Session: Proven Insights On D2C Monetisation From The Frontlines Of Major Mobile Publishers.

[Music] we're going to talk about proven insights on Direct consumer monetization from the front lines and for that we got chip from Far spring is's going to who's literally here right now is going to come up and talk to us all about that chip over to you sir great is this my clicker here that's your clicker wonderful all right thank you hello uh I'm chip I'm here from Fast spring uh as you said I will be talking to you about proven insights from direct consumer uh that was a great presentation we just heard I think we can expect a little bit of overlap with that but I'm approaching it from a slightly different angle I come to you from the game development industry

uh leading some direct consumer strategy and I want to take some of the insights I got there and show you what I really heard to be effective in terms of marketing and monetizing web shops but before I get into the content I want to tell you a little bit about myself uh so I do work for fast spring I'm the head of gaming there fast spring for anyone uninformed as an all-in-one direct consumer payment platform for all of your uh gaming and digital product needs uh we've been around for 20 years we have a number of major gaming clients we have a wonderful Booth out there on the floor if you want to hear more uh so please come by or just find me after the after the talk um for me personally I just joined with f spring in October so been there a few months uh before that I did work in game development so I was at scopely uh before that as a director of product and I was there for a few years and before that I worked at cplay and I worked at more a few different hats of my time there I focused on marketing on monetization on live Ops but most recently I was focused on direct to Consumer strategy and really growing web shops um so that's what I'll talk to you a little bit more about today on a more personal note based out of Austin Texas

over in the states uh I'm father to one wonderful seven-year-old kiddo and when it comes to gaming I identify as a recovering completionist I was I was doing well on that front and then tears of the Kingdom came out and I had a relapse but that's okay um so I want to talk to you about through a little bit about the perception versus reality that I hear consistently coming up when it comes to direct to Consumer and webshops I'll talk to you a little bit about the normaly of directed consumer I think the presentation before just touched on that really brilliant way talking about how over 70% of games have web shops and I'll look at it through a slightly different lens uh talk to you about the table Stakes of direct to Consumer what I think are the basics when it comes to starting your web shop the really foundational aspects that you need to to start with to build upon but the real meat of the presentation will be these five proven insights which are things I learned along the way as I was building web shops that I think could be helpful so when it comes to perception versus reality I think when I when I talk with developers about potentially pursuing

direct to consumer or more aggressively pursuing direct to Consumer I hear it framed almost as this tight RPP walk by pursuing this we're putting ourselves in a precarious position and there will be these dire consequences if we do it the wrong way and not only that but that it's this uh one-off project right that we just need to do this and if we can get this web shop up and running then then we're harvesting these profits we we made it across the tie RPP and we solid we we accomplished our project in reality from my experience it's much more akin to a marathon in that it's not something you can do tomorrow can't get up tomorrow and run a web shop um you you need a lot of time and preparation and strategy to really make that effective and to get that off the ground and not only that but it's not a one-off project for your road map it needs to become an ongoing Initiative for your game in order to be successful and to to continue to grow over time and so I think it's very important when it's upfront to understand what you're signing up for and what you need to do in order to get the most out of it but

also that the rewards can be more than enough to justify that investment and beyond that is the normaly of direct to Consumer and so when I think about this I want to take a step of back take a step back from gaming itself and think about if I want to buy a product right I want to buy a keyboard buy a mouse buy a monitor anything I know I as a consumer have the option to go through a distribution Channel like an Amazon and I'll go purchase there and I often do or I can go directly to the manufacturer if I have a Logitech mouse I want to buy and go buy it on Amazon or I can just go to logitech's website and buy it myself and that's just Logitech as the seller here understanding they have a distribution Channel they can use or they can just sell it directly to their consumers and when I think about D Toc and gaming I feel like it's become this loaded term of this secretive way that game Publishers are sneakily eeking out more profits that they weren't having before when really I see it more as the evolution of gaming to a more traditional business model it's saying

