Panel: Is Using a Webshop or Third-Party Payment Solution Worth it?

[Music] next up we have a panel we're just going to do some chair shifting or on the stage uh but we'll have a a panel on is using a web shop or third party payment solution worth it so uh we'll bring them up in a second but we've got Thomas hxa from rat PR David we have David vapol again from Far spring David Mason from roio Conor mlin from Agony and Jessica sundell from stash but before we come up I'm just going to grab a last chair hello everybody thanks for uh thanks for being here we've got a uh D Toc battle Royale for you today um to

hear about well from some of the experts in the industry about you know their respective uh platforms and strategies for uh you know maximizing direct consumer um should we start with some super quick intros to each of you and the the companies you work for I mean you've heard from David but a quick recap David I'm David Vogal pole I'm the chief marketing officer of fast spring we're a director consumer payment platform hi sorry hi I'm Jessica um I'm a product designer at stash um I've been developing um product mobile games and um and working for for roio next game's uh unity and stash and I'm bringing to this panel uh today my my knowledge about free-to-play games and players behaviors hi there my name is Conor mcin I used to work at liftoff mobile I come from ads so one of those people um um I

headed up all of our new business strategy uh at liftoff helping Publishers monetize via increases in cpms uh now I'm in a much more interesting space which is the kind of DTC or d2c I never really know which one to say um kind of publisher enablement space uh and I work at AGM I'm the VP of Revenue at agonum hi I'm David Mason so I I'm Rio um I'm uh lead the business unit which we call uh um beacon beacon provides the gamers a service platform that's leveraged by by rev Studios but also by Sager as well now and as part of that I've led the work on building red club which is our uh direct consumer kind of approach which we'll talk about a little bit today great thank you I I mean it's probably easiest to start from the premise that web shop and DTC are worth

it or can be worth it um maybe we should talk a little bit about uh in particular who they can be most worth it for potentially you know are there is there a spe specific kind of criteria in terms of company genres of game um and obviously monetization methods I don't necessarily think that you want to exclude any genres right I mean coming from an inapp ads background you see a lot of hyper casual guys right now namely kind of Voodoo quali all these Publishers trying to get more and more into the IAP space so I don't think that there's no opportunity for hyper casual I actually think that hyper casual has a very big opportunity going forward however to David's point in the previous session you're looking for Wales right you're looking for your highest value user in in my opinion in every game because 05 to 2% of of most games in the midcore and hardcore genre they're spending they're making up a large 50% 30 to 50% higher portion of

your overall Revenue as soon as you get those guys over to a web shop Solution that's where it becomes very worth it right but I I I wouldn't exclude any particular genre in that in our space if I can build on the top of that so I think in general um we're going to be looking at at mobile free toplay but what matters really is that you have a game that that generate Revenue through iaps right and you have a dedicated player base with a top 1% which is the the the top 1% players which is ice penders that you really want to reach out so to go back to what you were saying um so this is really this shift that you really want to have you want to have this one top uh this one% top player shift and try to have the behavior shift shifting from spending in in game to your store right so it's really about Behavior about bringing more value about understanding the limitation of what they have in the game and trying to really bring more value on

the web yeah maybe I can add to that because I think the you when we talk about this topic yeah we quickly get into oh can we generate more profit yeah can we drive purchases and actually that's the wrong you know mindset to have in this what you need to think about is you know what are you trying to bring to your players in terms of value yeah what is you know fundamentally the value proposition you're building and the features to support that so the roio approach is much more you know not a yes we have a web shop but actually the fundamental question is you know how do we build a long-term relationship with valuable players in our games and what can we bring that we can't bring in a mobile experience and for us we're fortunate you know we have a movie coming uh we have announced Movie 3 that brings a whole P of players that we want to bring into our games and you know that means we want to connect digital

