Panel: Mobile Gaming Revolution: Tackling UA Challenges & Pioneering Future Opportunities.

[Music] [Music] we've got a super panel now and it's a busy old panel um Jackie is going to be our moderator Jackie V from demoso and then we've got Jesse how are you feeling got the energy and hopefully lots of water and then uh Philip Gontier Peter Gerson um keyword

Studios e Coen from digital turbine and Valerio surio from usercentrics and you don't need to do any intros now I just did it all for you Jackie hello I'm Yi Andrus or you can call me juy I work at reactor and I work with our clients solving these issues building platforms and and being compliant I'm it Cohen uh SVP marketing and strategy for a digital turbine and as part of that we also deal with things that relate to Alternative stores and alternative distribution um and we have to engage in all those things that relate to changing regulation and compliance and the opportunities that come with that Valerio sud director of product at user Centric uh user Centric is a leading conent management platform famous as CMP uh we help companies become compliant with gdpr it's a SS platform that helps uh our customers all over the globe to actually make sure that they they can sleep well at night

hi I'm Phil gtia I work for a company called smartex we are a DSP and also run CTV as well so we help games and apps uh kind of like grow their user base so we've had to help customers understand you know how to transition this uh digital landscape hi all my name is Peter Gerson I am the global head of player engagement at keywords uh in player engagement which is a fancy way of saying how player support has grown up because of exactly what we're speaking about it needs to look at trust and safety um the whole process around fraud and cheating uh how does that all link into a whole PL support environment and how do you stay compliant with people's privacy and details when you're providing them Services especially if you're Outsourcing those Services onto a platform and maybe are not keeping the data in in country or in your own systems so very interesting thank you everybody so um you talked us through um

quite a lot of the things that were coming um online um but I just wanted to um I don't know everybody was here for you to talk but um what we're going to do here is just quickly uh go through the timeline of Regulation up until now just very briefly just talk about how that's come about and then I think a lot of this panel is all about how are we going to react to this as games developers so so I'm going to ask um Valeria could you just just give us a first in in insight into what's basically happened just recently up until now yeah I mean I will make everything start with 2018 when gdpr privacy directive went live and uh both uh they said one thing that before tracking any user data you need consent now the reality is that majority of the industry didn't really uh follow the rules we can say uh or at least for

different reasons uh complications different understandings of is GDP applicable to apps or not because apps I heard three years ago well we don't have cookies in apps so it's not for us um but actually it was also for apps the reality as well the regulator were not enforcing this uh because it's very complicated to follow each publisher and to Chase and most importantly speaking also with Regulators they don't know the technology many if you ask a lawyer they don't know what an SDK is and how an SDK can work so that was also the complexity behind this however in in parallel there was an important initiative by Apple everyone knows about this because it came from Apple um as the at at had a huge adoption I think 99.9% of apps now have the at pop up and even though at doesn't make an app uh legally compant

with the with the with the gdpr I believe that's my personal opinion he gave an hint to the regulator which said okay I think in order to make everyone compliant I need to go after the big players and that's what digital Market Act is about fundamentally in a nutshell because it says okay from now on you The Gatekeepers so the Google meta B dance Amazon Microsoft um and apple they need to you are responsible for or user consent of anyone accessing uh your services so now the bow is on them they have to ACC as the police and that's where you see now coming from the Google uh mandatory usage of a CMP if you want to keep using Google admob and now last week we have the new the update on Google consent mode so even if you want to keep using analytics and attribution tools like Firebase from Google you need to enable a CMP that's basically what is happening and I

believe we'll see some moves also from the others uh but I think everyone has to keep the eyes open and and Philip from a from a a DSP perspective what's uh what's your reaction that to be yeah I mean I think everybody in this room you know the whole kind of like the ability to promote a game uh to get installs kind of like relies on data right we know that from Facebook and Google and then all of the dsps ETC so uh the reality is that not much has changed um you know although you have all of these rules uh to this day um most and especially in gaming everybody is pretty much still relying on uh probabilistic matching or fingerprinting whatever you want to call it to essentially bypass these regulations and still Target people at the device or user level um so you know what we've done is that we've acknowledged that there are changes happening so for example you know uh

