Session: Marketing Web Shops - Chip Thurston, Fast Spring.

[Music] Up next, I would like to welcome Chip to the stage who's going to be talking about marketing web shops. another crucial uh element to uh unlocking revenue for your games uh business. So, welcome Chip. Thank you, Charlie. Is this one this one on? Just this. All right. So, thank you. I am, as Charlie said, here to talk about marketing web shops. uh whether it's really a forbidden fruit or it's this ripe opportunity that you could be capitalizing on as a game developer to

make your game more profitable. I see. All right. So, first a little bit about me, my favorite subject. Uh so, I'm the head of gaming at Fastring. We are an all-in-one uh direct to consumer payment platform. Basically, we're here to power the checkout experience for your web shops on a global scale. Uh we have over 3,000 customers. We have 20 years of experience. We'd love to be here to uh be your partner empowering your web shop. We have a booth just right there in the middle if you'd love to talk more about Fastpring. Uh for me personally, I'm bringing over a decade of experience in the gaming industry. I've worked at studios like Scipplay and most recently Scopely where I left in October. Uh and I was very uh privileged to be involved in developing a lot of the direct to consumer strategy at those studios. And so my focus at Fastspring as the head of gaming here is to really take that experience and bring that forward and help our customers in the industry overall to market and monetize direct to consumer to understand the strategies and pathways to success in this nent space. Uh for me personally, I'm based

out of Austin, Texas, father of one awesome seven-year-old kiddo. Uh when it comes to gaming, I'm a recovering completionist. I I try to do better there. So today I'll talk through whether it's really the forbidden fruit of direct to consumer marketing or that's a bit of a misperception. Um and then some of what we know about direct to consumer marketing. There's a tendency to focus on the ambiguity of it and to be paralyzed by that when in reality there are these very effective guard rails. There are these things that we know about direct to consumer marketing and I'll go a little bit into that because from there we'll go into the real meat of this presentation which are these what I'll call unique aspects of direct to consumer marketing some of the things you need to consider how you might do a little bit differently in the DTOC space and how you put together your go to market plan and then I'll try to bring it all together with a use case at the very end to try to uh emphasize those lessons. So when I have a lot of these conversations about direct to consumer marketing, I feel like they tend to go

immediately to this left image here, this this perception of direct to consumer marketing as a forbidden fruit, as the first rule about web shops is you don't talk about web shops. And that it's something we know we would benefit from, that we know it would make our game more profitable, but we also know we shouldn't do that. That it's it's prohibited by these anti- steering policies. And in reality, if you look at the other side of the tree, which is the right image here, you know that these companies are going up and down the tree just fine. They're going up and down. They're plucking that fruit and they're benefiting as a result. Their games are becoming much more profitable as a result. So the big question is how how are some game developers paralyzed by this risk aversion and this misunderstanding of the anti- steering policies while other developers are profiting significantly from marketing their direct to consumer channels and growing their direct to consumer channels. Well, I'll start with some of the truths about direct to consumer monetization. Um, and I think it's important to start here because another direction these conversations can go is

that these policies are ambiguous. And because they're ambiguous, I don't know what I can do and what I can't do. And so I don't do anything. And instead, I think it's important to start with what we do know, even if they're pretty basic and pretty foundational, because from there, we can build out a really informed strategy. For example, we know we can sell products in a store in a mobile game. This is the most obvious statement you'll hear this week. We the entire mobile gaming industry is built on this. But you can have a store in your mobile game. And I think it's important to start there because we also know we can sell products in a web shop for a mobile game. There's nothing prohibiting the existence of a web shop today. Now, how you talk about that web shop, how you get players to that web shop, that's all more of the gray area, and that's what I'll talk more about later. But as far as just creating this shop, that's perfectly okay. Many games, in fact, do that today. The other thing is something we know we cannot do, which is another truth about this. We know we cannot take players directly from that mobile game into that web shop. That

direct pathway is what's prohibited by these anti- steering policies. In a more extreme example, we know we can't embed a web shop into our game. If you're playing a mobile game and you tap on the store button, you can't have a popup that is powered by this web shop instead, right? It has to be powered by the mobile platform that you're on. Apple store, Google store, things like that. So, okay, we we know these things. We also know that leading publishers are profiting significantly from direct to consumer. Uh I'll cite play tikka here because in their quarterly reports they publish how much of their revenue comes from direct to consumer. And in their most recent quarterly report they said 28% of their revenue comes from the direct to consumer space. Not only that, that's up 8% year-over-year. So this is a very significant portion of their overall revenue coming from direct to consumer. And it's growing. I'm confident if we look back a year from now, we'll continue to grow. that'll be over 30%. And it'll go beyond that. And that's just one example. There are countless developers out here who are

