Session: How To Get To 30% DTC Revenue Share - Omer Torok-Arlosoroff, Appcharge.

kick straight off Again, we've got Omar from Appcharge is going to come. Hey, Omar. And we're going to have the 2025 AppCharge DTC report. Omar, over to you.
Happy PGC everyone. Happy Monday. How are you? Happy to see you all. Um, today I'm going to talk to you about one of my favorite things, which is direct to consumer, and how you can get to 30% direct to consumer. I wouldn't say easily, but in a way where uh if you do it right, it's going to happen in a short few weeks. Um I

think around a year ago, a lot of it was in theory, but the past year has been nothing short of crazy. And uh all the reports, all the data, all the best practices is based on more than $700 million we've seen in transaction from direct to consumer uh in 2020 25. All righty. So to those who don't know me, um my name is Omar. I've been with Upcharge uh pretty much from the get-go. And in the last two and a half years, what I've been doing, I've been helping u mobile game studios and publishers to reach their direct to consumer goals. Um whether it be 10%, 20%, 30%, acquiring new users and so on. Um prior to that, I was actually spending a lot of time on the other side working for Google. So, I I'm kind of aware of like the two sides and I can tell you that I've been really privileged in the last couple of years

to work with the biggest uh gaming studios on the planet. And in general, uh to those who don't know about Upcharge, we are built to scale. Um we have team in 14 different places around the globe. We have been working directly providing D2C services to 70 out of the top 300 mobile games around the globe. 2025 as I mentioned was more than $700 million from direct to consumer in transactions with upcharge. Essentially upcharge is D2C and D2C is upcharge. This is what we do every day all day. We've been supported by the biggest name in the industry supercell play. Long may continue. Okay. So I think in 2025 talking about direct to consumer D2C gaming studios finally realized it's not a nice to have anymore. It's pretty much

mandatory. I am not aware of any gaming studio who hasn't already built a web store already used payment links. A lot of them are testing the water and like hitting a glass ceiling of around 10 to 15%. And most studios want to be around like the pioneers at 30 35% even 40% wallet share of direct to consumer of their overall revenue. The reason that many publishers are stuck over there is because they're not following the best practices. What I'm going to do today, I'm going to talk to you in a very high level, give you a small tips on how you can get to 30% whether you're a big game or a small game, whether your social casino, casual, and so on. First and foremost, let's map out where everyone is standing. Um, most of the publishers that you know of today are anywhere along between 5% to 15% DTOC shell. This you can get quite easily only by uh opening up a web

store, testing your payment links. Um it will happen pretty easily. Um but you have a selected few that are already here already have uh 30% wallet share already have players coming back. They have their highest value payers. when they think about buying anything related to the game, they think about uh the game portal or the web store. And in order to um explain about uh how you get there, I'm going to I'm going to divide it into three steps, which is discovery. How do you get players to know about your web store? Conversion. How do you get that luxurious first time deposit? and then scale. How do you create a habit for players to come back again and again and again into your web store? Let's start with discovery. Discovery is essentially bridging the gap between the app and your D2C portal.

Getting players acquainted with what D2C is with what what they can get from the web store and so on. For the lack of a better terminology, 2025 was crazy. A lot of things were happening, regulation was changing and the biggest uh disruption that we've seen on direct to consumer was payment links. Payment links is essent essentially a web checkout directly from the game where you can with a couple of clicks pay externally outside of Apple and Google. It has been something that has been pretty much uh I think from March uh right from the beginning has been adopted by pretty everyone and it has been a really really good D2C tool to introduce new players to direct to consumer. I want to add a caveat. I want to say that um the direct to consumer ecosystem is ever

evolving and regulation is still changing. There's a big hearing next week uh between Google and Epic and the whether we are seeing payment links today might not stay for the longer run. We don't know it might. It is a good tool to get players introduced into direct to consumer and we can see it by the data. So more than half of the players who use payment links for the first time were completely new to direct to consumer. They've never seen a web store in their life. That's a really good foot in the door. And the most important thing for me is that quarter of the users have continued from payment links into web store. And this is really really crucial. Why is it crucial? Because at the end of the day when regulation is going to be aligned uh whether it's like locally or globally, Google and Apple will find a compromise. The one thing that's going to be here that's going to stay it's not going to go anywhere is web stores and game portals. This is the place you want to