we as game developers want to be able to sell our product directly to our consumer and this isn't to diminish anything that Apple and Google have done they are excellent distribution Partners they have built this entire industry when it comes to Mobile gaming uh and they will continue to be critical distribution partners for your game but in 2025 a multi-platform distribution strategy is healthy and I would argue it's even necessary for your game to achieve its optimal success um the last note I have is leading Publishers investing heavily this was touched on a lot before but I like citing plka mainly because one they're really successful in this area and two they publish this in a quarterly earnings report so you can go look it up yourself and their most recent report from Q3 of last year we saw 28% of their revenue came from direct to Consumer channels which is incredible and the even more incredible part to me is that it grew 8% year-over-year and so this is a channel they're not only seeing success in but they're seeing continued growth in this space and that comes from that ongoing investment in a few different areas

which I'll get a little bit more into later um so if we're aligned on this being a normal uh a normal business case and something that has become normalized for games then it becomes okay how can I do that how do I get this up and running I call these table Stakes because as I was first getting into direct to Consumer strategy a few years ago these are things I was reading then right this is kind of the foundational part this is what you need to do at the most basic level in order to set up and run a web shop which is one you migrate players there with value and two a small percentage of players is a large percentage of Revenue and so a few examples on the value piece um the most uh basic implementation of this is you have greater volume per dollar right you say I as a player know that a $10 purchase on the web shop will give me more than a $10 purchase on the mobile shop and therefore I will go make my $10 purchase on the web shop um and so that's one way you can do it certainly you've incentivize players with that value but you can do it in other more

creative ways too and we've seen some games have a lot of success with this you can have exclusive items maybe you start with cosmetic items you say there's this special floral print you can only get it if you purchase on the web shop and so some players who want that cosmetic will start to migrate over there if you want to be more aggressive you can do non-cosmetic items you can say okay we're going to have this special boost and the only way players can get that item is by purchasing on the web shop you can have web exclusive subscriptions uh one of the games that I had the privilege of working on is a core title we had a number of subscriptions on mobile and we added a subscription that was exclusive to web and it had a very unique value proposition and because of the first point here was actually more generous than the subscriptions we had on mobile as well uh and so what we saw as players subscribe there was that became a steady stream of web shop Revenue in addition to the more variable transactions that we would get on web shop so that was an excellent complement to our strategy um and another one is a bespoke currency shop let's say you don't have diamonds in your game and then you start sourcing diamonds you could Source them however

you want you can be through liveops through purchases or wherever you want but the only way players can redeem those diamonds is if they go to your web shop right so you're you're getting players intrigued with this new and novel currency that's giving them an advantage and then to use that though they have to migrate over to your web shop and so these are all uh means of having value there that you're using to incentivize players to just visit your shop and so that I think is the most foundational tenant when it comes to web shops and the second in terms of each is a truism for any game out there that a small percentage of your players can generate a large percentage of your revenue is uh true of every live service game I've seen we're very VIP dependent and so uh for example half your Revenue can come from less than 2% of your players obviously that can be more Revenue less Revenue bigger cohort smaller cohort but the point is you don't need to get all of your players to your web shop you can really focus on your most valuable players and if you can just get those most valuable players over to your web shop and get them

purchasing there well in doing so you can actually shift over quite a bit of your revenue and that could be your foothold and then you expand from there right you either get them purchasing more frequently on web or you expand your audience from there and so table Stakes Basics didn't want to gloss over them and assume they were covered but I think those are important to start with but what I really want to get into are these five things that I learned along the way uh that I think can be insightful for anyone who's either looking to build a web shop for the first time and get it off the ground or for someone who's already got a web shop and is looking to get even more out of it um which is really where more of my experience came in is taking these mature web shops and optimizing them and trying to continue to iterate on them over time so the first is to identify growth vectors relevant to your web shop and this is true for both marketing and monetization um so I've worked on web shops for both casual games and midcore games and one of the things I observed on a midcore game is we had all these beautiful channels at our disposal right we had a Blog that players would read uh

