizing we also considered the the renewable subscription we are still investigating it so yeah yeah this is something that i mean i would say that this is the easy side of growing your game growing on on on volumes is very difficult especially now with with all the changes in the edfa but growing your monetization tends to be a bit easier so you can try more things and grow your heart pool yeah actually i think that ties in nicely too another question that came from the audience is that what do you

guys think about subscription models or like registration models um subscription model meaning i guess renewable auto renewable auto renewable subscription models well if you consider both like after renewable or non um well i've just talked about the season pass and battle pass it's kind of a subscription that you need to renew it you know yourself as a player every every month or every month whatever it was like a charm for us yeah we really encourage people to try it and regarding the auto renewal subscriptions um yes conceptually it works it should work but we just found a lot of technicalities that for us for now put us a bit aside from it we are still considering it investigating it but you know there are some technical things that we need to go around

yeah definitely um just to kind of a little break we are joined by uh another panelist um not bolin but his colleague tau from ohio uh hey welcome hi nice to meet you guys hello hey um i you know i would say uh why don't you take a few minutes to introduce yourself and your company and then we will continue uh and just like with the questions is that right okay it's okay yeah because uh sorry for that because uh my colleague has some technical issue to join the meeting so i will take place uh to take um introduction of our company or something yeah so okay so we we we are a global publishing company our name is ohio and uh we have we have published games uh like asian bones or cherius fun and ohio is the leading casual game publisher in china

i know we help uh bring exciting games to gamers and empowers developers to monetize the the games yeah so basically well casual game uh publisher yeah right so welcome um and i guess you know we were right on the question uh but from the audience where they were we were asked like what do you think about subscriptions or registration models do you want to hook in and answer that uh maybe you guys can discuss uh it more yeah because i i i need to catch you guys hazel uh what's your opinion about subscription we we actually uh we actually already have a subscription-based model in imperial online it's been working for a couple of months now so it's uh again it's it's a little bit tricky i'm betting it but it's it you know essentially it can work it's um our our version of subscription is quite interesting because it actually

it spreads over to other players in your like guild so it's we've tried to find an in an innovative way of you know it catching popularity with the players so it's um yeah it definitely you can you can definitely look into it it's a it's a great idea you know we just have to be a little bit more innovative i guess for you know to for for those for those ways to actually work so it's uh yeah yeah i would say that maybe the only thing to take into account when considering this is the potential cannibalization of your whales if the subscription models are providing too much value maybe then you could you have to consider how to then compensate it for for your whales but that would be the only let's say drawback possible i would say yeah i would definitely agree there i mean we try subscriptions for a while and our game home designer blasts and uh i mean you

know there were people interested but when we looked at the sort of overall revenue it didn't really move the needle because like you say the whales were converting into subscribers so actually if i may jump back in um the reason the reason the reason for our idea that it's the subscription spills over to other people and other players is because a lot of a lot of the purchases that are made online which we've found in our games can be made are made for other players so there's often this kind of let me help this other player kind of mentality in in the games so it's yeah that's that's definitely something that you can look into it and kind of you know i don't really say exploit but it's at the end of the day it's kind of that yeah the the way we went through it with our battle pass was basically to offer we didn't offer uh much value in terms of hard currency or

value you can spend directly in the game but more like exclusive content or we also attached a set of perks that are not monetized in the game so stuff that is not really monetized directly and we provide some you know very carefully crafted perks so that they don't break the economy and it works really well whales compared to the previous ways that all the special events the new cars that we released they still spend there but they additionally spend on decision pass because of the exclusive content and the perks and we have other players at the start spending we had some dormant paying users that were we were not able to convert through any other means and the battle pass ended up converting them and reconverting them yeah right thanks um so we we've talked a lot about some different types of games and different types of like player profiles

but how about we look at different global regions so like for global publishing um you know you can divide the world into several regional markets and each market should be treated differently um so do you have like any insights on how different markets sort of behave and your difference between types of whales that's a tough one i would say yes the answer is yes definitely there are depending on the region depending on the country there are different spending behaviors um i can put a clear example we've run an analysis on asphalt 9 and we clearly saw that you know eastern countries were more prone to monetize through gacha for example while western countries were more prone to monetize through direct rewards even if they were more expensive you know if in terms of value the gacha was

better but they preferred to avoid the the you know the gambling and go even spending more money for getting the the sure reward the issue we have at least on our site is that it's very difficult then to articulate this into a real campaign because you need to then start having live operations that are different depending on the country so we limited very in very specific cases that you know the the return is is easy so we we invest very little but we know that we will get uh more in return but in general our general uh strategy is we basically do the same for for everyone even though we know that some actions will work better in some countries than than in others um tao you guys coming in from uh from like for being a chinese chinese publisher and now looking at a global outreach what do you think of this okay so so actually we are doing the

