Session: Beyond the App Store: Why Top Studios Are Embracing The Browser Again - Rabia Dincer.

Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Yes. First up, we do have uh Rabika Densa from Crazy Gh Rabia, sorry, Rabia uh from Crazy Games. Beyond the app store, why top studios are embracing the browser again. So, please take it away. Thank you. Hi everyone. Thank you for coming. You are a very very dedicated

group. So, I'm proud of you for being here at this early time. So, um lucky for you, I'm not going to start with a very sad topic that everyone is talking about the crashes in the market. Everything is going bad. Now we are going to be talking about a very very booming market which is the browser and what is happening. So most of you know me from mobile publishing and monetization and today I am supporting a lot of studios a lot of our partners to have games on crazy games and have extra revenue. Uh, also I guide for successful launch and for crazy games. My goal is to choose the top games that next generations are going to remember. By the way, can you hear me? Well, okay. Thank you. So to start with the issue why most of the studios are coming to us nowadays it is the mobile bottleneck which which is the

mainly the UA costs. Uh nowadays with all the spanning it's more and more difficult to get uh revenue successfully. Uh and the other thing is uh app store gatekeeping. Even though Epic has won the battle against the app store, for now it's only available in the US. So the issue continues and the review delays they are forever. And the thing is uh as a user uh it's getting more and more difficult to find good games unless the developer has a huge budget to spend a lot of uh marketing. uh and for users it is also becoming more and more and more difficult to find games from very very passionate uh developers. So that is where we come into play which is the web gaming because the thing is uh most people use web gaming as a discovery channel where you don't download anything. You don't

need to have any budget to buy the game. It is the peak of the premium premium games. So they can just choose any games they want to play. they can test a lot of them and the ones they really like they can download it and buy it and the retentions are much better and that it is available in any platform basically you can just go on your mobile phone to crazygames.com play them right right away but also on your PC on your tablet which is uh most of our US-based they are using from tablet and desktop um so it is very very flexible and the other part is ease of sharing which is uh web games are allowing for a very social uh playing experience to this one I'm going to come back later what viral games means on the web specifically so we have some partners here and after my speech they are going to tell you why they are coming to web gaming but to

give you an idea the games on the web it is creating a long lifeline Especially for maybe I mean everyone here knows about mini clip from your childhood maybe and what is happening is we are also creating the new life for the next generations. Um and this creates a diverse revenue streams because as you know if you work only on one uh platform and if there is a there's there are changes in the market your revenue is also not stable. That's why uh coming to web allows you to have an extra market, extra revenue stream uh where you can be as a studio way more sustainable in the long run. And the other good thing is Gen Alpha they are all on web because they don't have credit cards yet and most of them they don't have mobile phones but they are all allowed to use their parents' PC and

they are playing with their parents with their friends in the school in tablets. So you create a very loyal audience in the long run as well. Um and we have a very very big community on Tik Tok on Discord where they're competing against each other and they are boosting your game revenues as well. Um and it's a game changer for Virality. Uh and there's no need for UI budget. So for any indie developer who is coming to the market and has a really good game idea and developed maybe for a few months and looking for an investor which is very very tough nowadays to find a good investor they don't need anything they can just come release the game create the revenue source create the user base and basically start their gaming career. So to come to crazy games, we have a 40

million monthly active users and the big part of these users they are coming from the US and from tier one countries. We focus on that because we have inapp purchase and these users they are very quality uh spenders and they know what they are looking for in the games and uh we work with a lot of developers and we share this knowledge with our developers. What is going on in the market? what is trending um instead of checking app store glide the most reliable data is going to web because that is what they are playing exactly at this moment so uh the question I always get is how do you monetize where is the money coming from basically it is both ads and inapp purchases for ad supported models the rewarded videos we recommend using them way more than the other ones because uh retention stays more stable

and the users decide to stay in your games for a longer time. This is the same thing for inapp purchases because on the web since they have just clicked one icon and they are testing the game, they didn't spend any money any investment in their side. It is just a little bit of time. So in purchases allow retention to be way higher in the long run. And the technology is also evolving. Uh most of you know already about WebGL but the successor of it web GPU is already here and we work with a lot of uh partners a lot of uh game engines and also multiplayer frameworks like Photon and also um analytics attributions at partners etc that are really strong on mobile they are coming to the web now now nowadays because they see the potential and the growth So uh the very first web GPU game it

came to crazy games for the first time. Uh what a GPU does is that uh very high quality graphics are uh streamed on on the web very very quickly. Basically uh a huge game that would take maybe half an hour to load normally is live in 10 seconds. So this is a a game new racer game. This is still under development, but I'm going to give you a sneak peek of how it what it looks like. Let's go. [Music] Heat. Heat.

[Music] [Music] [Music] Okay. So, so in general when we see this type of games with huge maps, lots of graphics, we are very very scared. We are like, okay, this is going to be a huge game. We can never convert it. But thanks to WebGPU, we are allowed and we have these type of games on the platform. This means the users are also getting used to spending more and more time on the platform and play these type of games for a long time. So what is happening what we are seeing and as a future for the browser games is that multiplayer games they are

performing much much better because of the social gaming aspect. So when you have a multiplayer games and when you can invite your friends suddenly you have three times four times more users than a regular game and uh these games are also played with a lot of creators. So they do YouTube gaming like YouTube uh videos, Tik Tok videos and showing your games basically doing your marketing for free for you. Uh and also this is a discovery engine. So what we are seeing is even though people come to crazy games from browsers to test different games, they come to the desktop and they spend way more time in the long run. And an example of the viral games that I was talking to you about, it is the Italian brain rot. So if you're a millennial like me, Italian brain wrote is basically a meme on the social media mocking about uh AI generated photos and very famous song.