benefiting from this. So again, the question is how and that's more of what I'll talk about. But I think it's very important to start with these things that we know because these are the guardrails. These are the things that we know we can and cannot do. And everything else in between is this this gray area. This area that the companies that are succeeding in the direct to consumer space today are comfortable navigating. They're living in this gray area. interpreting these anti- steering policies and benefiting as a result. Now, the other piece of that, everything else I'll say from here is in generalities. I'll say generally a lot. That's my going to be my favorite word for the rest of this talk today because it's not black and white. But again, that's uh the intentional structure of these policies is that they are a bit open to interpretation and there can be exceptions to any rule from here and I'll I'll give examples of those too. And the last thing I'll say before getting into the real meat of this is that there's also a perception of the relationship with Apple and Google with these in that it's almost this kind of

backdoor way to make your game more profitable or that it's kind of trying to be secretive and do it without them knowing. And that couldn't be farther from the case. It's actually saying they will they have always been a critical distribution channel for mobile games and they will continue to be a critical channel for mobile games. uh it's about saying they've defined these policies so we will understand those policies we will operate within those policies and we'll do it in a very tactful and respectful way and in doing so we'll maintain our relationship with them while growing our direct to consumer channel so how do we do that well when I say the gray area these are the three unique aspects of direct to consumer marketing that I'm referencing and when I say unique aspix I mean unique relative to other marketing campaigns you might be putting together. So what you do for direct to consumer, you need to consider your marketing channels, how you'll reach your players because your strategy will vary significantly based on the channels that you use. You need to consider what you say. Uh in inapp

messaging has certain parameters given these anti- steering policies of what you can and cannot say. And lastly, it's the routing. It's where you're taking your players. Uh I mentioned earlier we can't have that direct pathway from a mobile game into a web shop. So okay, what can we do? Well, I'll go into a bit more detail on each of these, but again, these are the three that really make up this gray area that is very unique to direct to consumer marketing. So, whenever we start to put together this go to market plan for a web shop, this is, you know, let's presume we've already built this web shop and we're talking about how we can market that. Conversations tend to immediately go to how we're communicating about it in the app. It's saying, "What are we saying in our mobile game on a mobile device about our web shop?" And that's a critical channel. And that's something I'll talk a lot more about in the next couple of slides. But I want to start by broadening the scope and saying that's only one vehicle that we can use to communicate about our web shop. There

are all these other channels we have at our disposal. In my career, I had the privilege of working on both a midcore game and a casual game. On the midcore game, we had all of these channels. Uh we had a blog that players would read with very detailed content about our game, and that blog existed on our website. We had an email campaign we could use to directly market to our players. We had social media that players actually engaged with and loved. We had communitydriven forums. We had a Tik Tok channel, a subreddit, a Discord server. We had all these places we could communicate about our game. And the critical part there is that they were outside of our game. They were not in our game. And so when we came up with something new on the website, we could look at all these, put together a go to market plan and say, "All right, let's think about how we'll communicate that in our community forums. Let's think about how we'll email players about that. Maybe we'll post about it on the blog." And what we could say about that was much less restricted than what we could say in the mobile game. Now, it's not completely free reign. And this is where a bit of the gray area comes in,

right? If I go post on my blog and say, "Hey, pro tip. Don't purchase on mobile because you get 20% more value on web. Well, that's outside of the game. That's not that's not saying anything in the game about it. I'm posting on my blog, which is on my website, about my shop, which is another page on my website. But that's pretty disingenuous. That would be I would consider it to be going against the spirit of these anti- steering policies because I'm being very explicit in that example about the value on the web shop relative to the mobile shop. And so that's the kind of thing that it's important to understand and avoid is saying, "How can I do this in a very tactful way to talk about it?" I could say, "Hey, we have this shop. We have this new bundle on this shop." Generally, that could be okay if it's maybe in an email or on a blog post, but again, it's very general and there's a lot of criteria. It's not quite as black and white as some of the other areas of marketing. No, we're playing with the settings here. Uh so the the but by

contrast the other example I have is uh I worked on a casual game and uh the casual game didn't have any of these channels at our disposal right we didn't have a blog players wrote we didn't have an email campaign to reach our players we had social media but nobody engaged with it um we we uh we didn't have a Tik Tok server or Tik Tok channel or Discord server we didn't have any of these things basic it was a casual game right players didn't talk about the game outside of the name. So that meant our strategy for direct to consumer after we had built our shop, our strategy to market that was built entirely on what you can't see here, but it says inapp communications right there. Um, it was built entirely around how we could communicate the game inside of the game, how we could communicate the web shop inside of the game. And so uh it was a much different and uh much different marketing campaign for this mobile game that was casual versus this mobile game that was midcore, right? And so that's why I start here because you

