Session: Support-a-Creator programs: How They Impact Games Success - Justin Sacks, Nexus.gg

[Music] so next up in what we're hearing we're hearing this all fits together all the different Alternatives we have everything we've talked about different platforms monetization hybrid monetization we will catch up on rewarded but all of this comes together when you also have a Creator community and a sense of why I need to be a part of this why I need to be continuing to be a part of this and why it's worth me paying my money or my attention and my

time and to bring all of that together we have Justin Sachs he's the CEO of nexus. and he's going to tell us how to build a successful fan platform Justin I'll give it over to you thank you hello hello all right uh we're going to talk about Creator programs if you are looking at the monitor outside I think it said fan program I'm a emergency standin for today but uh excited to chat with you guys about all things Creator programs and what they are so first is to Define what that actually means um I don't know if you guys have seen some of the most popular Creator programs out there are from supercell or for fortnite where content creators on Twitch or YouTube or Tik Tok or wherever they might be let their audiences know about their creator code and if a player uses a Creator code to make in-game purchases then there's a revenue share back with that content creator I'm going to use the word creator interchangeably with influencer

the main reason for that is influencers don't like to be called influencers and so I try to keep it in my vocabulary mostly calling them creators um so a little bit about Nexus as mentioned we're inspired by epic and supercell uh we think of ourselves as a Creator program in a box we are a thirdparty platform that makes it really easy for any live service game to build and manage their own holistic creative program uh our version of a creative program is purely performance-based so there's no no upfront marketing budget you have to spend there's no monthly SAS fee it's purely does the Creator actually drive sales for your game if so then there's a revenue share back to the Creator that Nexus partakes in some of our partners are folks like Capcom Ninja Kiwi hyres that we're really proud to to be able to work with all right so content creator strategy is effectively a thing that all games are thinking about is how do you actually get creators to be excited about your game pay attention to it

start making content for it um but strategy can mean a lot of different things um and the idea of working with content creators is one that's been growing pretty rapidly over the past half a decade or so to the point that now um for PC and console games as a percentage of their marketing budget influencer marketing is is actually not only the fastest growing but the largest part but the idea of how do you holistically work with these creators in an Evergreen Way that is actually a win-win both for the game publisher and the Creator is something that's been more challenging and that's this newer version that we call a Creator program which is really built around this idea of aligned incentives where the when the Creator gets value when they get paid to drive attention to a game that's also valuable for the game publisher but one of the challenges of traditional influencer marketing is where the incentives are not aligned and traditional influencer marketing is where a game publisher would take a budget and they would deploy it through

an agency and they would say hey agency find me influencers on Twitch or on YouTube or on Tik Tok and pay them money to make content for my game and the challenge is when those creators go and make that content there's no connective piece there's no attribution so how does the game publisher actually know that those creators drove value for the game publisher influencer marketing traditionally is not built for scale there's no realistic way for a game publisher to work with hundreds or thousands of individual creators at the at the same time and while it can be really powerful for awareness if you get you know your game to be one of the top 10 on Twitch for an hour for a day it often doesn't actually drive conversion um and the reason for that is often the the creators that you're going to have to Target to do traditional influencer marketing are the absolute biggest they're the top 0 one% of twitch streamers and YouTubers and they're going to do a good job of letting people know that this product exists they're not going to be particularly powerful in terms of conver Their audience to play

the game if you want to convert an audience to actually care about it you're going to have to do really highly targeted work with creators where you're working with creators that have a really great Crossover with the type of genre and the type of game that your game is actually all about and in fact traditional influence marketing actually disincentivizes the Creator from Ever playing your game again if you think about it if you go to an influence and you say here's $10,000 play my game for 2 hours and they play your game for 2 hours they not actually going to want to keep playing your game because if they do then they're not going to get another $110,000 from you you can flip all of that on its head if you have an actual Creator program a way that is you're Revenue sharing with a Creator when and only when the really driving value for you as the game publisher and so some of the stats that we've seen of how these creative programs can be particularly valuable are everything from converting free players into paid players driving additional retention reactivating being churned players and then also growing

