Session: Web Stores Are So 2023: The Next Generation Of DTC Is Already Here - Broader, Richer.......

[Music] We've been sort of hopping around areas of payments. Uh right now it's all about the money, honey. And um so the next presentation is all about the web stores and it's uh the the title is web stores are so 2023.

Um but this is a really interesting presentation because it's really looking at the next generation of direct to consumer. Um and saying how it's already here uh broader, richer, and more profitable. So I'd like you to welcome to the stage Gil Tovi from Appcharge. Hi everyone. Uh so uh our talk today is this it's about web stores but it's actually about everything outside the web store everything it's like in addition to the web stores. So the catchy title is like web stores are so 2023 and there's actually a lot more to gain a lot more to do nowadays with how fast and how effectively u um DTC has been evolving these past couple years. Uh, oh wow. Okay. So, uh, so I'm Gil. Uh, real quickly, I started in engineering. I've been a lifetime geek, lifetime gamer. Um, uh, spent a few years doing product at adtech during the very happy adtech days when we were all very, uh, happy and did a lot of like high CPM campaigns. Uh, led marketing at Overwolf

for five years and I joined about a year ago to Upcharge as CMO. Upcharge is the leading BTC company. Um uh built by game makers for game makers. Uh this is my last time in Barcelona. Any local Barcelonians here? All right. I love Barcelona. This is my last time been with my wife to a Blink182 show. Best time ever. Uh so happy to be back. I just landed. So very excited to be here. All right. So we're living in a very historic moment. Like an historic shift is happening in our industry. Uh I'm sure you guys have followed this. this been like across all the news being covered everywhere. The April 30th uh ruling in the US District Court is a is a makeshift moment. It's like it's a it's a it's an earthquake in the industry. Um I can't stress this enough. I'm getting to some examples later, but what this effectively effectively means is that for the first time ever, we have a court backing and we have the compliance conditions that now allows

developers to send outside every single purchase in iOS in the US. That's every single purchase. Yes, web stores are a huge deal. I'm going to get to that in a second. But the earthquake that happened a month ago is that for the first time the 100% of IAP is up for hijacking. I'm going to get to what hijacking means in a bit. Uh the first to react to this were across the industry across categories. Spotify on the same day of the ruling uh um submitted a new app version for uh approval that allows players for the first time, users for the first time to go and join a subscription in the web being redirected from the app through a link out. This wasn't available before and they celebrate that moment as a victory for players as a victory for more choice for more understanding. Uh Patreon wasn't too late to follow. Patreon is a very interesting case actually for the first go live. We see here um the default button from the uh CTA of Patreon now

goes to a web store and the secondary option if you want to still pay on the web store sorry inapp goes to the inapp version. So Patreon's flipped it. It's not like an option to go and pan the web. It's the main thing to go pan the web now and you you have the fallback to pay in app if you want to. But Patreon is an is an interesting case for another reason which is we saw that happening through Techrunch articles that basically Patreon released the first version of this new app where the web store payments happens embedded inside their app. It happens through a web view. It's like uh threequarters of the screen. You see the uh web checkout uh popped out and it's actually was disallowed by Apple and Apple asked them to change this. And we saw how the new uh formative way to do this properly in a compliant way is not through a web view. It's not through a hosted web web browser. It's actually by sending the player to an external browser. And I'm going to show that in a second. And then the third one was app Epic and Fortnite.

uh it's been a legal a bit of hiccups in legal but uh after the judge has compelled it we now have uh Fortnite back in the iOS app store where players can go and purposely buy on the web. So these are great three examples of very popular apps but all three of them are um apps where the transactional occurrences are uh few and far in between. Uh one is a subscription. you might interact with the web checkout once in your lifetime as a user. The second one is um Patreon. If you guys don't know, it's a loyalty program for streamers and creators. So, you might meet the the payment step a couple of times for different creators, but it's it's a couple of times a year at best. And then uh Fortnite, it's it's a more like a recurring game, but the way Fortnite monetizes is that you buy a bulk of in-game currency and then you use that in-game currency to buy skins and stuff. But the step of buying the in-game currency happens only once in a while. So these are great three examples. But these are these are all