we had email campaign we could reach out to players for we had social media channels that players would actually engage with we had Community forums we had a Discord server we had a subreddit we had twitch content we had all these places players were communicating on the game outside of the game and we could use those to communicate about our web shop because when we think about the anti- steering policies from Apple and Google those only applied to the tip of the spear the ancoms if we're talking about our web shop in email or in social media we can talk about it much more freely and talk talk about that exclusive subscription that we're launching and why it's relevant and what value that has for the player uh the Casual game I worked on by contrast did not have these channels it did not have a Blog players it didn't have email didn't have certainly didn't have a Discord server a subreddit or any of those right and so on casual what I observed was players don't talk about the game outside of the game they just play the game and that's the extent of their experience here versus midcore where it's much more expansive so on casual

we only had enough comps that was our only growth Vector for our web portal to make players aware of what we were doing on web and to uh communicate with them about any anything new that we were doing on web so did that mean we should not pursue this no absolutely not it just meant we needed to have a very different strategy and then we had to laser focus on incs to intimately understand those anti- steering policies from Apple and Google to understand what we needed to to do as a game developer to really maximize the opportunity there and then adapt our strategy to communicate with players in that way and so I think it starts with this if I were looking at any game out there and how to do a web shop I would look at the verticals available and say okay how will this impact us because it's not even just initially setting up the shop it's also in optimizing that and creating a goto Market plan over time any new feature you have on your web shop will be beholden to the growth vectors at your disposal here and so it's it's imperative that you understand that and you can adapt your strategy to that and the other part this impacts

will be the ceiling on what you can achieve pragmatically for the midcore title we had a much higher ceiling than we did on the Casual title in terms of how much revenue we could expect to drive through our web shop in the immediate future now over time I imagine this will catch up to one another but in the immediate term it was much easier for us to communicate about our web shop on the midcore because of some of the uh channels and growth vectors here that we had at our disposal so that was the first lesson and then from there the second was minimize friction and I almost hesitated to put this on here because I feel like it's pretty obvious right like we as game developers we're very familiar with uh friction we'll we'll put our first-time user experience under a microscope we'll break it down to 70 steps and we'll stay step 37 that has a higher drop off of retention and we need to improve step 37 of our our patouille but when it comes to web chops the uh conversations I've had around friction always go to checkout it always go to conversion rate say okay well my

conversion rate's fine so my friction is fine when really it's this entire Journey that we need to consider because if we can improve friction at any step of this journey that will improve how much revenue we're driving through our web shop and I want to actually take a step back here and uh untangle a web portal and a web shop at least for purposes of this presentation uh a web portal will mean the full Suite of web pages on your website right so it could be a homepage leaderboards page maybe a a guide tips and tricks support and oh yeah a web shop and each of those can be different pages on your web portal whereas the web shop is very specifically the page upon which players monetize and that distinction is critical because we know from the anti-steering policies we cannot route players directly from our game into a web shop but if we have a page with content that's a legitimate complimentary experience to our mobile game okay we can point players there there's nowhere to monetize on that page even if it happens to be on our web portal where oh yeah there's also a shop

we can point them to for example if we have a new feature launching our game we give a very high level overview a few bullets in the game that says hey there's this new feature here's what you need to do but if you want more information tap here tap there it takes them to a page that's not on our web portal and that has paragraphs of information all the details players want and then when they're there oh yeah there's a button for this web shop that we want to try to funnel them into and that's the journey that's mapped out here you go from game to web portal then from web portal to get them into the web shop and that's critical piece of friction right it's it's what's that web shop visibility how can we increase that clickthrough rate because if we do that is an opportunity to drive more web shop revenue and then of course web shop to checkout and then one step we often neglect from check out back into the game we assume okay these players just made a purchase like they're going to go back into the game on their own generally that's true but maybe we can nudge them along the way and improve that rate a bit more right we can say okay here's a button to take them back into the game and then even once they get back into the game did they immediately have that purchase this will

get a bit into the next slide but we want to make sure that they have that purchase as quickly as possible that's what they get on mobile and therefore that is what they expect when they purchase on web too and this goes into trust so in addition to minimizing friction you want to maximize player trust trust is something we take for granted uh something incredible Apple and Google have done really all of us make purchases in mobile games and we don't have a second thought about is my payment information safe am I in the right place to purchase for the game that I'm playing uh it's all just second nature now and it took a long time to get there but when we have web shops some cohort of players still has that doubt I say am I really in the right place to do this I have to input my payment information again I don't know how comfortable I feel with that um and so the point with this is that trust is top of mind for some of your players and therefore trust should be top of mind for you as a developer it shouldn't be something you just assume is there one example of a way to do this is by having a similar look and feel right you want to have a similar look and feel of your web shop as you do for your mobile shop because this will get players confidence