The increased monetization of a given player from month to month so for example some of the stats that we've seen in the programs that we've done for our partners some of those folks like Capcom or highres or ninjak kiwi if is we've seen that 41% of players that use a Creator code to make a purchase had never bought anything in that game before meaning a big chunk of those players were freet to-play players that had been just playing for free for months or years and the first purchase they ever made was because a content creator said hey hey if you're going to go buy this new battle pass please use my code it supports me and that got that player to make the jump from a free player into a converted paying player and an additional 15% of players that used a Creator code had fully turned out of the game they had not made any they had not spent they had not played the game for at least 30 days and the first purchase back used that Creator code meaning the content creators were really powerful in reactivating those players and bringing them back into the game then we have some more stats here around retention and

around the increased spend that a player can do once they they support a Creator but the the idea that I'm trying to suggest is that when a player uses a a Creator code to make a purchase it has a really positive impact on that player behavior um so I'm going to do some super highle definitions because I think a lot of people have probably heard the word Creator program and that means a lot of different things to a lot of different games there's games that have a Creator program when that's really just a private Discord Channel where you can talk with the devs all the way up through you know a fully holistic program where creators have different tiers and they're receiving in-game currency and they have Revenue share and all sorts of stuff and so how does Nexus think about Creator programs so one content creator I mentioned we use that interchangeably with influencer this is generally anyone with an audience but it doesn't actually have to be someone that makes traditional content on a platform like YouTube or twitch a a creative in this case could be an ambassador so it

could be a clan leader inside of a game or a guild leader or someone that runs a Discord server or someone that has a podcast or runs a Wiki for a game or anything like that a Creator code is usually what is that unique identifier for that creator that Their audience can use to support them and so often that can use that's interchangeable with a supporter Creator code or uh you know a a promotional code or anything like that but it's something that the player can actually use so that they can show their support when they're making purchases because of that creator that they follow and then lastly a Creator program we Define it at least as a performance-based Evergreen holistic program with aligned incentives between the game publisher and the content creators that's a lot of words that sound like they don't mean a lot of things but the important part really is just that it's Evergreen and it's aligned that this is not a one-off promotion a one-off campaign or a one-off budget but this is something that'll be true Pro your game from

pre-launch to marketing beats 10 years down the line some of the games that I talked about whether that's balloons or Smite or Street Fighter have been out for years or sometimes even decades and they're finding more value from the Creator program this year than they were the year before and more the year before than they were five years before that all right and this is a lot of there's a lot of things on the screen here but there's a lot of features that go in and create a program and so some of the things that we power that we think are really critical for having a worldclass Creator program are things like live dashboards having unique SKS for your creators having localization because creators don't just speak one language having previews of your content that the creators can see so that they can be prepared to make their content ahead of time um being able to get get feedback back from your creators providing education to the creators one things that Nexus does is that we do webinars monthly for our different creators and different Creator programs where we share best practice and learnings of what really works well

for the creators for The Unique game and the community that they're a part of all right so I'm going to talk about the life cycle G of a game and the role of creators because as mentioned creators aren't just part of your launch beat they're part of the entire 360 life cycle of the game so everything as early as development Partners creators can be really valuable to bring in and again I wouldn't scale this significantly but bring in a couple key creators when you're early in development and it's not really frankly to get their feedback on what systems you should add to the game but it's more to build a relationship with these creators and to get their feedback on how they might move into content creation for the game in the future creators are going to be best at giving their perspective on is this like does having a spectator mode really help them significantly does having a re a review feature help a lot does having ugc is that something that they particularly care about those are the persectives that you can get with

creators and bringing creators in early in the development cycle is actually been a common practice with AAA games for the past half a decade or so and it's something that I would encourage and you can do even if you're an indie title you can reach out to the creators that are a fit for your type of game and when you tell them authentically hey we want your perspective on does these sort of systems these sort of styles that we're adding to the game help with you making content they're going to be excited to to work with you on that next step invite content creators to join play in stress testing and importantly especially for stress testing to bring their audience I think this can be an important piece because when creators Drive attention to a game they do so in a way that's different from adding a new patch or bringing in uh you know a new content update and frankly usually when a when a creator of a meaningful size Drive is making content for your game all of their audience is going to play that game at the same time and that tests your servers and matchmaking and all sorts of systems in ways that are different than what you might be able to