three examples of a web flow that only happens once uh every few weeks or every few months. Can we solve this for a typical mobile game where you will find um many purchase occurrences in a single game session? Could that be done? So uh we as charge introduced uh um uh payment links and this is what hijacking looks like. So in app in the game natively you add a button to pay on the web. We recommend showing the two side by side and then the user gets sent to a hosted web checkout. He pays and then he gets automatically redirected back to the game. The web checkout is pre-authenticated. If he's a returning purchaser uh his payment details are already pre-filled and the whole uh flow passes very smoothly. Um this happened a month ago and in that month we saw an explosion of new clients and new deals and we're trying to uh help all of our clients go live with this in these the very days. Um just to put things in perspective for the size of the seismic shift that

happened here these are the top 10 uh publishers in uh US uh and this is the iOS revenue that they're making. um a typical AP purchase rate of 30% the Apple tax what it's called we can simply uh if we switch to a payment vendor like upcharge that charges typically 5% with these 10 publishers alone there's $1.6 billion on the table $1.6 6 billion just by making the shift. And mind you, this is uh a single day integration process. This is I'm not talking about acquiring new users. I'm not talking about UA budgets. I'm just talking about sending the same purchases to the web and back. And by one day integration, there's 1.6 billion dollars up for graphs. And this is immediately possible and is uh officially compliant and officially supported in the US iOS as we stand today. Um but this is this is amazing but this talk is about um what

what is happening with DTC and the evolution away from the web store. Uh so this change has been brewing for a while. Um web stores were the first web stores 2023 web store was the first they're still a wonderful tool. We strongly advocate for them. We strongly advocate for now pushing your players from the game uh with linkouts to the web store to get more awareness. Um, and web stores are great for certain things. They're great for intent based and they're great for high LTV categories. So, this is a report that we sent uh um late last year. I did a talk about this in London of this year. So, this is a report where we shared the adoption rate of the top 20 games in each category for web stores. Who has a web store and who doesn't have a web store? And we see that in certain categories we got to 100% adoption, 80% adoption. But in some other categories like casual where it's like lower LTVs the adoption rate wasn't as high. Uh so web stores were great but what are we seeing now? So the first evolution of uh sorry um um um one more

thing about web stores um there is building a web store and there is building a web stores. We're very fortunate to be working with the best partners in the industry uh that that value our jud that value our advice and value the work with us and we're able to ship and build very sophisticated monetization tools to make the web stores feel like part of the game. There's a metag game around purchasing that players find engaging and that boils down to advanced monetization features like a progress barum what we call accumulation bar post purchases that are only unlocked after you complete a purchase. uh rolling offer which is a wonderful mechanisms that get players uh more more comfortable around paying and coupons and promotions if you want to run an influencer program for example. So this was web stores it still is live and kicking when like I said it's a wonderful tool and we encourage all developers to store it but a lot has happened in the last year alone regarding D2C. So the first evolution was alternative app stores. So back in August uh 2024, we saw in the EU the

launch of the Epic Game Store to iOS and mobile and Android. There a bunch of other alternative app stores like our friends at Apptoid and many others. And what is sideloading? Sideloading is any any form of downloading the app. It's not officially through the Google Play or App Store. And we see a lot of ways to solve this in distribution. And we see a lot of ways to solve this with handling payments for this uh version of alternative apps because once you distribute outside the official Apple app store for example, you need an in-game payments SDK to solve all the payments for your players at the alternative version. So a very big uh famous case of that is from Plica that was able to to uh uh to have a large portion of their highest spending players to actually migrate to that alternative version of or APK. And uh from Epic Games alone, we saw in in the first few weeks uh we saw 10 million downloads. So this is happening and this is happening more broadly and we and we believe that with the recent changes in regulation, we're going to see more and more of both these stores and developers

like tapping their foot in the water for uh uh distributing APKs and as well in in Android as well as in Apple. Uh the second the the the third evolution that we saw in D2C is web games. What you see here, sorry. What you see here is the one of the most popular uh PVP match free games for matchm. This is available today on the web. So you can go to play.mmatchmasters.com and and start playing the game. This is 100% of the game. This is the native game. It's running on a browser, in this case a mobile web browser. It's not a port. It's not a almost the game. It's 100% of the game. that we're seeing we're seeing developers uh through uh the advancements in WebGL and other tools porting their full games to the web. It's already an 88 8 billion industry in 2025 in terms of the transactional volume happening here. And what we're seeing here is that we're seeing that in this web browser version

