Session: The Rise of Player-Powered UA: How Incentives Will Shape the Future of Mobile Growth.

[Music] so next up we are going to be talking about the rise of player powered user acquisition how incentives will shape the future of mobile growth uh and that's Alex Aras from Treasure play Alex come on up awesome hello everyone very nice to to be here um my name is Alex Aras I'm I'm the CEO and co-founder of treasure play and uh I feel really glad to be back in in Helsinki um I would love to tell you a little bit more about us and and our team but

I've been in gaming for over 15 years now uh my career actually started uh here in Helsinki uh I moved from from Chile to to Helsinki and back in 2008 and it's been amazing to see the evolution of the gaming industry since since those days um at Digital Chocolate where we used to work um we were figuring out the transition for um feature phone games to uh social games remember and um and and smartphones and and eventually there was so much learning the industry was changing in in a I think in a similar way that we're about to see it change now later um after that I I was at EA running globally product management for uh our data platform trying to have that single view of the player and use that information for personalization engagement and then I started omniat uh which was an analytic platform that was actually quite broadly used here in in Finland with uh some great students that

we team up with and we work with and we learn a lot together until they got acquired by by King and then I spent some time at Xbox uh Microsoft and for the pandemic to take a bit of a personal break and catch up with the family and with life and uh and now post pandemic decided to start something new uh really excited so I I decided I wanted to bring the best possible people I could to to team up with it so Andreas is micr founder he was running product for Candy Crush and other great titles at at King butron was uh Sim City and Engineering uh lead product and all the beautiful art you see of trasure pre was Peter creation from King and and wuga and we actually our journey started as a as a web3 company we started building web 3 games the first game we buil was uh called Eternal dragons and it was quite successful for uh web3 standards um we have a super engaged Community we have we made this incredible uh event in Berlin where

players from all over Europe drove in some cases over day to come to this Carnival essentially that we put together people dress in Dragon custumes and we start talking to them and it was the first glimpse of what I think is the biggest change we're seeing in gaming which is this direct relationship with players for once they were not you know of analytics and just thems and retentions and strengths it was uh actual people with that are passionate about the game that tell you more that that give you feedback and and also that they are Partners they're partners that can help you grow they can bring their friends to play and and I think that that trend of having that relate direct relationship with players is something that going to stay and going to grow Beyond it's going to be mainstream part of all the regular games you want will start consider the players more as a partner um than just a regular consumer so uh we brought those learnings everything about about uh

incentives that really work to try user behavior and engagement and and that relate connection with with players and we focus all our energy and our resources to build treasure plate which is this platform to enable this new paradigm so um we identified three main Trends that's been happening for the past few years on the one hand is this direct connection with players well a good example are the web shops right you want to give offers to the player to buy directly from you and and they get a discount they get a better deal and you get direct connection with them you get also payment method you can engage with them you there's more value both ways H and I think that's also being enabled by policy from the Privacy perspective you would see that the players in control and say maybe I share my data Maybe not and if I share my data what's in it for me what's the value that we want to deliver to that player and I think that that's a great question and we should

answer that we should be able to provide value to players um for for for helping us for helping us grow grow the business the other uh the other Trend that we have seen is that the players are getting a share of the value creation uh in web 3 that that's obvious that that was the whole Paradigm is about teaming up and P it up uh and and the players get a share of that value creation but I think that's expanding beyond that to all of Gaming and we see that with the growth of incentivized AD networks uh the share of um spending on ad networks that is going to incentivize is incredible and that's happened very recently it's something for the past you know just a little bit over a year but at an incredible rate and I'll show you a bit of data around that and the last one is that with the latest tools with AI um this a there's an empowerment to players so they can contribute more to your games another way of thinking of players as partner Partners right user generated content I

seen this incredible demos of just typing a prompt and you get a full game end to end and imagine that type of technology in the hands of millions of players imagine the creativity what's what's going to come out of that and that's happening it's happening right now um and on the other hand you see these ecosystem that are verticals like uh telegram or like Roblox where you have tools to make games you can publish your games you can um have direct communication with them you can you have a currency you you you can spend and in the case of telegram you have a social network you have communication you have Discovery I don't know if you have seen but there's an incredible growth on some of those titles where the players get some points for inviting their friends very simple it comes all the way back to Facebook you know mechanics but in this case those points can be exchanged for their token ton and that could eventually become real money it's it's a little bit combersome but actually the experience is is quite good and it's hinting you there's something about um