global publishing so uh basically we are a chinese company uh so now we we we think we we are so a little bit more familiar with the asian market uh especially for the japan and korean and we do very good job in japan and korea as well so i will share some insights about these two markets perhaps yeah so um after a period of exploration it has uh also confirmed some high success rates and uh stable uh risk tracks among them so we think the puzzle category are the key categories in japan south korea as a category with the second download scale in japan and the first download scale in south korea so puzzle has a large download volume a long game time and the core gameplay is very simple and the the entry chest threshold is is low so there are many successful

cases released in china uh the basic disk of such game in mainly light game players represented by middle-aged and early elderly users so the game motivation is to kill time for free and there is no need to rush time with heavy games in addition we think the shooter games and the simulation categories are also key race tracks in japan and south korea and the shooter as a very new category and the market is growing rapidly and uh for new products um for new products for new players they have they still have uh the space the to to enter this market and uh maybe the light action and the cultivation element have a great potential in in these categories so um um the simulated management category

is uh is a category with the longest daily average time and the longest life circle among all categories overseas top games are 90 30 and 5 annually so moreover the the concentration of running water in the in the track product is is not high the the portion of the running water in game is very high so there is the room for entry so that's uh what we thought about the the the japan and south korean market all right um basil i know that your games attracts quite a global audience do you see uh different behavior in the uh in different regions uh honestly i don't think i will be able to answer this question very well um but yes we do we do actually have global audiences from uh brazil from russia as well

so with regards to the specific offers whether we whether they they like something specific i cannot definitely say that's uh you know it's actually out of my knowledge which i apologize but with regards to players who are interested in let's say world war ii games those obviously are you know the the the countries that are you know were involved in in in world war two so essentially there always is some sort of um you know every region has some sort of different um you know kind of specifics and needs so we try to fulfill them accordingly but we also try to make sure that the game stays the same for every region we we generally don't want to give one region uh like let's say for offer one more diamonds uh four four two less

diamonds so we're trying to make sure that everyone has the same opportunities whether they're you know whether in asia where the europe in um america it just doesn't really matter for us we try to yeah be fair on everything on every level i guess yeah yeah that makes sense um we've got some more questions from the audience so i'm just gonna continue with those um so the first question is the chinese game publishers have historically been very proactive in providing a lot of vip support to their biggest users like dedicated events personal account management etc are western companies employing similar tactics and how much should developers think about an active account management for their top players um on our site we are not there we are not doing that uh right now but yeah i think it's a

it's a trend that it's it's coming and we are actually considering we are doing our first steps to let's say get closer to our top top players we start running servers that are specifically targeted to so in service that are specifically targeted to those players and we are investigating this uh but yeah at some point if this went well the idea would be to get in contact directly with these people so have some sort of communication channel with them trying to even you know some sort of uh validation of the roadmap with these people but for now this feels like pretty far away in the future for us at least all right um tao you have um of course experience with the chinese market but also with the global market uh do you have any experience with the vip players

okay so because we are more focused on the casual games so as you know our game is more uh game revenue is more coming from the ad revenue so for us we don't have such kind of vip users to to to be managed but still we have uh we have to do a lot of analysis about our users to know their their interests to to improve our game gameplay to improve our experience of the of the games yeah that's uh that's the thing that we will do but not like the vip player management stuff yeah sorry yeah i know i totally understand what you're saying because you know as a fellow casual game publisher i guess we see our vips as the users who are mostly interacting with our brand so the users who are constantly reacting on our facebook posting and reaching out to our customer support etc we highly appreciate their input so yeah we do

sort of you know treat them as as vips when uh you know basically we we answer them sometimes we give them goodies when they report a bug uh just to kind of show appreciation but yeah i i agree that within the casual space uh there's definitely uh uh yeah less of the sort of the vip perks that you see in big mmos and such great um there's another audience uh question after that one i have sort of a closing closing question for you guys um but yeah this one is also i think quite interesting and it loops back into alternative monetization methods so the question is there was a talk yesterday about g-commerce digital retail stores for products inside the games is that something that sounds feasible to you guys and what do you think about it we did some tests in some of our games in gameloft

they didn't go well enough to go full throttle on it so our position right now is more waiting and see how this unravels and see if i don't know if it generates a real trend that we can jump in because our initial tests on that were not satisfying enough ido do you have some uh some thoughts on this does it feel like not exactly my scope in business i know right how do you feel in general about sort of the you know i mean i see more and more sort of alternatives to in-game advertising popping up for example uh audio ads or like really um really well integrated in-game branding uh are those also things that fiber is looking into um yeah you mean like also in-game ads these kind of things um right now we're still uh we're not looking into it right now

but it is possible in the future we might seek more opportunities right this is actually work well for us uh uh because we have we have you know i would say that pretty a lot of paid deals with uh brands that want to for example have a branded special event or a branded event on on our game or we have in the you know in the circuits when you when you the cars are racing there are you know advertisement panels and then we can put there you know in place advertisement um and yeah this is a significant revenue stream that we get from paid deals on that yeah i guess it doesn't has so much to do with with the topic of whales i guess but it's i mean we are talking about and uh yeah i think it's uh interesting to also take all those things into account because in the end the the you know the quality of your game is also going to have an influence on the amount of wheels that