of the game, you have embedded payments as well. So, it's in-game, it's while you play, and it's working smoothly. The next evolution that we're seeing in in D2C is that um um a web story um exists and it has all these offers but there's a challenge of distribution and what we see smart developers doing and very effectively is to take incremental offers and personalized offers and then send them through communication channels like Facebook Messenger or in the future WhatsApp, Discord and any other platform. We uh those developers communicate to a large number of players. uh every single player gets a personalized offer and when they click the link it's a deep link that is like pre-authenticated goes to that exact offer to that same player it's not un unhackable unusable by some other player and uh the session closes when the purchase is over this is live now and working with some of our partners and what we see here is is a typical flow so for example I'll comment to uh my

favorite game on social media I'll immediately get a message offering me an offer or it could happen in the regular VIP the account management and then when I click the offer, it's that offer. It's just for me. Uh you will see something else and uh if I if I'm returning purchasers, it will already have my purchase details prefilled and I'm done with it. And when we're talking to players, when we're talking to developers, they're saying, "Oh my god, it's like having 10,000 VIP account managers. I can now have my team manage uh and and generate one-to-one interactions and relationships with my highest spending players in a way that like would have cost me like hiring a huge army of teams. Uh and then the last one is that what I showed you previously which what we call payment links which is basically sending in purchases to be completed on the web. Um we see this happening more and we see this like being adopted at crazy pace uh during the past four weeks. Um there's no more scare screens by court mandate. Apple

cannot scare the user that this is unsafe or this is like uh somewhat uh harmful. And uh one of the things that we saw being appreciated the most by developers is the ability to AB test the checkout screen. So we can now give players different version of a checkout screen. One of them could be more elaborate. One of them can be more simple or bread and butter. We can mix and match with the payment buttons or we can mix and match with the sections. And then that that's like uh as we're all learning this together, the entire industry is learning the meaning of maybe the drop in conversion rate together. Having the tools to AB test come along go a long way. And um this is a very interesting recent development of the market. Um and and this is my point here, right? This is like this is what I'm trying to get at. What I just showed is a snapshot of June 2025. These five tools all circling around having a web store. That's the tools we have now and like three or four of them just just were just added in the last year. If if

I if we all meet here in the same room a year from now, this map might look completely different. But my point is is that when you're thinking of of DTC, people often think about the web store. And we're like very proud of our web stores and very proud of our uh clients and partners who are building web stores with us. But there's a lot more on the table. And what I want to share with you is that with all of our developers, we're working on adapting additional tools from what I showed you today. So that's that's the point. The point is that you don't have to do all of them. And frankly, it really depends on your players. It really depends like what would resonate with your player base. You have to try and mix and match to see what resonates and what doesn't resonate. So it doesn't necessarily mean you need to do all for all players, but you probably it's a probably a good idea to always be testing and to try things and see what sticks and what doesn't. And this is the future of DTC. This is DTC 2.0. It's fragmented. The the there's a lot of untapped potential left on the table if you don't experiment

with all these like additional advanced tools. If you're just focusing on the web store, web stores, the the the the concept of calling it web stores at 20 2023 is that web stores used to be like the the the tip of the spear, the the the most advanced things you can do. Nowadays, they're still wonderful and there's a lot of like a very high uh uh profit ceiling to be gained from web stores when done right. But web stores are now uh common. Web stores are now the the the the competitive conditions. If you don't do web stores, you're left out. But there's a lot more opportunity still on the table to explore and to try. Um, and a word about uh applying all of these tools and about hybrid monetization as well. Um, the point of this of just like test test and try. So we um this this is the same slide that I used to finish my talk in in London in January. It's like we're trying to uh help push the message of you have to