have to consider the marketing channels that are available for you because that will inform your go to market plan. It won't just inform what you're saying. It will inform uh where you're saying, where you can take your players. All of these vary significantly and it is critical for your direct to consumer marketing strategy. So, uh with this I'm going to jump to the next slide which you can at least see the image on the right here. Um this slide is going to be about how you message the uh web shop in your mobile game, right? What you can say inside your game is restricted by the anti- steering policies. Uh, we know we can't talk specifically about a web shop in the game. Again, that's prohibited by the policies. But the the best practice I found here is to talk about your website, not talk about your web shop. So, let's say you have a detailed news page on your website and you release a

new event in your game and you have a few bullets of content in your game about it. And then after that you have extensive content on your website that outlines it for players so that they can go through uh and really understand the feature in depth. It has all the information they could want and that exists on your website. Well for your uh mobile game you're just giving them a very high level of the content. You could say click here to get the full details and they click there. They go to the website and that has the full information. What you're doing is you're creating a truly complimentary experience to your mobile game. it just exists on your website. And so you're giving players a reason to go there. And you're also creating a marketing inroad for yourself by having this news page there. Now, we're a bit bit zoomed in, but uh we're we're getting there. We're improving. Um and there's plenty of other examples, right? You're basically you're trying to design this website as a destination that players will want to go to. And not only will they want to visit that, they'll want to go there again and again because it has this

content that's very helpful for them. Maybe there's a tips and tricks page for them. Something that you release a new feature and you're like, "Hey, here's the new feature, but if you really want to understand how to make the most of it, what the rewards are, how to engage with it, go to this page that's on our website, and then they can learn more about it there." And then, oh yeah, there's a shop there as well. And we that's where we really want you to go. And if it's unclear here, the journey that we're trying to take players on is not going from a mobile game to a web shop. It's going from a mobile game to a page on the website and then from that page on the website to the web shop. And I call it a web portal here. Uh a web portal is basically at least for context of this talk the full suite of web pages. So you have a homepage, maybe a leaderboards page, a news page, a tips and tricks page. You have all these different pages and a web shop. And those are all different pages on your web portal. And then the web shop is very specifically the page upon which players monetize. And again, this distinction is critical because of the anti- steering policies. We know we

can't talk specifically about that shop. We can't link players directly into that shop. But generally, we can talk about a news page. Generally, we could talk about a tips and tricks page. Maybe you have a live event. Maybe you say, "We're going to build out something that players actually engage with on our web portal." So, maybe it's a let's say it's a poll. a poll players can engage with on a weekly basis of like which guild will win this event this weekend and you incentivize players for voting in that poll. They get something a little freebie just for voting each each week and then maybe they get another freebie if they pick the winning side. And so what you're doing here is you're creating this wonderful flywheel that really benefits your direct to consumer growth. They're incentivized to come visit this page. They're and not only once, they're incentivized every single week to come back. And not only are they incentivized to come back, they're also now invested in the outcome which is determined by your game. And so you're creating this wonderful relationship between your mobile game and your web

portal and getting players back there on a regular basis. So is there an inherent value in players voting in this poll, going to your website and clicking vote and then going back into your game? No, there's not a a direct inherent value to that. But is there value in this awareness that you're driving for your web portal? Is there value in this habituation that you're facilitating through this live event? I would say absolutely and that is how you can help grow your web shop. Uh and the last thing I'll say is there are exceptions, right? So again, generalities here and I want to give one example of what I mean by that. Um let's say I have a shop and I've invested a lot in this shop and I built this shop but I haven't marketed it yet because I don't really have those complimentary web pages. So I'm like, okay, I really want to market this. I'm just going to build a homepage or even a news page. And my news page consists of a couple bullets of content like, "Hey, we made some bug fixes. That's it." And then there's just a giant shop button alongside those bullets. Is that technically linking to

a non-shop page and talking about a non-shop page? Yes. Like you're you're abiding by what I've said in this presentation. Um, but is it abiding by the anti- steering policies? I would say no because you're essentially just taking players into your shop, right? You're just taking them into this bespoke page that just has a couple bullets of text and then oh yeah, there's the store. So, you do really want to be genuine in your approach here and not try to do it in a way that's undermining or circumventing any of these rules. You want to again that's where the tact comes in and really thinking and being respectful of what these uh anti- steering policies are and what they're trying to achieve and how you can do that in a respectful way and we're finally back on track with the slides here. So we're we're good. We did it. Uh the last thing is the routing the landing page. It's very important to consider the landing page that you use. Uh like I said earlier, we cannot link players directly from a mobile game to a shop. I've said that a few times, but I actually want to reframe that. I want to expound upon that and say the policies