you have and of course quality advertising can help to make it feel a quality game so it's definitely interesting um well we are close to uh the end time of our talk uh i guess the final question i want to end with for all of you is what advice would you give developers who struggle to find a good way to monetize their players perhaps start with ido um sure so we would suggest a good blend between iap revenue to ads revenue still have good retention retention minimum churn um always constant testing of new formats and frequencies rewarded video banner interstitial and the offer wall another interesting thing maybe also relevant to the discussion about the countries we had before is uh segmenting users

according to their value and pro and price them differently uh show or not show ads to certain users use different exchange rates for certain users either by region or by behavior of the user um another interesting thing is um as part of the idfa deprecation we advise to adopt also uh limited ad tracking waterfalls with possibly slightly lower prices especially for the beginning until everyone learns properly how to monetize uh these requests all right thanks next puzzle perhaps yeah uh i guess that's the million dollar question no um i think i think the best the best advice i could probably give to any developer who's struggling to

monetize is to go back to the drawing board and analyze every component of their game and see if anything is not working correctly such as why are the players not you know why did they not feel the urge of playing and see if it is something within the game and if it's something within the game they can from their own fix it uh but what actually as i said the mixture you know between different monetization methods is is a great it's it's a great way to just kick off things also you should always know what sort of player you're targeting for us it would be you know males between certain age and usually have a higher form of education so you're narrowing you know the type of players who might be interested in uh interested in your games and you can you know acquire them by user acquisition so it's um again it

really it really depends on the actual game and you know what stage the game is in uh but if it's some if it's uh you know a game that is uh you know quite in in its early stages then i would definitely say go back to drink board because you haven't done it not enough time has passed so maybe something you haven't done in uh in the in the beginning you've missed uh yeah a b testing as well you know of course if you if when you when you find what you've if if you're something if something is broken you should always you know have a look and you know a b test it it's just the way forwards that's um yeah that's how we used to operate as well i definitely agree uh we we do a lot of ap testing with our top games like constantly you know it's because when you have good numbers they can always be better yeah uh tao any any thoughts for uh for indie developers yeah okay so actually we believe the the truth is that all users love the

core gameplays so we think that's the reason why have a casual game can reach a very big range of users so therefore we we think that during the core gameplays we don't suggest to do some ads or any any things to interrupt the users but apart from the core gameplay there are some meta system and so for the meta system you need to uh dig in different layers to for example the a b test you you guys just mentioned it's very important to to to do the monetization behavior because some some users may be very sensitive for the ads or others are not so you can use the a b test to increase the revenue itself while which don't have negative um effects for the games and actually we think that the for all the users they have four kinds of different needs uh demand or demands uh from the game we we will uh we think that the the

first is the pay for win so the users will like to show off or they want to increase the data in the game and the second is the pay for efficiency the game the users want to save time or they want to get some accelerations and the third is the pay for outfit for example you buy some skins you buy some weapons appearance to make it look better and the last one the pay for content for example the card drawing or something else so if you can find uh one or two the the core demands of the users that you they needed and to develop uh develop the the the ads or the the pay payment uh payment element so you can have a very bad very good monetization result that's what we we think yeah all right thanks last but not least tony yeah well um first i would i would uh

make sure that your problem is in the monetization site because usually uh it's harder to have a game that has good retention good engagement numbers and actually a big enough player base so first make sure that you have all those things solved and if that's the case then i think you are in a very good position because improving monetization in a game that is good and it has good retention engagement and a big enough player base i would say that you can start by looking at what reference did you use to make that game because probably you were inspired for some other games so take a look to those games check what they are doing for monetization and try to implement what they're doing if this doesn't work then just go to the checklist that the guys already also some of them suggested try the battle pass try the gacha try a rotating shop put timers

and skip the time if you have if you don't have time limited events try to put time limited events if you are in a multiplayer game try to sell cosmetics also try to see if you can monetize through what why not if nothing of this works then maybe you have a problem in in the depth of your game maybe in terms of gameplay maybe your gameplay is not deep enough and players actually cannot play for it for long or maybe you don't have deep enough prevention systems or maybe both so check these things and if any of these works maybe you could also be in a problem of you know content production basic maybe your players are consuming your content faster than you can actually produce so check if you can actually speed up your your production which is usually the toughest uh one but then you can do a b test for increasing prices it's

another solution if you don't have enough content maybe you can increase the prices of your content a b test and see if that works and you can even try to scale up your economy because maybe you have i don't know you're selling units you're selling champions in an rpg game and they can level up up till level 30. try to rebalance it so that they can level up up till level 15 50 or 80 or even 100 so you can squeeze a bit more your your content and that should be my funnel try the easiest easiest stuff first and then go for the toughest ones at the end it definitely agrees yeah and especially about the retention before you can monetize you have to keep yeah all right um well that brings us to the end of the panel so i would like to say a huge thanks to to all of you guys thank you for sharing your insights um and uh yeah if the audience has any more questions i'm sure they'll know how to how to reach

you to the socials bye