get all of your players when it comes to direct to consumer. Like anything else in life, uh we're still in the discovery phase. We want to get to know someone or get to know something. Communication is key. How do we communicate to our players, to our highest payers, to anyone actually that we have as a gaming studio, a web store or a game portal? So, the lowhanging fruit, the way to go, the easiest way is in-game communication. If you're a gaming studio and you just open the web store, you want your players to get to know about your web store. Make sure that in any way that you can within the game, you communicate to the player that this exciting new exclusive place where you can get more for your money within the web store. Whether it's redirects uh directly from the game depend on regulation and areas whether it's like uh just constant pop-ups and reminders

always leverage any type of communication you have within the game to remind the players that hey web stores are happening. This has been from what we've seen the best way and the most efficient way. But it's not the only way. At the end of the day, you talk to your players all the time. And if you have a VIP account management uh infrastructure where you already have a well-established relationship with the player, he already knows you, he trusts you of a VIP car manager. We have seen that every time that a VIP car manager has been communicating directly to the players, they felt that um they're getting something exclusive about the web store and they also were really eager to see if it's the right place to go because they really know what time and when and how they can get the best value. And in web stores by nature, we're going to talk about it. You get a better value. But it's not only VIP

account management. You have a social game, you have communities, you have discord, you have Facebook, players are uh looking for uh things that are happening there all the time. Make sure you keep pumping up your DTOC portal there at any given time that you can. And one thing that we have seen that added incremental value is that there are newsletters, there are uh chat within the support, there is SMS marketing. Every game has a different type of marketing communication. Leverage any direct correlation and communication you have with your players to always keep reminding them about web stores. Okay, that's great. Now we have the players and the players they are aware of the web store. They know it's a new thing. They've read about it. You you talk to them about it. How do you make them buy and trust a web store for the first time? makes it like very luxur luxurious first time deposit.

There's a buzzboard around the industry about segmentation and personalization and everyone has a different idea about what it essentially means. Um to us from what we've learned is that any successful mobile game today know and learn the players in a very efficient way and they know how to segment them into making them feel that their offer that they're seeing that what they're playing is tailor made to them. We believe that in order to have a successful game and a web store, you need to make sure that every time the player gets in to the web store, it's been segmented. It's being personalized in a way which is based on your own game personalization. It has been something that we have been seeing with all of our stores and it has been a gamecher. This is pretty much mandatory and we know in app chart that no one knows the game better than you. Take

your own segmentation from within the game, implement it on your web store, make it automated. It's a game changer. That's actually a really interesting one. Um when we initially started um doing web stores, uh I have here funny with me, my VP product. Uh we really were contemplating about in terms of offer, should we offer sale or should we offer more value? And we were kind of like AB testing with some of our publishers. And we found out that adding more value to any offer that you have compared to what you get in the game not only increases uh average revenue per user. Also increases the chances of getting that first time deposit. Players who are coming to the web store know how much they're paying, know how much they're getting. And we highly recommend on any offer that you do within the web store to add somewhere along of 15 to 25% markup on top of what

you get within the game. This has been really important. So giving a discount might work. We don't see it working as efficient as adding 20% more. Yeah, there isn't a bigger uh conversion killer than wanting to buy. I want to play. I've seen this amazing offer and I'm not able to log in into the web store. This has been something that we have dedicated a lot of time to and quite a few solutions on how to do so. Make sure that your web store has a seamless way to get in and login. um whether it's uh OTP or whether it's like a Facebook login or even a passwordless login completely that takes the player ID direct from the game. That's up to you. But just make sure that every time a player goes to the web store, it can be in and out in a few seconds.