having that connection with the player and and and team up with them to grow your game and and that's happening so um couple of examples uh there's a report from misplay that shows how over 80% of players will want to play a game that gives them real world Rewards or tangible rewards how they call them right what I found interesting on this metric was like there's a 25% uh of players that will actually stop playing the game and play a game that gives you reward so in the in a hyper competitive world we are today in terms of gaming if you have two games and one gives you recognition some point some something that you can brag something you can even cash or something special the the choice is going to be pretty simple so one can stand out by have a better value proposition for players and they are becoming more aware that they have the power to to make that decision to to to join your game based on those on those Rewards

so uh we also saw I have seen how you can see how the spending on marketing has increasingly going deeper in the funnel so he's moving beyond CPI to um feedback and optimization based on on on ads for example or iaps or special events and and what's Magic about that is that as they complete U certain milestones in your game you can start predicting and understanding what's the Val what's the value of that player later on because they might have been exposed already or show a level of Engagement that can help you predict that that player will eventually actually become a really great player so optimizing for events deeper in the funnel you can see it's a it's a trend that's happening across all different ad networks and then the most obvious one when it comes to volume of spend on ad networks you see uh misplay and AD Joo really going up to the ranks in a really rapid way so I believe that the um ad Network business is being challenged right now by this new model because it's very disruptive and what's disruptive

about is that the player is getting a share of it the player is part of the equation and that wasn't the case before so this revolution is what we think is is is happening um the players will will uh H have the power to share the data or not they will uh decide whether to buy from your web shop and or or or will want to have a webshop to get a better deal or they will expect there an expectations set essentially of getting rewards um by performing valuable actions and then they're going to be empowered also to create the contribute to be part of our community so we should think about uh that transition of what's happening with players and our recommendation for game developers is Embrace this change and be proactive and build that direct relationship with them have your Discord ask for email get ways of communicating get a web shop and let them contribute uh to your game with with different

tools and reward them and I think this relationship what's important it needs to outlive the game it needs to uh be something that you want to build a relationship that you can reuse for re-engagement when they're not playing you can reuse for re-engaging when you want them to try your new game uh it it's important to distinguish a player playing your game from your relationship with your player and and the the the companies have been successful of that are are are showing they're building this CRM this direct connection with them now what are the right incentives and what are the right rewards it's actually a really hard problem because it's Dynamic like what's the right mission to give to this user what's the right reward how you even value from a monetary perspective those those uh rewards and how you want to communicate that to them with what what type of tone what cont what what content what uh images and perhaps is a timing aspect maybe they only have what is it one day

is it two days is it a week to complete that mission what's the right time so it's a lot to think about and data to look at to try to figure that out um and perhaps you even want to make those rewards more exclusive and only a 100 of your players will get them um coming from some of the learnings from the web three space so that is is um the area where we are approach to solve that problem and people have different approaches for that but our process is to rely on data that's our background that's what we do that's what we love to do and essentially we're using analytics machine learning and llms to solve these different parts of the puzzle to figure out what is the right mission to give to a user um how to communicate that mission identify the content and use lln for creating this personalized uh contest and and experiences for player and then on the other side predict and understand what's the right reward and what's the monetary value of that reward

which is contextually it depends on each player and on each game and and it's all driven by data so that's is what has worked for us we have a little um demo I can walk you real quick to show you how this works in action so this is our our platform so essentially after you log in in order to create this Dynamic quest uh first of all we import all the metadata and the and the content that the play and that the application has in the store and we use that to create those uh those quests dynamically then we connect to a source of data in this case a Firebase so we can understand based on the data what are the right milestones and what's the value of those milestones for your players so we can automatically uh give uh insights and actually tools for analysis and data but more importantly an automating way which I think is is the way how tools should work from now on in the this new generation which is let's use data to

configure everything and let it suggest what are the right missions and the right price points because it requires that analytic work to be able to to create those quests and then we allow them to we show a preview and and then we put their the quest live and and when they're live um they start showing in in our network uh both um in our app but also ass SDK so it can show up in many different way it can show as native Quest as part of the game consumable items or items in the store we show a popup an offer send the user to the other game we get the the the post back and eventually we dynamically generate a push notification that we send to the user and say um awesome you have completed the mission so uh come back and get your reward so you see that as soon as we get a post up from the from the MMP or from the source of of um of data we have for that postback we are able to reward that