we've been really investing in understanding for example for Apple scan uh scan 3.0 Now scan 4.0 what are the new features to understand if you can actually run campaigns that are performance for games and apps uh are um you know using scan as opposed to MMP data um but the reality is today pretty much everybody's still running MMP uh data so uh whether it's a just up fly and all of the other guys right um but you know I think it makes a ton of sense uh for everybody in this room if you're doing app marketing if you're doing game marketing to really lean in and start understanding because I think there was some surveys done towards the end of last year there's still a lot of people who just don't understand scan and what that means if fingerprinting ever goes away so I think you know the big the big thing that people need to do is at least start testing and understanding what to do in the scenario where when fingerprinting or

probabilistic matching actually does go away do you think they're going to go away soon you know there've been rumors for 2 years yeah so I I think it really just depends on Apple you know uh I think Google uh Google privacy sandbox will be further away that's not going to happen you know this year I don't think um Apple you know there are rumors that something could happen the springtime but then again there've been rumors for the last 2 years um so only only Apple knows is that is a reality but if they do make that kind of like aggressive move to kill fingerprinting to kill uh probabilistic that will be you know a complete pardon the fun game changer do you do you think that developers are kind of kicking this can down the road a bit yeah I mean it would be good to get maybe a I don't know if there app developers here but like you know if there are like you know who's who's actually investing in like understanding scan and and actually testing scan campaigns I don't know if there's a companies here that are doing

that no not a single one well people don't want to it's me it's me nobody wants to be a pck me kid um but yeah but I you know I get the feeling that you know talking to a lot of people in the industry that this is this is a can that continually is being kicked and that's why there are so many rumors that float around um it's like with tmps I mean uh they've been you know kicked away for a while um I remember being here first time three years ago at Pocket Gamer no one literally wanted to speak with the CMP it's like why I need this you know uh but now they but the trend was there already and if you follow the trend like with cmps now that are made basically mandatory you will see this happening with fingerprinting as well so at some point it will happen so if someone is you know like wants to do some foresight I think um I think the answer will be yes it will happen we don't know if it's this year uh but it will happen so it's

better to be ready have you seen any this in in your business deta so we're seeing an awareness I'm coming at it from almost the other side so we're the voice of customer in that space where we Outreach where where we're the Outreach when the customer reaches back in so um we're always at the tail end and we're getting dictated to so exactly the points that are being made is that the apps and the processes are going out we're being forced to sign agreements like dpas and stuff Mike PS off just technical so um you're seeing you're seeing um not really being taken seriously in implementing or like gdpr as an example we had to go back and actually go back to our customers and almost beg them to sign a DPA in conjunction with the contract that we have as a Sub sub u a sub provider to them and now with us having our own technology platform actually as a a processor sorry sub processor and

processor and then explain to them why that's important so at the tail end of it we're not seeing massive uptake even from gdpr days and now this whenever we raise hey you know that the digital Act is coming no we don't well we haven't spoken about oh that's above my pay grade so there's definitely a lot of that going on in the industry and it's quite worrying because um there's a lot of information flow around that actually the customers don't realize um so an example is the VIP programs that a lot of our customers run that requires a lot of un a lot of understanding of your player and their activity and everything that's going on and do you genuinely have their consent yes they signed up to a VIP program but did you follow all the rules and so we're doing a lot of research into that area that side of the business of how do you comply how do you keep it transparent how do you give people the choice and if they after a while okay

yes I want to be but 6 months in I no longer want to be RVP what are you going to do to go back clean the data because quite often we've had as the the first point of call hey um I want you to give me my report on the gdpr of all my data and what you're doing do you it's nearly impossible to get some companies to give you that back and we don't know we're a subprocessor where we're a processor it's easy but where we're a subprocessor we're relying on the company give and it isn't really happening so some big fines are coming before people are going to start doing stuff that's definitely on the cards it's time I think that that last point about big fines are coming is where change starts to happen so what we're seeing is technology always moves faster than regulation so this industry kind of got stood up 15 years ago and was built a certain way and was built around device identifiers and that grew into a massive massive business so big that Regulators started to take notice and so then regulation gets developed and without a very very you know deep

understanding of the technology and the moving parts of that technology regulation gets put in place no Behavior actually changes right so the first people to change is maybe the people here on stage right new companies get set up we send you a new addendum to the contract that's really exciting for everybody lawyers get a lot of work um but nobody actually does anything different you know uh we we heard uh from from everywhere in the industry that people still prefer to maybe test scan at best but run the other way if they can and so the thing that actually changes behavior is enforcement Google is now requiring a consent platform because of enforcement and so the dynamic here is we have the regulation in place the regulation is now starting to get enforced in some cases more on the Privacy side but dma is only coming to effect in a couple of months yeah enforcement is still a couple of you know months if not you know longer than that away because there's going to be a grace period and only then we will see