experiences from the movie Into the game as well so strategically you can lose all of your kind of avenues to reach players but then also you know we'll probably talk about play on the web as well you know you know many of us have Facebook games this is an opportunity to really uh also Drive web-based know play and and desktop experienc and the reasons why people play casual games on desktop versus mobile particularly competive positive games but I think you will fail if you start by thinking I'm going to do this for the money uh because you won't get players then you'll get some but it it'll it won't be you won't deliver something of value to the players that's meaningful player value is a great point to put point out there David um the only thing I would personally add on all this is scale um if you have a new game if you haven't really scaled up your player base it's probably not worth it to mess with a web shop right now you need to build and grow your Community you need to grow

adoption um and you know time spent playing the game so that's the other kind David filter yes sorry go ahead no that was it so David's previous point in the previous session again to bring it back to what you were saying it's a and also uh I think it's all about audience engagement right you have to have an audience engagement extension platform for users to actually continue to come back and to make it an extension of your app so as long as you brand it associated with the look and flow of your your app I think that users will come back or your game will come back consistently very interesting um what are David I think you mentioned almost you know by having another touch point or set of touch points with users you know that offers some advantages in terms of building relationships um open to the floor you know what are the uh particular benefits that you see in terms of I guess uh owning data and the the way that that gives you you know opportunities to Market Market differently in different ways and also

what are the kind of additional features and and and mechanisms that developers should be looking to have as part of their DTC strategy for example a meta Game feature for example two layered question yeah maybe I can talk a little bit about what we've done and kind of where we're headed as well but yeah so um you know fundamentally you know we built out some key capabilities so we have you know red Club is the domain that people go to it you know supports multiple games and you know we life with anger's friends today um but we deliberately chose you know red because of the IP that we hold dear and you know and the fact that we that that resonates with our audience and all of our game players that play Angry wordss games but then we build red ID so oh you can sign in in the game sign in in the web stores and you need that piece to connect because the the end of the day you know if you're doing

something in the web you know that experience also needs to appear in the game you whether you're bringing you know say you have something you're providing for players every day or the office you're providing it needs to appear so you need that connection but then also gives you ability to communicate with the players you know you get email you can get other data as well and build that direct relationship but then you know we built out blog content you know offers we can segment and Target as well but we want to go further and we we plan to bring play on the web uh we plan uh to bring features that are you know extensions so for example you we already have level design capabili so bringing these kind of things you know so that actually it becomes somewhere where you build a community not just not just web shop I can maybe add on that also so in terms of features you really want to

have engagement features right so we're thinking about for instance loyalty programs uh players guides um user generated content we want to do it more like an experience rual so it's not only about monetizing it's also about really creating value right on the top of that you have to think about really uh adding some good incentives for players to to be able to see to shift their behavior spend the behavior from in game to the web store so those incentive you know you really have to look at what what what players want uh what are the motivation and then look at where are the limitations of the in-game store right so you can really start designing a personal um experience you can really give for instance uh Early Access to game content you can give exclusive offers bonuses uh rewards all these kind of things and you what you have to do also is to start shifting or creating an habit of visiting the store daily so

with for for that for example you start giving them uh daily gift to claims and all these kind of things so there's a lot of strategy to build a very rich experience uh and not only a web store yeah you want you want loyalty programs as Jessica said you want all of these things to basically continue to build loyalty to your hub for us at Agony we're actually and this might come as a surprise David and I were talking about this before but for us at AGM we're actually driving users directly to content we're not driving users directly to a store and what that enables us to do is that enables us to essentially put icons in the in the game where we're able to drive users do direct to what we're calling a gamehub we're driving users direct to gamehub as a result we're seeing daily transaction rates of 14 to 20% within the first week which is really really exciting because if you're driving users to content you are fully compliant with apple and Google's laws and you do not run into that 27% fee and to your profitability point David you

were talking about plka at 8% plka is at a profitability level of 8% because they're Market they're using all of this budget and resources to Market to users who live in an app outside of an app to drive those users who are outside of an app over to a web store if you're driving users at a 14 to even ideally within the first 3 to six months 50% rate you're looking at much higher profitability levels more in the 100% year for your profitability levels but let's be very careful with some of the statements that get thrown out here converting converting players really depends on your game and how you monetizing your game so if you take a more casual game you know a lot of the spend will be at the point of pressure in the game where you know somebody wants those extra moves that's not an experience you want to take somebody out to a web shop for because you that's just you know it's kind of so you need to think about where the pl spend is and Behavior as well uh you know so if you