Localization. So your game is doing great. You have players everywhere, whether it's in the US, in the UK, in the Middle East. Um, in Europe, players needs to feel that when they go into the web store, it feels like it's a part of the game, an extension to the game, and it needs to feel familiar. Having uh using uh localized currencies, localized language is extremely important as well. We have been seeing that this has been a real uh game maker in markets that we initially didn't really believe it's it's going to make a change. So, this is really important. Always localize your web store. And let's say you're somewhere in Europe and you're already in the store. You've logged in, everything looks great, and then you go and you want to pay and the checkout doesn't load in time, and you can only pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay, and you really want to pay with your local payment method, but you don't

have it. That's also a conversion killer, especially for the first uh first time deposit. Make sure that your checkout is customized, is loading quickly, it has all of the right alternative payment meth methods, depends on the country. Always make sure that when you're at the gateway, you're on the way out, you have the best experience, experience that shows that it's safe. This is crucial as well. All righty. So now let's say you're a game. You've opened a web store. You've done everything that I've told you to do. You've been good. Uh you communicated properly. You got players even to buy for the first time. And then a week goes by, some players come back, some don't. Some comes back few weeks after. You lost the momentum. you feel like players only remember uh uh your D2C strategy even though we've done

everything in terms of introduction and in terms of communication. How do you break the glass ceiling of 10 to 15% and create a repeated purchase habit for the user where every time that he wants to buy he thinks web stores web stores web stores. And now we're going to talk about the last part which is scale. We have found out something very interesting that a lot of players that are coming the first time are actually going to come the second time and then there is uh a drop off but the players do come to buy for the third time within the web store are probably going to stick for the fourth, fifth and sixth time. If you're able to get a player to buy three times on the web store, there is an 84% that he will continue to buy most of his transactions via the web store. Um, we can see that

that 87% of users who buy four times continue to fifth time. So, we have find out that our goal is to get players to buy at least three times. And how do we do so? Listen, you're coming from the mobile gaming industry. You have your games within the game. You have mechanism that have been working efficiently to get players to come back to the game again and again. Same thing for your web stores. You're using rolling offers, which to me has been the biggest game changers on web stores completely where you progress towards a visible goal. Players always want to come back. Same like for progress buzzer when you see something and you buy and you get rewarded for buying and then eventually you're going to get some bigger reward if you have four or five or six purchases in a row that helps a lot. And obviously uh daily bonuses where you

incentivize the player to return to the web store and and he knows that if he goes to the web store that eventually is going uh to get a bonus. This has been really great for a foot in the door to create scale. And those three are just like three examples that uh I can show you today due to like limited time. There is at least five, six, seven, eight, nine different features you can use. Depends on your game. You know your game best. Another thing which has been helping with scale is seasonality campaigns. Um same thing you do within the game. You have Black Friday, you have Christmas, you have one year to the game. In those days, players know that they're going to get a much better deal uh for their money. And if you create a correlation and a symbiotic relationship between those seasonality campaigns and the web store, you tell the players, hey, you want to get 40% more cuz now

it's Christmas, cuz now it's Black Friday, go to the web store. We've seen players who usually don't even leave the game go directly into the game portal or the web store. Uh on those days, the wallet share for some of our games have been north of 50% of their overall revenue in those days. This is really really really important. Create correlation between uniqueness, best value and your web store. Yeah, at the end of the day, as I said at the beginning, B2C ecosystem is something mandatory to have. 97% of revenue uh that come from the web store comes from repeated buyers. Just think of that. players who came back once came back twice. And think of how

much money you can save and utilize and how much you can improve communication with your players if you have a wellestablished game portal and web stores. As I mentioned before, getting players to buy once, to buy twice is something that has been done quite easily. getting them to buy three times have been crucially important and this is something that you need to focus on if you want to get a scalable approach on your D2C and at the beginning a long time ago like seven minutes ago I was talking about pyramid links and uh when players go to the web store they feel like they're in a much more wellestablished well-rounded uh store and they're more eager uh to buy more to invest more. And as I mentioned at the beginning, web stores are something that are here to stay no matter what's going to happen with regulation.
Yeah.
Okay.

So, I'm going to have I've got our panelists waiting to come on up. So, um really appreciate the uh the finish quick 20 seconds.
Oh, literally one second. And we really
So I'll just say that um we have been working with some of the biggest games in the industry and to our biggest publishers most of them if not all of them are at around 30% right now. Um you just need to follow the rules. It's pretty fundamental. Make sure that you do. Um we are really humbled to work with Gaming Studios. If you want to talk to us, we're here. We have uh a really cool report that goes in detail about what we learned from $700 million in transaction in the last year. And uh thank you so much and apologize for
No, it's all good. It's all please don't forget to take the picture of the QR code and get that. Um really amazing stuff. I think the uh the off store stuff is really important.