Behavior actually changing with the customer um and again in many cases uh you know just like yussi said if uh enforcement hits the big companies they start trickling that down to the market by changing how they operate and that's when developers actually take notice so I think that's the sequence of events that we're about to see no company especially you know relatively small Studios that just want to make a great game they want to engage users they don't want to really spend a lot of time understanding regulation and putting more friction into their processes they will only do that if they have to and and that's what we're about to discover in 2024 is what will they actually have to do yeah and those companies they have invested in Performance Marketing for a long time and they know how it works for them and it's really hard to look from Another Side when you already have the team in place you have the tech in place how how do you go from there and probably many of those companies don't yet even know that the dma is actually coming

yeah but if you're a small developer you you're thinking who's going to who's going to enforce this who is going to enforce it I think that no one will I think for for the small developer no one it doesn't make enough of a difference for any kind of regulatory entity to enforce it against the small players and so they're also doing their own 8020 logic of going after the big opportunity but with that what will happen is that the rules of the game will change because of the platforms making changes and that's really what we're seeing is that there are two kinds of enforcement there's the legislative enforcement which will typically go after the big players and then there are the big guys that have to enforce their policies if fingerprinting is not allowed but no one is enforcing fingerprinting then fingerprinting is allowed yeah the enforcement for fingerprinting is not for any kind of regulatory entity it's for the platforms to enforce right and so that's when if they change the rules of the game the smaller developers if they're not aware and if they're not ready they're going to get that entire

Foundation that they've built taken away from them with no plan B with no safety net and uh we can see that already with the with the Google admob uh deadline because if you're not sending the signal to admob now the TCF signal you don't see advertising any longer the monetization is off you can only get limited ads which by the way are not really R yet so you get nothing so even a small developer now is impacted not because of the regulator but because the regulator told Google to to enforce this so that's what's changing that's why I made before the parallelism with the at because the at came from Apple everyone adopted it now is the regulator Behind these changes Google is the first one moving but we haven't been seeing moves from Apple and meta and B Dan Etc but as we were talking about for example finger printing uh Banning will could be an a move from Apple we'll see but in the gaming industry we've seen also like a

bit of a shift as well you've seen like last year you know some of the big hyper casual which obviously they rely purely on monetizing through ads um we've seen like some of the biggest players Voodoo Etc even they claiming that you know pure inapp advertising uh monetization is going to be dead I think they they use the word themselves right so you have seen a lot of the uh hyper casual games shift becoming more casual so that they can actually monetize in in in in another way not just rely purely on Advertising so I think you know I think developers have started to shift but then again it's some of the bigger ones that started that shift like Voodoo and others because it it's they are the ones that would obviously they started being impacted massively in terms of potential Revenue loss yeah um but I think you know there is a wakeup call for everybody but um my you know if you're a game developer in this room I'd say at minimum understand and what privacy is

um and you know can you run and on or test you know uh privacy Centric campaigns um until it actually happens though the reality is i' we've spoken to many gaming companies until it actually happens until they have to do it they will do probabilistic that's just how it is because the degradation of performance from moving from MMP uh versus scan is significant because you don't have those signals however interestingly and you know what I'm going to refer to here valer we've worked with with a company um a developer that has actually seen a better performance from implementing a CMP when we're talking about bringing money in from Brands into the kind of the ho sort of PL the market this is something we have seen regularly across all our customers at the moment by they send the proper signal uh to the uh to the to the industry to Via to the programmatic industry industry they will see a boost in ecpm because uh their ad

spaces would will be filled by brand ads that before were not accessible to them so maybe we the here the the colleague can can speak from from their side of things uh but many networks told me that a lot of inventory was locked in Europe and UK just because the gdpr signal was not passed so we saw a boost in ecpm range from 10% to 120% depending on the size and the genre and the type of ads they they have but it's pretty impressive so we we saw the pan the talk before about the carrot I think this is the carrot for men to actually switch to compliance yes so there are advantages if you are going to really start looking at at the next yes I think itai was the first one I had a meeting with him three years ago and he told me about this and he put me the SE like hey this is