have a high level of you know plant spend then you're going to get potentially get higher value from a web store but then you also got to think about the friction as well so it's a question also they thinking about what bundles are Etc that people purchase so but you know I think the only way to do this is to test and understand but you need to be careful because what you're not trying to do is you know you know have an an intended consequences of changing player behavior in your games either right and and just to that point to address that point I mean and this goes back to Jessica's point you want an audience engagement platform that's an extension of your actual game right to not disturb the user from flow of game to flow to gamehub I I have always said that I think a traditional web shop is a finance-based solution to address a gaming problem if you create a hub like a gaming Hub that is a direct extension of your game that is a gaming solution

to a gaming problem that also hosts a store and you can use live Ops in a gamehub to drive users to maximize their engagement rates to transaction flow but if you are you know if you're just kind of setting up a web shop and throwing six different icons of Ina purchases on the web shop and seeing how you can Market users over to the web shop and hope that they transact it's a finance solution to a gaming problem so I think to to to David's point I mean you do have to also be wary of where are the user going how engaged are they with your brand I mean think about it there's another way to there's another way to Market content outside of web shop in the sense of how do Brands communicate with their users if a user comes to to an app store and says I am disappointed with this update in your game because there are a lot of crashes how does that brand communicate outside of Discord maybe how does that brand communicate with the user to say hey this update was just done to fix your user complaints because we're communicating with with you now outside the Game Hub I mean from

a creative standpoint it's endless you can a One-Stop content shop that is an extension of your game with a store it's pretty cool if we stay stay on this topic for now because I think you know people will ultimately be interested Connie you've talked about how agonum approaches this but you know and David you touched on it a bit before but if you are trying to direct users to you know a Commerce page Direct what are some of the you know strategies for doing that uh and maximizing the value for that ultimately it's you know hopefully I'm getting this the right way around but it's it's tax avoidance rather than tax evasion this is all it's it's it's all you know within the guidelines but how do you navigate those guidelines which are constantly shifting um and will probably shift again but maximize value by driving users directly or indirectly to Commerce Pages yeah I don't like to think personally the fees by the platforms is

taxes like they do deliver I feel a great value I think that you know having that much of your Revenue taken away from all of your players can be very difficult for your business um Tim of Epic recent Sweeney recently reported that with a 30% cut the platforms would make more on epic games than epic makes on their games and so that's a very difficult position to be in I think when it comes to a web shop there there is kind of this Pure commercial element to it um if I'm a VIP I personally love VIP over the term whale but if I'm a VIP and I'm spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on a game going to a web shop and David you mentioned earlier what is the value we can deliver for these players um paying closer to 5% or whatever it is from a non you know app Marketplace payment provider allows you to make more profit but it also allows these players to get more value for the money that they spend right and so there

is that kind of Pure commercial aspect to it but um and I really like the points you were making Connor and David you as well around making your website an experience it's not just about a shop it's about the user account and what they see when they log in it's about content it's about leaderboards it's around Community um more than just maybe even links to a Discord server or whatever um but it's about owning the relationship with your players and not just renting the relation ship with your players from platforms to me that's what a full web experience for your uh players is about it's not just the shop it's not just about avoiding the fees it's about owning the relationship with your players yeah absolutely I think it's it's about creating an ecosystem that is absolutely well integrated to to your game and anything you you experience on your game in in your on your web store or on this direct to Consumer platform has to be exactly the same experiences the game so you have to really