player so our view is that by leveraging data we can build we we can deliver more relevant missions and rewards for players and which is going to be a better experience for players and it's going to be more effective from a developer perspective to acquire players and and I think it's a continuous continuous process of more data you get more feedback and what I want to share today is that we're launching our treasure Play app uh later in the quarter we're inviting developers to to join us in in this launch we've been yesterday really you know busy from from morning to uh to when the event ended uh getting developers and board which has been really exciting we're giving out uh up to 100,000 um dollars in US in credits for user acquisition to help these developer that are uh supporting us um get their games discovered and we're going to send our users to all all of those games and um so we're we're

really excited about that so if you want to learn more I I will invite you to drop by our booth which is um um it's right at the end you can follow the treasure map also that you probably have in your hands and um but the key takeaways I want to share really um from an industry perspective from my perspective is that this revolution where the player is in control the player is getting more value the player is getting a revenue share is happening and you better embrace it do something to connect directly to have a a direct communication uh have a web shop uh give them offers give a good deal and and make them feel special make them feel awesome if they are great players if they spend money why not give them something special some gifts some gift card uh that makes it feel appreciated and I think that those are the expectations that players especially good players are going to have and they want to brag about it they want to tell their friends they want to be um appreciated socially for being you know

spending that money and and playing those games and being awesome of those so um I think that being proactive and taking ACS to have that direct relationship is important and then uh from our perspective think that one can make the difference by thinking about those rewards and by giving that figure to those players if they set mind that are val for you how about you get some value you get like get them some value so our road map or treasure map for uh the future so first of all I want to share that today again we're inviting developers to to join us in this journey and later in the quarter we will be launching the treasure Play app so please com by both for monetization and and user acquisition we'll be happy to you know discuss more in depth um and that's what I had to share today thank you very much thank you very much does anyone have any questions oh is question back oh there's

two first question first hand up one over here thank you H hello so my name is Claire and I actually have a lot of clients that are also launching their rewarding app so from uh your side how do you acquire user what which channel uh do you use like do you usually use meta to get user in your app or what is your way to proceed we launching the app later in the quarters so we're doing specific UA for certain markets that we're testing the app but we have not published it yet as K okay so or do you plan to have your user in in tweet well all The Usual Suspects sorry all The Usual Suspects including you know meta Google and what you can imagine so okay thanks cool thank you we have another question over here I think did do you still have a question you had your hand up for a question no okay that so I'll last one I

mean so I'm a cynic uh and when it comes to play to earn we've seen lots of people trying to introduce play to earn in various forms and it's never worked ever ever and equally web 3 there's been a lot of really good in intention games out there know some great games out there but I think a lot of consumers have been burnt by it now that being said I think your method you're using is fantastic is it okay for us to use this kind of process but for ingame you know rewards not necessarily real money or web three based experiences that's a great question I think that this principle applies generally for any sort of reward mechanism you want for your players for valuable actions whether that reward is something on a given game or whether it's something that's been sponsored essentially by because the action is performed somewhere else as part of us position it makes no difference from the method ology being the same about predict using

data and predicting user Behavior to uh be able to Value identify the right the right reward and and the right Quest um so we think of this for example it can enable cross promotion within within networks uh it can enable reward system within a single app or you may want to open up your ecosystem and actually be let your players be send abroad or get perhaps only traffic in but then keep them in I've been working in game studios and I know how um protective you know they can be of their place which makes sense and but I think that's important to give that flexibility to say look you want a reward system for your players anyway you could use it for user acquisition but perhaps you want to also use it for cross promotion and improving the network lifetime value so to your point about uh web 3 and Play to ear not working I think that when you made the math

work if you have the right levers you you can find that if you give the right incentive to the right player at the right time and you can measure the performance of that eventually that that equation work they com for the reward and then they stay for the for the game and then in average that cohort monetized in a way that is raw as positive if it's ra as positive yeah matters to your point I think the where I'm coming from is um the the generic like do everything everywhere hasn't historically work but to your point there is a subset of audience where this does work you know where this can be very effective and I don't want to be overly cynical but I have to raise the cynical voice to have conversation I love you bring it up and and I think the segmentation is the key difference it one of the thing that I mean we didn't find sustainable the business model web 3 at all and one of the reasons that it's not targeted like anyone could buy that coin or try to get that reward and it makes no difference whereas here you want to be super clear about who should get what and when and for and for doing

what and and and because you can't do that on blockchain because you don't have control over who owns what that is why you cannot enable the sustainable business model exactly and I think the whole like you said the whole point here is you know let's let's be open mind about what's possible but also think about what works for the player and that means segmenting like you're saying so I think that's been fantastic thank you very much for that no my pleasure thank you all for for coming and for the great questions great stuff thank you very much brilliant stuff thanks Alex right [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]