actually happening and then since then I was like okay I want to test with a game if it if that was true and we did the first test with h games last year and they were looking at the numbers at some point oh my God 10% increase in our ecpm that's amazing and then we did various case studies also with black smoke studos and uh yeah they saw this increase and it was pretty amazing so thank you it for well I think I think it um Shalom everybody from digital turbine's been talking about this for for a while right because I think it's um so we one of our products is an ad exchange that that ad exchange has a variety of buyers connected to it it's all programmatic so it serves both performance buyers like smex and brand buyers for example from the trade desk and that gives you a pretty broad perspective and if you as a developer you typically think about advertising only in the context of performance advertising so you care about identifiers you care about clicks you

care about downloads and that bottom of the funnel type of type of marketing is very analytical and doesn't really care who the person is despite all this privacy talk we don't care if it's itai or if it's Phil behind the impression we care if you click and if you download right and so nobody's actually trying to know who you are for Performance Marketing but it's all still getting taken away Brands only care about who you are because they're buying personas so those brands are actually looking for a way to say this person is of this age range with these interest in this geography and therefore a relevant Target for my product which is not a digital product in most cases right and so that's when those brands also care about consent without consent they can't put you in the right Persona bucket and then buy and we've we've had similar case St is just recently with gaming and non-gaming apps we've worked with lvu for example here in Europe they've seen a 60% uptick across a variety of European markets just by implementing a CMP and sending the signal into the

exchange so there's there's some upfront investment that goes into that but the buyers are actually ready to consume it once they're receiving the signals it opens up a variety of campaigns that were just previously excluded from buying that inventory and so even for a smaller developer there's impact there because again they're not buying a particular property and they're not buying a particular action they're buying a Persona so opportunity sounds like early adoption in this case can pay and it's kind of from where we're talking about looking at the customers and looking at the programs that get run we definitely say transparency is is definitely something that will pay you because most of us are consumers and so most of us are okay to get the kind of ads we want to see but we don't want to be treated like fools and idiots so this kind of in a way is the protection for both ends of the the Spectrum the key though I think is that there's a lack of understanding at the consumer level or

the player level about any of this because it's very very poorly um communicated but actually also to the industry as a whole so I mean who owns this in the industry who's responsible because industry doesn't really self-regulate we have similar things with um you know if people get hooked on games and spend too much money etc etc there isn't anything in the gaming industry like there is in the gambling industry that forces all these things that good in the difference gambling regul correct well and the reason and the reason is because they never listened and they didn't regulate themselves and to the point all of the smart people on the panel are making is if there isn't an uptake and a and a good way of following these best practices the industry will get heavily regulated for sure talking about the upside uh now that these are early adapters do you think there's going to be a change if this becomes mainstream stream so is this money that's now going

only to the early adapters and later on will be shared to a wider audience most likely yes I believe that if you're early adopter now you can reap the benefits of being one of the few and the future it will be it will stabil stabilize I believe I agree with that but I also want to say there was a stat that was just published a couple of weeks ago from uh e- marketer that showed that for the average user worldwide we spend 11% of our time in mobile games GES and only 4% of mobile ads spend goes to mobile games 4% so there's at least a 3X investment uplift potentially from Brand advertisers CU again e- marketer primarily measures the brand advertising activity the programmatic activity and so that's at least a 3X uplift so yes early movers get to reap the immediate rewards but it also makes it more accessible and available for Brands to continuously Buy Mobile audiences and to continuously find Their audience and that's an

underlying reality that's not changing so we're still I mean we've been saying it for such a long time that Brands brands are coming to mobile brands are coming to mobile it's actually even a better user experience for the average gaming user right like you get bombarded with the same gaming ad repeatedly if you're just engaging with game ads and the thing is that developers they don't even they don't ever see the brand ads coming in because they don't even see it in their own reporting because when you use mediation platform you see you know unity and iron source and meta and admob and digital turbine all of those companies have an exchange all of those exchanges have brand buyers connected to them but a lot of those brand buyers are dormant without consent right and so there's actually a pretty uh immediate a pretty substantial immediate opportunity but also a long-term opportunity because if it's easier for us to sell the inventory to Brands we will bring more brands in yeah for sure it's a great