understand like the players behaviors you have to understand also the finess finess of game development of what make the experience great and how you going to take that and really uh recreate that on the web right because you don't want to have just a a web store that is disconnected to your to your game and disconnected from your players so this ecosystem is very very important to create and the experience needs to be there absolutely and that's why some companies as well are developing we've developed a live Ops program right so once a once a user actually gets to our gamehub we're able to address hey does this user have an LTV of over $100 and a level of over 20 in Angry Birds right and then we can use that and we can say why don't we discount this reward in a live op scenario in a pop-up scenario once they get to the Game Hub at 10% and only give it to them for the next 20 minutes so that they can so we can drive them direct to the user to the kind of transaction flow as easy as possible and

there are a lot of companies that are now doing that where they're looking at user profiles and they're saying how do we how do we deliver the best possible reward to this user where it's incentivizing for the user to return as well as loyalty programs as well as incentivizing for the publisher to use based on the transaction rates that are happening post uh reach so that's that's a really interesting thing I think that assessing user profiles and making sure that you are compelling and tailored and customized to each individual user as possible is key in the next stage of DTC platform uh kind of efficiency how do you see you know we've talked about kind of this is the the one% the 2% of you know VIP players ultimately right now are the the people that are going to be most engaged with these experiences but how do you see that evolving you know potentially from your point of view David with with Rio maybe it's slightly different ultimately and you have a higher proportion of

players kind of visiting the additional content how do you see that evolving do you think well you know these alternative touch points will become more relevant to a larger number of players over time or will it continue to be for now you know this subsection of VIPs yeah I see the broader opportunity as well and yeah I'll give you an example this is hypothetical but if you've seen with the original angs movie and angri bir movie too there was a lot of um uh brand engagement with and you know for example he went to McDonald's we have these kind of and there these Brands want digital experiences as well so why wouldn't we bring those people into the domain that we have and then bring them into the game so it's also the question of actually could also be uh a means of bringing BL in and I think also you've got to think about the web uh uh web user acquisition is cheaper than mobile as well so maybe there's an

opportunity as well that whether you've got play on the web or whether you're using it as a landing site to bring new players in so I think there's many opportunities to this as well so the other thing is if you make your just from DTC kind of an enablement solution perspective if you're making your rewards kind of if you're discounting your rewards to a point where maybe non-paying users traditionally non-paying users who are ad viewers traditionally ad viewers who do not pay who do not buy iaps ingame if you're making them um more affordable for these users then you can actually Market to you know you're not just looking at a net revenue increase on traditionally paying users you're looking at new user acquisition for inapp payers and with loyalty programs and kind of other programs that bring users back you can turn your traditionally non-paying users into paying users via reward systems so that's a another big opportunity in this

in this space maybe you add as well is if you talk to Google um they will also tell you that having an email address will help you with use ACC as you go forward because they can so there's also a potential you know the fact that because you've got first party data then it will give you new C you know capabilities as well to reach players and and reacquire those players on the in a similar vein I guess in terms of engaging new players does does a dtoc strategy and the diversity that that might allow for example in payments and payment methods for example does that unlock new players potentially in new GEOS um you know giving players essentially their preferred way to pay I think so um I mean Apple and Google don't support every local payment method on Earth and so you have the local payment benefit of having a web shop and being able to support that um the other thing is it players don't always find it convenient or have ready

access to use a different credit card on their Apple or Google account so if they get that gift card from a friend or parent or grandparent um it can be difficult for them to use that the example I gave in the prior presentation of my son with the Visa gift card um it that money would have been spent on something else if he didn't have the option to spend it on the store so I I do think it is about like converting existing Revenue into higher margin D to C but it's also about slurping up you know Revenue that you weren't going to get anyways that was going to be used at some you know laser tag game or something like that um rather than on your game another thing here it depends on your strategy right I mean there are certain for for us individually our strategy is to convert maybe not whales maybe we'll call them wh VIPs whatever I like that name better but um but uh but is to convert VIPs over to the DTC enablement platform right so if you're converting that 0.5 to 2% of users that

