Session: Playhop: Current State & Opportunities For Developers - Nikita Bokarev, Playhop.

Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] So up next, I'd like to give a warm welcome to uh Nikita from PlayHop who's going to be talking about the current state of an opportunities for developers. So welcome Nikita. Good morning everyone, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure for me to see you all here. I hope you have a great morning. Thank you for joining our presentation today. My name is Nikita. I am the CBDO of playhop.com. Would be great for us to start uh from understanding how familiar

are you guys with the web games in 2025. Can you please raise a hand if you know a lot about web gaming? Not too much, I would say. Okay. So web games are becoming more and more popular from year to year and this is closely connected with the situation in business with mobile applications for today. So basically saying traffic is becoming more and more expensive from year to year and the lifetime value of the players on mobile is basically not changing. So the profitable part in business in mobile publishing is becoming less and of course this business needs support and web games have become uh a big support for the game developers for the game publishers because for today porting your games

from basically every engine from mobile to the web has become very easy and basically browser games browser User platforms are giving developers and publishers additional traffic and additional revenue. PlayHop is one of the biggest platforms. I will tell you a bit more about it. So for now we have more than 20,000 games on PlayHop. We have more than 10 million players on a monthly basis. And here we are talking about the players that play the game for a few minutes at least because on the web if we would talk about the visits the number here would be about 40 million. And uh one of the things that show quality of the audience of the platform is the average play

time. And having 10 million players on the platform with average time of 50 plus minutes is basically great. Uh as for some details about the audience. So first of all 80% of our players are older than 24 years. Uh this is a good audience as you all understand in terms of the CPM from the ads in terms of the payments in games. Uh as for the desktop uh browser or mobile browser we have a pretty equal split here. Uh 40% are playing on the desktop and 50% playing from the mobile. And the one of the greatest things about web is a crossplatform that basically mobile games are not providing. You can start playing a game on desktop and continue

playing on mobile and so on. Uh as for the genders, mostly female players play web games. It's not only on PlayHop. Uh this is a classical thing for basically all top uh web games platforms but still 42% are male players. Let's continue. As for uh the top countries that we work with in terms of user acquisition for the last year, we're totally focused on working on the US market and this is the largest part of our audience on PlayHob. Also, we closely work with the Vietnam market. We have a lot of content from the top publishers from Vietnam and of course a lot of players from this region. Also, Germany, Turkey, Brazil, and Spain are the top countries that are bringing players to the

PlayHub. As for now, we have more than 5,000 partners on the platform. It can be a huge company like funus from China, the developers of the state of survival or it can be a small indie team. uh but in total it's more than 5,000 and of course uh very interesting thing for the web games is that the inapp purchases are growing from year to year because the classical understanding on of the web shows that it's okay for hyper casual it's cool for the ads monetization but inapp is something new and for the last sever several years we see that inapp is becoming more and more uh huge part of the revenue that platform have and also we see that other

players on the market are going into this direction. uh for instance, Crazy Games or Azerian game distribution that were working only with the ads monetization before also are implementing in-game purchases. And of course, uh the variety of genres that we have on the platform, we have more than 30 for now. So, it also shows that not only hyper casual games can be widely presented on the web. Just to show you the recent releases that we've made in the last maybe four months I believe we work closely with mobile developers big companies top titles all of them are facing the same problems as I said in the beginning traffic is becoming more and more expensive. Everyone needs additional

support in terms of audience and in terms of revenue. Uh let's take a look for instance to the traffic tour. Uh traffic tour is a huge mobile game racing game from wolves interactive developer. Uh it has a lot of content and the game build I would say is pretty heavy but as you see they handled the port process and ported the game to the web and it's performing good on our platform. And I would say the most remarkable example here is a State of Survival title. I think you all know State of Survival, right? It's a mobile hit with a huge amount of content and a game built weight more than 2 GB. How can it work in the web? It's all a question about optimization, guys. Because on the web, optimization is the main thing. uh

players behavior on the web differs from a classic because when you made a decision to install an app, you will give it uh a lot of trust, I would say. But if you're reaching the game in one click, you will not give the same trust. You will not wait for a few minutes until the game will download and show you the start screen. So the secret is that you need to provide the player with the starting pack of content and while he's going through this starting pack it can be tutorial it can be first a first part of the game uh you will upload all other content in parallel. So state of survival is a great example of how huge midcore title can work on the web. Uh this game is presented on PlayHub for now only on desktop but also Fun Plus is

getting ready the mobile version for us. And uh another example as these two games are super mobile hits. So for instance, Traffic Tour has more than 70 million installs. Ludus here is an example of a new game from Fix Games and these guys having a lot of experience on working on the web. When they were preparing the release for the mobile stores in parallel, they were preparing the release for the web because for them it's a normal thing that they split the revenue between mobile and web. Uh so funlus uh made a great step uh they are distributing this game not only for the play hop also game publisher have an opportunity here to work on a standalone domain so it's not a thing that you're you need to put your

game on an exclusive basis to one platform I would say that the key strategy the most valuable strategy for any mobile publisher or developer to present uh the games on the web is going to all possible platforms without any exclusives and receive revenue from each of them having different business conditions with each of them. And also you might have your own standalone domain as state of survival does. We talked about Ludus here. It's also a very successful game uh on mobile and one of the most fast growing hits for now on our platform. What is remarkable here both State of Survival, Ludus and other other games that I will show in next slides are having 85% of their revenue from in-game purchases.