are we can't link players from a mobile game to a page upon which they monetize on our web portal. So that means maybe on my news page I have a popup offer that comes up. Maybe there's a sidebar and like the main content of this page is all the news, but then on the side there's a few offers players can purchase. Well, that's you're you're essentially linking players directly into this page, but they can monetize. So, that's not great and that might be violating some of these anti- steering policies. Um, what I think is best here is to really contain the monetization to the web shop page. Contain all of your offers to one robust page. And what you do by doing that is give yourself more pathways into your website, into your web portal. You can take players to a news page generally or a tips and tricks tip tips and tricks page generally if there's no monetization opportunities on those pages. So one example to try to bring

this all together is let's say we align on a new strategy and rather than a poll we want to do free claims. Free claims obviously the most direct incentive for players. We just say come to our web uh web portal each day and you can claim something get a freebie. We're just incentivizing them for visiting at this point, right? And we're trying to really drive that habituation, trying to create that in a way we haven't had before. And that's how we're going to drive awareness for our web portal. Great. We're aligned. We're all going to go do this. Well, what do we need to determine? The first thing is what are we giving out? Now, that's more of a game economy decision. needs to be incentive enough that players want to go visit to claim this, but not overly generous, not enough to disrupt the economy, right? So, we we determine, we align, okay, we'll give out these diamonds. We'll we'll give them out every single day. And if players come in for a week, maybe we give them even more, try to incentivize a streak kind of mechanic. Um, okay, great. We we know we're giving out for direct to consumer

marketing. We really need to think about where we're putting this claim. Are we going to put this on our web shop page? Are we going to put this on a page with no offers on it? There's pros and cons to both. There's no right answer there. And it really depends on what our goals are. If we put it on, say, the web shop page, well, to claim this, players need to go into the web shop. That's great. We're driving that awareness of this web shop by forcing players in there to make this claim. And then every day when they go claim this, they'll see our shop. They'll see our offers. Hopefully, they'll understand the value. But the downside is we're creating more friction for players to make this claim because we know we can't link players directly into that page. So maybe we get a little bit lower adoption of these free claims than if we were to put them on a different page. So maybe we decide, okay, let's let's put them on the homepage. Let's just players go to the homepage, they can make the free claim there. Great. Well, generally we can link players from the mobile game to that homepage. We can say, hey, that we have these free claims. Click here, go claim them, and then they can go claim them on the homepage. and then they can

go right back into the game. Generally, that'll be okay, but we're not getting them into the shop. So, the benefit there is we're driving a little bit more awareness about the web portal that we have, but maybe not quite as much awareness about the web shop that we have. So, we need to decide where are we going to put these? Because if it's unclear, these will significantly impact the next thing we have to determine, which is how to market this claim. We're putting together this go-to market plan uh for these new free claims that we've added to our game. But how we can market that, where we can market that, where we can take our players is all impacted significantly based on where we put the actual free claim on the web portal. So that's the extent of it today, but I do want to add a giant asterisk to everything I said, a giant caveat. I want to undermine my entire talk because uh it's all my current observations as of March 17, 2025. These regulations have changed

significantly in the last couple of years. And they will likely change significantly in the years to come. And as they change, how you can market, where you can market, where you can take your players, that will all change as well. And it's moving in a positive direction. It should only become more open. But as it becomes more open, you want to make sure you know what's going on there. You want to make sure you have a trusted source to help you stay in the loop on this because the more you can react to that and adapt to that, uh, the more you can profit from that by driving that revenue through your web shop. And so when these new regulations materialize, I think there's three questions that you should ask yourself. First is what's within the scope of this new regulation? Uh, does this impact the channels we can use? Does this impact where we can take our players from the game? Does this impact what we can say about our web shop in our mobile game? Maybe there's a point where we can directly mention the web shop in our mobile game in the near future. Um, all of these are different aspects of it, but each ruling may only target a

specific area of this as these regulations materialize. Secondarily, it's when they take effect. A new regulation just doesn't come down and then everything changes, right? I mean it t there's a grace period of inten weeks often months uh there could frequently be a grace period for companies to react and so sometimes they're even delayed indefinitely because there's a pending appeal. Uh, and so you need to think about, okay, it's not just the regulations there and everything changes, but when does this actually impact what I can do about my direct to consumer marketing? And lastly, where does it have an impact? We're seeing this roll out on an interesting geographic level. This example from the fasting blog was in Brazil in December. And you might say, Chip, I I don't have much revenue in Brazil. I don't care about that. But what we see is often what happens in one country becomes a precedent for what other countries see and the rulings they can make. And so by having this global perspective, you can ensure that you're ready to react as these rulings continue to materialize on a global scale. So

make sure as these continue to change that you're aware of what's changing, when it's changing, and and where. But regardless of any changes with regulations, I hope it's clear you can market web shops today. Uh there are plenty of companies benefiting from that. And so the future uh potential is very high. So thank you for the time.