are driving the really The Lion Share of Revenue in your game and you're converting them over they typically have credit cards they typically have kind of via an API connection they typically have the Apple wallet the Google Wallet so in that way kind of all of these kind of additional payment kind of uh tools are are are distant from that type of strategy but it depends what type of strategy you're looking for there are strategies that do the opposite the inverse I think the strategy is the point where you should start it's a question of where where your audience is and how they spend that money and um and think about that I think the you you can build out a lot of capabilities yeah but I would you know start with you know fundamentally what do you you what do you what do you want to offer to your court players and then how do you extend that and the you know you can add multiple payment vendors let's be clear you can be payment vendor agnostic and actually there might be benefits to that

because some vendors will be better in some markets than others you know it's not just about the percentage you pay it's about the percentage of transactions that get completed and these kind of things and you can even AB test yeah the if you have the tooling to do that but it's I would fundamentally start with you know who you trying to reach how are you going to bring the value and then work out what your road map to achieve that is and I would if you can try and be agnostic to one platform or one vendor but obviously that's easy for me to say with resources I have or super to a or Zinger Etc um yeah so you may have to bet on somebody you as well really interesting question for me I think is as we talked about epic for example um as the distribution landscape kind of changes with the you know epic gam store store upcoming probably Microsoft Store out store Apptoid you

know if you're looking to uh potentially distribute your game on more of these channels how does that affect the dtoc space with the the range of options opportunities and and commissions that are charged across all of these platforms first and foremost you're going to need to keep up with the terms of each of those Market places and how they approach direct to Consumer we've kind of been using a broad stroke in these talks and talking about Apple and Google's rules but you just introduced a whole bunch of other rules um so I think that's the first thing to consider um you know what do marketplaces fundamentally bring they bring convenience for the player they bring convenience for the publisher and they bring eyeballs to the publisher I remember my first job on the internet my my boss said the internet is about one thing it's about the battle between eyeballs and content and so these marketplaces like epic and Microsoft and Apple and Google are bringing players now we saw earlier in the presentation before this only about 15% of game

downloads are driven from App Store shopping but there is this eyeball effect that are bringing players to your game so personally I like to take advantage of as many eyeball buckets as I can U but from a director consumer perspective you're going to need to look really closely at the rules for each store I don't know what yall think I so my my personal view on this is you know we will see radical changes over the coming years yeah and there's a lot of legislation out there to be honest with you a lot of the legislation doesn't help because actually it creates barriers you know you know it it adds a lot of complexity both the consumer and the publisher so let's say yeah I don't think we're near a perfect outcome of this point um yeah and of course we all would like to get more money from the players but let's also you know I would start with you where you where are the players that you want to reach where you what channels can you reach them through

and you know if you know epic s you obviously you know they're they're going to be really successful with you with fortnite you they've got a massive game there and if you want to be you know close to those players maybe it's an opportunity for you yeah they won't suit every won't it's not going to be a hyper Casual Marketplace for example so so I think they really think about again your audience how are you going to reach them yeah which AB help you do that the most to David's point and also just to your question the legislation I think we're going in a direction where certain States and I don't mean obviously the United States but certain countries are pushing South Korea Japan obviously the United States Europe collection collection of countries um are really pushing for uh you know less stringent rules around developer and publisher freedom and I think that we're really going in a direction where Apple the

Apple and Google duopoly or Monopoly whether or not you're focused on the store or the ecosystem is going to uh become less and less stringent on the publisher and on the developer and in that we will have a huge change in how Publishers and developers are able to monetize their users without kind of uh you know these these these heavy fees to to bring it back I guess to closing before questions in terms of the features of a DTC strategy or or web store or gamehub whatever the you know the respected terminology is what's your what's one thing you've seen to be most effective in terms of an engagement mechanism or piece of content that users are really valuing um on a DC platform for for for us it's the uh it's the icon in game we're we're putting we're putting icons and buttons in game that lead directly to content once a user gets directly to the the gamehub Via their you know game ID they get to