It's not about ads. Uh one of the best games uh on play hop for now is a battle arena from red bricks wall. It's uh a midcore title. Uh remarkable thing here that uh battle arena is not uh developed on unity. It's developed on a native engine that allows them to optimize the game as much as possible. They have uh content for players for several years of playing for now. But the game build that they have uh have a weight about 40 megabytes. How can it be possible, right? This guy these guys can do this. Uh this game is I would say top three games on play play hop in terms of earnings uh from the in-game purchases. Uh this one is legendary. Do you guys

know hedges? Hedges game? Anyone know it? Few few people only know it. So basically for us uh moving into in-game purchases and midcore content started with this game. Uh this was the first game that we tested our functionality for in-game purchases on PlayHop and other platforms. and it's performing just great. Uh people continue to pay through several years and the checks are pretty high. Uh and the lifetime value of users is huge. Uh if you don't know this game, I would recommend you guys to take a look. Uh because it's not very classical, I would say, but super successful. uh as I mentioned before web has a lot of specifics comparing with the mobile

first of all you don't need to download anything you can reach the content in one click and if the optimization level is high uh a player will start playing in a minute and will gather its impression about the game if he does not like the game in first few minutes he will just leave. It's not uh the way how it works in mobile when you made a decision after seeing like 100 ads about a game or your friend made a recommendation to you to install it. Uh it's absolutely another way to communicate with players. Also uh there is an opinion uh from the uh past years that browsers cannot allow you uh to have an excellent performance for the games. But it's not true because for now uh almost every

browser provides all necessary power for you to play a shooter game, multiplayer shooter game. It's not a problem at all. Also for today I think you all know that it's a big problem to receive traffic on mobile without spending right so the huge part of any launch of any release is the user acquisition it also has a difference with the web because on the web we provide the organic traffic to every game to every title we do it on a regular basis and we gather metrics for the first week, for the week two and so on. Uh to understand which audience plays uh this game more, who is paying more and uh who is performing another metrics to make recommendations to other players and after this it becomes clear for us how

we can scale the project. But uh the best thing here is uh that we provide the starting traffic for any game. Uh and the four here but I would say it should be number one because optimization directly affects game quality and speed. We have a huge experience. I work in game industry for more than 15 years and for the last four years I'm working with the web games and I saw hundred of examples when a developer makes a webgl on unity and put it on a platform without optimizing and he thinks that he did a lot and everything should be fine but it's not working like this because if the optimization level is not high a person a player will wait for the loading of the game for too long and you will have like a very high bounce rate. A a lot of

players will just skip it and also during the game process if a lot of things happening on a uh screen and this affects uh the graphics uh this is also a problem. So if you want to go to the web, focus on optimization. This is number one thing. Uh for now, not only we uh are promoting web, also game engines do and mostly every game engine for now supports the technology for the web porting. Uh, of course, uh, the most popular engine on the web also is Unity and other like default, KCOS, construct, uh, also are providing technical decisions to make a port. Uh, as I mentioned before, we make ads monetization and of course, we provide inapp purchases. Um, we use our

machine learning recommendations to make a match between a game and the player. We gather data that allows us to bring the most relevant players to the games and of course we have a lot of tools for game developers. uh we received huge amount of feedback from our partners with thanks uh about the instruments that we created and provided our developers with. So first of all AB testing for of creatives for web this is super important. This is important also for mobile but on the web it works in a very specific way. So I would recommend you to make a test with 20 50 100 creatives to see which of them is working best and then you can scale uh this kind of creatives. So basically it

works like it works on mobile but uh this is dedicated directly to the web and for now uh we are implementing and releasing the tests for the build versions. So in your web version of the game you also face the same questions like on mobile how strong should be boss it should be very strong middlely strong or not strong make a test uh release three versions and see how players behave because if the boss is too strong uh it might have uh two results. So from one hand the competitive hardcore players will spend more time trying to kill it but you will have a huge percent of the players that will not be able to do this and they will just skip your game in this case. So we want you guys to have all possible instruments to make the best decisions.

Uh also we track everything uh for the conversion for the first game launch, player retention. We have a detailed revenue statistics uh broke down by devices, countries uh and of course it's also possible to launch uh promotions uh on the platform. We provide you with two instruments here. One is the promo. This works like the feature on the platform that will be targeted to the audience that you will choose and the second one is the performance campaigns uh that you can also run. We have a lot of different dashboards. So basically for now our functionality is 99% close to the mobile and also a great part in the web games business is distribution. All platforms are

distributing its content to each other and bringing additional audience and of course this is also a huge part of our business. We distribute the content to OEM platforms, browsers, music apps, gaming platforms, news portals, and media. It works great in mostly old jail. And this is the thing that allows us to bring additional players to the games. We have a lot of partners that are already working with us receiving revenue uh from the web. Uh I will not mention everyone here but I would say that up quantum uh visor games famobi clever apps I think these companies are well known in the industry and of course they can share their experience of how

they work on the web. Uh remarkable thing here also is that top companies with huge revenue with hundreds of millions of installs are moving into this direction because um they have a very good products right and these products are performing very well on the web. So the platforms are motivated to provide them with traffic. So they don't have expense for user acquisition and the result here is that the whole income that they have on the web is going straight to the profitable part of their business without user acquisition costs. Take any mobile hit. It can earn $15 million in a month. This game will spend $12 million for marketing and the profitable part would be will be not so big but the money that

you earn from the web they are going straightly to the profitable part of your business. I would say this is a great advantage and a great motivation for the top companies to work with the game platforms. So guys uh first of all thank you for your attention. Um I have here a core code for my linkin. I write about web uh on link in sharing news with our partners uh sharing the best methods to work with the with the web. And of course it's also a way to communicate with me directly to arrange calls with me or my colleagues. And of course guys, we invite you to our booth uh to like have a more detailed talk about how we can cooperate with you. Thank you and have a great day guys.

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