look at DTC alongside your existing teams alongside your ad revenue team alongside your IIP team and maybe UA as well. So, if I have a DTC channel and I have in-game uh uh like a legacy channels of monetization, the proper way to do things is to have the teams collaborate, to have the teams speak to each other because what would often see is that we're having some form of kind of monetization or some form of uh value changing hands. Maybe we're doing some uh very strong campaign that on the back end damages the game economy or maybe we're doing something that's like seems to be uh gaining value but it's actually there's there's a there's a net loss. Um we recommend segmenting players. Try different tools to different players, different player segments. It could be as you're mixing and matching monetization methods that some players will only get ads, some players will get like very aggressive IP. Some players who are loyal will get redirected to the web store. Some you'll try to get them to download an alternative version of

the app for sideloading and mix and match. And then lastly, we want to track across channel for impact because don't just measure for uplift. It might be that there's a hidden um uh trade-off that you want to make sure that you see. Um and that's it for me for today. Uh if this is interesting for you, we share a lot of interesting materials on our LinkedIn. You're welcome to follow up charge on LinkedIn and talk to us on whatever. We're very happy to chat about monetization DC web stores and it was great seeing you. [Applause] Thank you. Thank you, Gil. So, has anybody got any questions for Gil? None at all. I got a question for you, G. when people come to you when when they're talking to you when do they typically start when what stage in their process or are there many different

times that they come to you? So like about a year ago most of the calls that we had were developers exploring web stores for the first time. Nowadays, most of our calls are uh or talks is developers who already maybe have a web store or they're thinking about maybe switching vendor or they want to uh be get more information on these new tools that I showed. But it seems to me like for a very short time span of a year has passed and like market education has like done like huge leaps and now it seems like everyone already knows about this. many are already trying or have a web to web web store tools up and then they're talking to us about either switching vendor or just like learning about new tools. So it start it originally started with web stores but now people are you finding you're getting a good demand for other DT strategies and are you becoming more like a consultant like you could try this or you could try that. So I think we've always been a consultant like many like we have great ties and with like some developers who don't work with us and that's completely fine through us just like to keep talking and see how we

can help. um eventually uh we believe it will lead to good things. So we're down to that and we're down to consult. But uh cuz something I noticed in your presentation, you seem to be at the at the coldface of this. So you're seeing the new things that are happening and and you're seeing that sort of being applied within different types of developers. And is this any size of developer? Sorry. Any size of developer. It doesn't matter if you're like a small indie straight through or so. Historically, we found ourselves be working with the bigger developers because uh the tools that we build uh you get the most amount of value out of them if you have like a monetization team and VIP managers that can actually use the tools that we provide. But nowadays with the payment link and the single day integration like like 50% of the new clients we sign are like mid tier. So this whole like thing shifts and sometimes on like a month a month month passes and everything changes. But now we're cater to what like you said like probably any size of studio today. Super. Well, thank you, girl. Thank you. Oh, sorry. One more quest. One question over here. You're gonna have to shout it

and I'll repeat it. Oh, here we go. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you. Uh, do you expect Apple and Google to punish the games that divert their payment through the web store like Patreon did uh by giving them less visibility on the store or less featuring? So the answer really changes on region and on type of game on on I guess like whenever we are with the appeal. So in terms of region, we already saw like the scare tactics that I said like no scare tactics that's in the US. You guys got a chance to see Apple is already like warning users of uh apps that are using alternative payment methods in the EU because there it wasn't banned. So the warning or the scaring or the punishing depends on the region as to monet like money value or like the amount of uh um distribution that you get. It depends on your category. Like if you are an app that relies on uh uh organic distribution

from the app store like being featured or being like on short lists then if you start diverting away revenue streams from your app that might uh be reduced. But realistically that's a very small amount of apps that actually get a significant amount of distribution from Apple and Google. So in most cases the answer to your question is no. I don't see that happening. And both what we saw with Patreon, Apple work with them to change the way they implemented the the payment things and now they they pay they implemented it correctly. I don't see Apple punishing Apple's like on on on there's a lot of eyes and and and magnifying glasses on Apple now with the recent court ruling. The judge even highlighted some key Apple officials to be in contempt of court or her recommending them for them to be examined for contempt of court. So they're going to be very careful with what they approve, what they don't approve, and especially what who they punish. I think that's why they were so cautious in how they handle the Patreon thing. They're very polite and asked them to change and Patreon complied with

the change. So I don't think I don't see a potential of punishment. Great. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Big round of applause, Miguel. [Music]