test in traditional stress testing and the reason for that is you really want to identify and partner with tent pole creators ideally for some sort of beta experience and what I mean by a tent pole Creator is these sort of like Lighthouse content creators that other creators will be influenced by I often call them like meta influencers these are the sort of creators that you're really looking for to build true partnership with because and this is often just like one or two individual people but if if you build that relationship with them through this life cycle they're going to be really critical not just for Bringing In Their audience and driving attention to the game but these meta influencers are going to be important to bring in other creators that follow them that look to those creators for what sort of content they should be making and what sort of games they should be playing and so as we move towards launch you want to activate those creators for and their communities for launch this is pretty obvious and doesn't need a lot to be said around it any sort of Creator strategy a lot of your focus is to be around launch that's when you want the

most eyeballs on the game that's when you want the most players playing it giving you feedback and then creating that sort of virtuous cycle that helps to perpetuate the game especially for live service and PVP and multiplayer titles you can also partner with content creators to amplify game updates um this is a thing that we do really often with our creator programs where you work with these creators when you're launching season 2 or there's a new battle pass and there's some meaningful piece of new content in the game work with with the creators to amplify that and educate them ahead of time on what is the new content that's coming in the game how can they tell Their audience about it how can Their audience be excited about it and then lastly and this is a big thing that we focus on with some of our Legacy Partners establish the content creators as long-term Community leaders because they're going to be really really really critical for the growth metrics of your game for things like retention and reactivation you're going to really want to be partnering with those creators in a long-term fashion where they can be making a living where their job is just making content

for your game in my opinion that should be one of the kpis of any live service title is how many individual content creators individual people make a living where their job is just making content for your title all right so uh going into some case studies or examples of really great Creator programs I think one of the best if not the best in the world is supercell they've built this first-party native in-house and they've done an incredible job with this um they have a a large team dedicated just to their creator program they've built Educational Tools outside of the game so that creators can learn how to make the best content how to learn about new content how to play the game in a better way for Their audience I think supercell has done a really really great job of this and they do have this sort of holistic Evergreen Revenue share focused Creator program some other examples um I think uh Hoover with genin impact has done a great job because you can look very Global with their creator program they have english- speaking creators in

the west and they have a ton of non-english speaking Creator programs in the East or creators that in the East that have done a great job they have an interesting Creator program where they incentivize them largely through um in-game currency and exclusive invites to events rather than Revenue share but they they still do a lot of spend with creators and more sort of traditional influencer marketing except they they have some performance elements to it and so I think genin impact has done a really great job as well and then um stumble guys and Bloons I wanted to shout out I think stumble guys has done a great job with their creative program that they've built inhouse within scopely as well and then Bloons I'm really proud of what we've been able to do partnering with ninjak kiwi in order to power their creator program um also I wanted to show that that many of these games are not just mobile obviously a lot of the the developers in this room are going to be really mobile focused but Creator programs have been really successful on PC console VR and web as well all right so one big question question how do you know if your game is

a fit for a Creator program these are heuristics and these are guidelines this isn't absolutes and these aren't always going to be necessarily true but the more that your style of game is core versus casual and the more that your game has deep monetization rather than Advertising based you're going to be a better fit meaning if you have a hardcore strategy really deep uh tactics focused sort of multiplayer PVP game that has incredibly deep monetization with battle passes and multiple currencies and all sorts of stuff you're a natural Fit For A Creator program and this is the best the single best system I can recommend to affect all sorts of growth metrics if you are anywhere along that curve towards core towards deep monetization a creative program will be the best thing you can do to convert free players in a paid to retain your most engaged players to move players along the monetization curve and then one of the last things that I really want to talk about as well is web shops

I'll actually be doing a a panel tomorrow really focused on D Toc but if you have a web shop one of the big challenges that you have is that you as the game are not able to directly tell your players go visit your web shop but content creators are the creators can directly say hey if you want to go get the best deal if you want to go get this currency every single day go to the web shop and do it and so having a creative program for your web shop can be really powerful and there's some awesome Partners out there like FAS spring that can help make that happen all right so that's basically all that I had I wanted to give some time for Q&A if we had any questions happy to to to chat through things I think I had some sample questions in case no one had any but looks like we might have some sure I can hear you