the gamehub they're already logged into the gamehub once they're at the gamehub they can explore all content associated with roio or Angry Birds for instance and then from there our live Ops tool drives them to maximize the chances of transaction so I think for us specifically we've we that that icon in game is very you know Explore More content on this gamehub has been phenomenal for user engagement and transaction rates um I can add on that I think loyalty program in general as a feature is as a great opportunity to really um um Drive uh players to your store and re-engage them because you can develop a loyalty program that integrates directly into your game and have a progression for users you know to to to progress to gain points to to spend them for example on your store and then all of this communicates to the game so you also can can earn those points in the game and then spend them back to the store so you can create this this Loop um of

progression between the game and your store so loyalty programs I feel really brings a lot of value uh for players for sure maybe I'm not going to point to one feature because I think fundamentally you should be thinking about what you bring to the players in your game what I will say is really understand your audience run surveys understand test ideas with them I I think what you will find with your Spenders your Spenders spending your game because they love the game and play the game and they are your most engaged you know members of your audience so serve them this is an opportunity to serve them what we've seen is the those are the players that sign up to Red ID and you know then want more you then you know and and one you more conversation with the game developer you know want to understand you know you know what features are coming all of these kind of things so really think about yeah understanding

your audience and and what they're looking for should we open to the floor is anybody got any questions any questions for our panelists you uh I I guess I have some I have a question so uh I guess is there is there anything a publisher might do that actually means that I'm getting close to the speaker is there anything a publisher might do that you know actually makes trying to Fig how to word it like if you did something wrong on your on your DDC platform then you could actually drive players away so what what are some things to actually avoid doing so you said like what to do but what shouldn't you do that maybe You' even seen developers do in a ads I mean throwing throwing in interstitials and rewarded videos yourb store might not be you know too

practical I think there's a larger point there I mean um I say that in just nobody's doing that but I think that um I think that making the experience annoying for lack of a better way of saying it is going to drive users away um I think that there are various levers of making I mean it David kind of nailed it on the head right you want to make the user experience fun you want to make the uh web store or the gamehub or whatever you're calling it as close to your game as possible so that you have a seamless transition from game to gamehub or game to Web Store where the user does not feel like they're in a position where they are not interacting with your brand or your game and I think it's the more distant you become in terms of that branding the more that you will lose kind of uh user return rates I guess is the best way Jessica David don't don't try and change your you players behavior on how

you know on how they spend you know yeah uh if you're if I think I mentioned this if your players spend in the game you know while they're playing the game then you know that needs to be a frictionless experience so really understand you know where the opportunity is to you know to have a web shop and what you know what you know what in that purchases makes sense you know what offers makes sense you know if you've got a season pass maybe that's the thing that you start with for example yeah that's more of a a plant purchase than a uh than you in while you're playing the game purchase so really think about that and and don't because if you change the player Behavior you you may lose money yeah if you try to change that but you should try and get people to maybe buy more season passes but that doesn't mean you know that that's increase you shouldn't be hitting if your game has 90% revenue

from elsewhere you you need to make sure you retain that as well so it it's all about um understanding your players motivations and really adding value so I think if you look at again the limitations like what you can do better uh and then bring more value better content at a better price you know I don't think you can go wrong with that so it's pretty much about that and keep the experience as as uh Connor and David were saying the The Experience really close to your game so don't launch an nft collection for you exactly and I would I would underline it's really important to have kind of user insight and yeah so if you can run surveys in your game then test these ideas get the feedback of what people value and what they don't value and you before used that building you really know you do that use it ins research yep and

continue to do it as you evolve the only thing I would add to this is don't be callous with security and compliance on your web shop in the mobile platforms there's a lot of guard rails when it comes to security and compliance and you're going to have the world your fingertips when it comes to your web shop so don't be callous with your player data don't be callous with your privacy and compliance don't be callous with your security these are all freebies when people make transactions in Mobile shops and on your web shop that's your team's responsibility and you can Outsource some of this and offload to vendors but make sure you cover this this is super critical the players experience and safety is is foremost in my opinion above almost anything yeah thank you so much everybody Craig send us up yeah thank you thank you so much so please give a big round of applause to the panel that was fantastic thank you so much good job

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