What happened is that we developed a very small game in a over a weekend just two days. We were just kind of laughing about it and in just in a few weeks it got played by like 11 million times and uh the it's a clicker game with more than 10 minutes of play time which is very surprising for this genre and especially for Gen Z and Gen Alpha it became a hit. We saw lots of videos people sharing this among themselves and this created a meme trend. After this, we started to get so many more games based on the memes, what is trending, etc. So for you as well, this might be an indication of seeing what is working on, what is going on in the market right now and plan your next projects based on those. And the good thing is if you come to Crazy Games or any web platform, your options are almost unlimited. We are not

alone. There are so many other amazing platforms that you can distribute and create diff different revenue sources and uh nowadays we almost work with all the mobile publishers big ones and uh just let us know uh if you have different types of games because even though we work with the top ones for us the importance is the quality of the game. So even if your game has never been launched or have very very few uh downloads, we are still open to uh judging them based on the quality. And what we have learned from all the users and what can help you when you're designing the next games for the web, it is the session length trends. In general, the player time it's around 10 minutes. So if you want to monetize by ads or in a purchase, you have to have very short levels to show the

progression inside the games. But also uh top performing genres as I said um it depends. So you can always go and see what is on the top games during those months. But what we are seeing obviously uh this is a simplification but any competitive game for multiplayer game where I'm crashing stuff and like racing with my friends and basically show my skill set they perform really well for the ad monetization but also for the inapp purchase you need to have a narration a little bit more content maybe RPGs so mixing the narration with more competitive aspects as well and for ad formats as I mentioned rewarded and inapp purchase they perform the best. What we most of the time recommend is launching the game first with the rewarded ads. You can add your events and track your performance and based on what you see which ones are performing the best. You can create your inapp

packages as well based on this and then uh loading time. Well uh I think nobody wants to wait on an empty screen on a black screen. Uh that's why loading time it is super important which is why we talk about the technology and optimization all the time and adapting to controls for keyboard mouse because more than 75% of our users they are on the desktop and uh well they are going to discover your game uh this can lead to more and more downloads or uh sold games on steam. As an example of this successful launch, uh, Stonegrass is a game developed by Free Play. It was a hit a few years ago. Uh, and what they have done is to re make like give it a second life. They launched it on crazy games and this became one of the top games in the platform because they have done the AB testings on mobile. So the monetization

in a purchase it was already there and it is a very satisfying loan mover simulator game and since it is on a lot of platforms users are playing it on both web uh both web and mobile and the play time and retention is catching up on the web as well. So yeah, it is for a long time and next generations are also getting to know these games with no UA cost. And for the ENAP, the successful case, uh we can show you battle arena. You can also test this game. Uh it is developed by Red Bricks wall and it's an RPG game. So basically, as I said, it's a competitive game. There's a story line, but the onboarding is very short. So it's free to play. There's no login. So they can play this extensive uh content very very quickly and um just focus on the game play which is performing really well for the inapp.

So some uh insights from us about the feature and what we are seeing in the market. uh 75% of our players they are on desktop as I said but the mobile part it is growing very very quickly and inapp is also we were surprised we weren't expecting this much growth but this is uh it's also breaking records every month that's why uh we are also focusing on this type of genres the MMOs adventure games more casual games more and more and uh the high penetration of Gen alpha what we mean is this virality was not something we were expecting and the this age group is normally not uh aimed for when we are doing the market but they are there and they are waiting for the next trends and well since this is a trending market mobile publishers they're coming every day to

the web uh yeah and that with that the one surprise eyes we get is that Chinese developers they are using web for entering to the web western uh markets to test what is performing to uh to check their own games and do the AB testing on the web and multiple publishers they are creating uh web teams they are quitting mobile quitting steam they're only focusing on web because they have seen the potential that there since this is just a revenue where they are really well connected to users where they get most feedback and yeah this is a trend setting. So yeah and whales prefer to play on desktop. Okay this is all on my side. Thank you so much.

[Applause] Do you have any questions? Thank thank you very much. Yeah. Uh so my main question is about how do the users discover your games here because on on mobile for example you have the app stores. Yeah. But here you don't have a standard app store which people trust. Yeah. Exactly. So basically we are very very strong on SEO and most of the countries you can just search games uh we are the top results there but also uh since we have more than 3,000 games they also look for these games and we are the top provider for these as well. So it is mainly SEO. Thank you. Thanks for one question. Thank you for the lovely presentation. I'm wondering what sort of strategies

are you employing to target users for retargeting campaigns as well as retentions because apart from inapp purchases you don't have many ways to go for those right. Mhm. Well in general compared to mobile the retention is always going to be less because uh we are trying to get as little data as possible from the users. What we recommend is that you will always get new users. So focusing on the onboarding for the first 40 minutes of your G game play is going to earn you way more than focusing on the long-term users. But that's why we always recommend adding inner purchase because normally when you think of the packages you think of okay 10 $10 $15. But the thing is if you create different uh pay walls even if it is for $2 well they are going to come back because even if it is $2 they invested in the game. Mhm. Yeah. And also on the top of

the crazy games portal you have continue playing part. So this also works. Are you running any email campaigns or so? Are you running any email campaigns? SMS notification campaigns? We do, but it's way rare. It's mainly the quality of the game that you Yeah, exactly. Right. Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, that's that's very loud. That's my first experience of a drill. Uh, but it works. I have the message on my phone. Um, yeah, that was crazy. Uh, are we all good for questions? Anything else? Any Any other questions? Okay, great. Thank you so much. Please, another big round of applause. Thank you. I live this here for you. [Music]