yeah so I uh let me know if I have the question right the question might be what if they're not making as much money from the Creator program to support themselves how is there other ways to incentivize and excite creators yeah great question how do you get the Creator to stay with your game there's a lot of ways so one of the things that Nexus does is we have a tier system where you can have different tiers for your creator program and so it could be a silver gold and platinum tier you know something that's actually focused on your your Games IP where you encourage creators to get to different tiers because they either make the sort of content that you're looking for or they have the sort audience that you're excited about and then you give them different rewards that can be Revenue share based rewards like you get 20% in the Platinum tier versus 15% in Gold but there can also be other sorts of things

where they get in-game currency packages every month they get closer ties to the developers where they're part of developer feedback they get uh you know some physical reward once per year so a cool jacket or whatever it might be there's all sorts of stuff that you can do to focus on that and I think one of the best things and one of the easiest things you could do to keep creators excited about your game specifically is just having communication where you tell them that they're valued parts of the community it's kind of incredible to see how much value there is in having a VIP program that is just telling those folks that they are VIPs so just telling the creators that they valued important parts of the community is a way to keep them in your community yeah so question is how do you do acquisition of creators basically um the best is if you already have some

organic Creator community so if your game is already out and has some creators it's engaging with those people and identifying who are their peer networks and then working with them directly um and the best way to do that is have this sort of holistic Creator program the next one is if you have churned creators so creators that used to make content two years ago but don't anymore you go back to them and tell them hey we we have this new exciting program we'd love for you to join if none of those things are true how do you get creators to First pay attention to you I don't recommend agencies one agencies will only work on traditional budgets you're going to have to say here is $80,000 deployed for me they won't work on this sort of performance-based experience or or you know 95% of the time they won't um and so you'll have to go direct uh you can do that through a platform like us where you build this program and we'll work with you and partner with you we're not an we're not an agency at all so we don't take money so we will never take budget and then find creators but we're incentivized the way Nexus makes money is also per performance base we get part of that commission when

creators Drive sales and so we're pretty incentivized to get as much creators driving as much attention in sales for the game as we can and so you can find folks there's not a lot but you can find a couple platforms like us that can be helpful um but really the best way is look at uh the type of games that creators are looking for play find those creators and reach out to them only way that they want to be reached out which is not email and often isn't Twitter it's usually through Discord um and so basically try to connect with them and if you can't connect with them directly you can maybe connect with their moderators or their Community leaders or things like that and then once you build some of those tent pole creators and they actually care about you in your game they're the best people to find other creators to bring on board yeah one two uh thank you for your presentation uh my name is Serge ianov I am influencer marketing deputy director from zor agency and um I would like to

comment a little bit about your presentation so basically I'm not going to ask any question just to say some words um first of all lots of examples of great uh Creator programs you have mentioned such as stumble guy such as pubg mobile such as G impact uh they do not exclude traditional influencer marketing as their tool to promote their games of course they have like great Creator programs they have lots of different type of content creators but still they also rely on um traditional influencer marketing and we can track that easily is it possible for us to switch to the slide like shortcomings of influencer marketing one more yes this one um I would like to comment a little bit about these shortcomings because actually these shortcomings can be break down pretty easily first of all no

attribution and performance elements what exactly do you mean by this because uh we can see a lot of examples for example we can use tracking links in YouTube we can use clickable panels on Twitch we can use anchor links um in Tik Tok so basically what exactly do you mean by saying there is no attribution and performance elements in traditional influencer marketing uh there's no direct connection from spending $20,000 an hour on a twitch streamer and seeing exactly which sales that twitch streamer drove in game you can use UTM links you can have link outs you can give them codes you can do all sorts of things but there's no way to directly do that attribution um you can take inferences from hey we saw this player account jump we'd saw these sort of things but it's hard to do the direct attribution because there is no there's no literal performance-based attribution piece at the point of sale it's more someone's it's like a billboard board certainly Billboards do

work and people look at them but it's hard to tie a billboard to a specific conversion in action uh but that's not true actually because um I have done lots of influencer marketing campaigns and um uh lots of our gaming Brands Mobile gaming Brands provide us access to their internal back offices and databases and we can see exactly how many new players uh brought this piece of content or that piece of content how many uh money were like return to the game uh in the form of like uh deposits buying some in game I would love to talk if you have a a way to directly tie attribution to PID influencer marketing I think there's a lot of games that would spend tens of billions of dollars with you guys right away so that's exciting to see uh we have lots of cases cool we can chatol we could chat we could chat offline yeah yeah yeah sure so I will not was I'm a little over time yeah okay so thanks so much though thank you so much

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