Point there's also a trend towards um Quality in general so we have privacy first the consent and then beside dma we have DSA that is towards also trust safety Etc so we can see these trends of privacy first but also quality in the game quality of advertising Etc so all of these ties together and uh it's an interesting Trend to evolve even if you're building a new game I think you can and think about you know these type of things in order to to attract more users because users are becoming more sensitive to these topics and and they are attracted by that yeah I mean I think you know there's been so much gloom and doom prophesies about all this increase in regulation and how difficult it's making things for everybody but we're starting to see sort of green shoots of opportunity as well we've talked a little bit about the ecpm increasing from um implementing a CMP earlier um what other green shoots are we seeing well yeah I mean look we're

all in this room you know here's like what the big gaming conference that kicks off the year over year Pocket Gamer it's packed right so I think the industry is not gone anywhere I think you know it benefited hugely during the covid years when everybody was in lockdown and there was nothing else to do except for download and play games right uh but the reality is you know if you look at like where are we in 2023 relative to 2019 it is a much much bigger market right so that's the reality so you know the industry is thriving yes there are challenges but I think there's one thing I've learned is that there's always this industry always finds Solutions right um you know from our perspective we've seen also as well with privacy a lot of people like also testing CTV uh CTV I think again you know if privacy really kicks in that will be you know you have to look at other channels what are the other ways that I can grow my user base space um and you know CTV is something

that we we've seen it's not always on but a lot of people testing it last year um so that's another green shoot there as well like you know uh and CTV is a lot more accessible it's not like lenar TV which you know requires you know a massive budget for production and and so on CTV is a lot more accessible and you actually spend you know tens of thousands of dollars on CTV campaigns not Millions that's in itself a great message because I don't think a lot of people feel that CT is something that's necessarily immediately on the radar and interestingly what we've seen is actually mainly gaming companies testing CTV by far gaming companies so it's very interesting very interesting yeah we talked about quality or at least it was mentioned one of the big annoyances for me in in ux in games is as as a parent I have kids and I have made the mistake of installing them games and saying that they are kids so now if I want to buy some stuff for them them it's super annoying some of you

might know it's sometimes it's even impossible but if we have through these through possibly DSA dma through these new opportunities new stores new ways of buying stuff it's possible to make parental controls and and purchasing opportunities that are actually good user experience and and good privacy experience and really good ux for the users so this is something we were talking about earlier which is opening up the app Apple's having to open up the stored then you got all the other stores that have actually been available for quite a long long time but these are all areas of opportunity as well yeah and I think they require an upfront investment and and having a forcing function like the one we're talking about kind of raises the question for developers of do I actually want to diversify into a different ecosystem that might operate under a different foundation and alternative stores have existed for a while on Android they're going to exist for the first time time on iOS uh you know presumably this year depending on

uh just how difficult Apple makes it it will be difficult we just don't know how how difficult and that doesn't it it's so early in its development that developers actually have a chance to influence how this plays out and the platforms that are being built they don't have to work exactly the same way as the older platforms they they can be designed in a way that facilitates privacy compliance but more efficient targeting more efficient attribution more efficient uh UA opportunities uh that are different from what we're accustomed to so there's definitely a big opportunity to just research that space for sure I mean I'm seeing loads of well not loads but fair few privacy First Development platforms coming through which are incredible sorry I just cussing you off no I was agreeing and to I was just thinking to tell's point we're assuming that everyone's already got a game out there and then they're running it in the old way and then that's where you're talking about a significant investment but it doesn't

mean you can't bring new games already and start there and then work backwards because as long as you I think if you're transparent as a developer uh and or publisher and you're working to show that you're moving things forward and your new games are starting to comply and then you can go back to catalog because as you say it opens up a market that's probably the best way to show any regulator that you're serious about this and they're not going to come off you for what was there if I'm not mistaken so then the investment is planned as part of that project which is a lot more sensible than trying to just get what you've got and make it more compliant exactly the changes that are happening today are disruptive to the existing business and so you have to think about those changes as an opportunity for your future business and so again soft launching a game on an alternative platform and may be actually using that to test in core market so today many developers are actually doing their soft soft launch in proxy markets you know you soft launch in Mexico before you publish in the US and things like that