they're in the right place it doesn't need to be a one toone mimicry of mobile to web but it should be very similar and the ultimately where I've observed a lot of value is maintaining your brand consistency and your brand voice if you do this it will also help uh be consistent and increase your director consumer Revenue percentage the fourth is another one I hesitated with stating the obvious here but don't ignore engagement right just as there is value in a player playing your game today and not monetizing today there's value in a player visiting your web portal today and not immediately purchasing today every conversation on DC is focused on monetization every talk today this talk this talk was titled like I don't know best practices for directed consumer monetization right it's all framed around monetization but that shouldn't come at the expense of Engagement uh engagement is critical too and so anything you can do that drives engagement with your web portal is also valuable because what you're doing is you're establishing trusts you're letting players know hey they're in the

right place for this for this game you're letting players know okay I can navigate this website you're reducing friction because they're getting more comfortable what exists somewhere and ultimately you're driving awareness and habituation for your website and so a few ways you can do this you can have regular free gifts literally just incentivize players for going to visit your web portal or even your web shop uh you can have helpful guides there as I mentioned earlier you launch a new feature and you want to really detail that out uh put more of the content on your portal and it becomes something that is complimentary to players where they know even if I'm not playing the game right now I can go there to engage with this game that I love and get more content and be more informed and so Point here is stronger engagement is good it's a good thing even if that doesn't immediately raise your direct to Consumer Revenue percentage uh and the last one is you have to monitor the evolving regulations I think we're all just kind of uh observing and seeing what happens right now that's the general feel I get from the industry and things are changing quickly uh things changed a lot in the last year and

things will continue to change in 2025 and so it's critical that you have a trusted source to help you stay on top of these regulations I don't know exactly what will change but I can tell you with confidence that things will change things will continue moving in this direction uh we have an example here from the the fast spring blog just from last month and it was some movement we saw in Brazil and I like this example because it represents three questions you should ask when these new rulings come along it's what's within the scope of this regulation does this impact the language I can use in my game to talk about a web shop is it maybe making that a bit more liberal than what it was before is it impacting the landing page I can use from the web shop or from the mobile game Into the Web shop maybe I can actually start routing players directly into the web shop which we cannot do today and maybe it could be something else there's a lot of directions this can go as we continue to iterate through this and so it's important to keep an eye on what's within the scope of these secondarily when does it take effect often there's a grace period could be a few weeks could a few months could even be likely to be

appealed by the impacted parties right so we'll see these uh regulations come down but they may not take effect for months down the line and so it's still good to be aware of them because you can prepare for the changes that are to come but know that they don't take action until later and lastly where does it have an impact and this example is from Brazil you might say chip I have like less than 1% of my Revenue in Brazil I don't care about that I would say it's still critical to be aware because we've often seen these regulations become a bell weather it's something other countries can look to and say okay uh we've seen this in Brazil maybe we can iterate on that and then we see things start to take shape and gain momentum on a global scale and so by having that Global Perspective you'll be more prepared and ultimately more responsive you don't want to find out six months later that you could have been communicating things more liberally in your game and when it came to your web shop you're leaving money on the table in that case and so it's critical to be uh plugged in and and make sure you know what's going on throughout the year so uh that's it I think we're just hitting

time so real quick recap identify your growth vectors those will be unique for every game uh minimize friction with your players at each step of the journey maximize your trust it is top of mind for some players it should be top of mind for you uh don't ignore engagement that's critical on web just to is free your game and then monitor the evolving regulations those will change throughout the year more responsive you can be the better you'll be that's it again I'm chip please visit us fast spring. and I hope you have a wonderful show thank you thank you very much that's great again once there's there's a lot of this stuff that we need to be paying attention to in game monetization in itself and the fact that we now have our external access to do other things as well and like you say we have to watch this space because that's likely to change and hopefully for the better hopefully but we shall see chip thank you very very much