but what if you could soft launch in the US just not on your bread and butter platform on an alternative platform gauging you know your your kpis and that performance there and then um potentially scale that into your uh incumbent store it's a very cool idea um when we're talking about other opportunities what's actually going to be happening with the attribution and analytics platforms what's how are they going to react to this I I from my side they will now I mentioned the Google consent mode one very shortterm thing that will happen they will adjust to that so if you work with a just or a flyer you need to wait for their instructions on how to pass the consent signal to to Google so that's an immediate change to keep an eye on uh they will keep uh working but there will be some changes also in their API so so keep an eye on it those guys are so Savvy and so

technical that they're usually very much on top of you know what they need to do and how they need to change and in some cases they're trying to introduce also innovative solutions that actually work differently like data clean rooms and things like that I'm not worried for mmps because they're so deeply entrenched with the customer audience that they've become almost like trusted advisers in navigating this it's actually more for people who are trying to change the ecosystem to partner early with mmps almost as a channel to get to the developer uh closer closer to home right like as as a channel to get to the developer and and affect their Core Business alongside their new business and you know I think that's that's definitely been our experience you know as part of launching an alternative store and trying to grow that business the first thing that we needed to think about and solve for is okay can can this be attributed are we even going to get credit or is that going to get you know miscounted misattributed and so on so it's an inherent part of how you have to think about building an alternative ecosystem I can't imagine I I can't imagine Ms disappearing um you know so I

I think they've adapted already you know since ATT came out 2 and 1 half years ago whatever it is they've adapted and adapted but I guess yeah the big elephant in the room is really like what is Apple going to do cuz if Apple makes a a big aggressive move then yeah things will shift quite quite dramatically but um you know everybody's been waiting for that uh and you know still you know hoping that it's not going to be that that that much of a of of a shift for everybody very very difficult times for a large commercial entity to make very aggressive moves uh it immediately attracts scrutiny and fire and I think you know that's where it's also so difficult for Apple or Google or any large company for that matter to act as the enforcement agency right because this now it's not a regulator enforcing against a commercial entity it's one commercial entity with skin in the game enforcing another Comm things another against another commercial en you know that opens the door to a bunch of Apple have had no issues with having

different rules for themselves thank you for I have I'm conscious we've got 42 seconds left so have we got any questions in the room at all for these wonderful gentlemen okay I'm going to if we don't one key takeaway you'd like to leave the audience with starting with you okay one thing we didn't touch much but small companies please take action because otherwise we're going to see a lot of bad things happening to small and mediumsized companies take take care look at look at the regulations and and look at the landscape for me it's uh find your trusted partner in navigating all of this some some company that you already work with today that helps your UA business or your monetization business and can guide you through what's coming uh that's your best way of not having to do all the research yourself for me one uh quick tip is to go check the Google consent mode so make sure that you

enable that because otherwise you won't be able to use Firebase and that's pretty bad uh and also work with a good consent management platform certified by Google that they will help uh use sent if you want yeah yeah I would say yeah really brush up on scan test scan and and maybe uh you know there are Partners like ourselves our competitor there's many others who actually have been in wasting a lot of time learning so again as I think you mentioned lean into to a partner that you can trust uh you know run workshops on scan with them so that you can understand how to do this and then and then consider alternative channels like CTV which is like up and coming mine's much more simple because all of the buffins have told you what to do around the technical implementation but the key thing with the industry is exactly what I saw with gdpr happening now again if you're an alcoholic you have to say I'm an alcoholic before you can start the Cure admit that this is coming admit it's going to impact you

and then take on the view of how do I do this differently to change my activity or change my behavior far too often in the smaller to medium Publishers and that we suck it's not really my problem the big guys will deal with this I'll get to this later and when you get to it later it's always more expensive it's always more difficult and it's always when you least need it to happen that it's going to mess your systems around and for me I'm seeing so many many new companies springing up with a lot of great minds behind them from the industry that are privacy first Centric so keep your eyes open and be prepared to learn because every day is a school day and I think there's so much more we all have to learn in order to stay ahead of the stay ahead of the pack so thank you very much everybody [Applause] amazing