Subscriptions, IAP & Ads - The Trinity of Hybrid F2P Monetisation PG Connects Digital #2

hey hey sorry hi how are you good are you yeah fine thanks fine thanks we're aware about see you in the world at the moment I'm in Khomeini okay so yes how's the web in your way sit summer-ish lovely oh good unfortunately we spend it inside as always for yeah that's true but it's still nice to have the Sun coming in through the windows at least we can do this and still connect even with the CERN it's like yeah well it's not quite the same as being on a beach but it's about the best we can come up with at the moment I think these these conferences you guys are hosting and they're working really well and I mean it's not a replacement for you know having a beer with good colleagues you see and travel the world I love that as well but now that we are where we are I

think this is working really well yeah let you get started it means that you know we've got the time so that you can share your screen and everything else like that so I'll stay on until that's there and make sure everything's ready in the meantime while you're setting that up I'll let everyone know that of course we've got the chat function where you can continue to talk about the talk and interact and everything and we've got the Q&A section as well so definitely throw in your questions because I'll be coming back as always at the end to do a bit of a Q&A session and obviously we've got the discord as well so make even if you're not if you haven't been into that yet make sure you get signed in as lows going on there there's the coffee talk chat and the reason why I bring this up is obviously if we don't have time to ask all the questions we'll the discord absolutely and I'll be available in in there as well for for chat afterwards so my email is there so it's all yeah yeah exactly

so you know like I said keep your questions in mind but don't worry too much if you know it's funny we get the Q&A area and then it sort of stays quiet until right at the very end and then we get this swarm of questions that is always difficult to get through so yeah I don't want anyone to worry that they're going to potentially miss out on anything so but anyway I think we're a couple of minutes that's yeah I could totally leave you to it now thank you thank you so I'll start by presenting myself since we are a few minutes early so we get that out of the way my name is twice I have been in game development for around 15 years and started out in console and then moved to pc and mobile and I see myself as a game developer and the reason why I bring

this up is because this topic is more on this sort of monetization side but I found it unleash together with GEICO marcin wolfish who's the founder of massive entertainment all over in millinery sweden you might remember that he ran it for ten years or so and we found it unleashed asked game developers you could say because we saw a problem not just for consumers but also for game developers that we wanted to fix it so we we come from that side and we when we talk to game developers we often Rosie sympathize or empathize at least with the problems they have and how we can do it so we we do commit and add it from from that angle and that's where we found out unleashed we found it unleashed rather we found it multi Scripture I should say which is now launching unleashed about a year and a half ago and we've been running a full speed ahead and since then getting everything ready for launch later this year although I'll tell you more about it in the deck so I think we are we're

ready to start so without further ado I'll then I'll kick it off because we we do start by going back in time a bit once upon a time back to when 2007 when the iPhone was introduced that sort of I know gaming goes way beyond that but that's sort of where we start and our little story of monetization because when the iPhone was launched it quickly became these $1 games that were sort of the way to monetize we call it the age of premium and you remember all these wonderful wonderful games and you see him but a few years after this new trend came and I think we all have to say we all remember the days when we went to the same conferences

today and we all talked about how you had to do free to play and how premium sort of was gonna was going away etcetera and we learned about how to do free to play and it's quite interesting that that subway service and classic trends and creating trust they all came out in 2012 and they're still if not top three crossing anymore it's at least top five and now we're seeing a new change and use will shift in my association to subscription and we were obviously seen that with ever lock aid which is probably mostly known right now could be play pass also being rolled out less known and then Unleashed which we hope will soon be more known than the the two others that's our ambition at least one thing that's different though between between now and before is that while premium has Mallis gone away we don't see free-to-play going away we see that this new world would be a combination of

business models so we don't think that it's no longer be enough purchase rather we see this as the Trinity as we call it of mobile monetization and we think that the most successful games will be using these three pillars to create their monetization again as with everything this talk it's all gonna be sort of broad strokes so yeah you can find a successful premium game but we think that as a business model is is gone now and you can of course find a game that works without any purchase or without ads but it's sort of the general the general terms of it so maybe I should start out by telling a little bit of more about why I'm sort of speaking so boldly about this and what it is we're doing and where we were where we come from Unleashed is a cross publisher subscription it's integrated into each game via the SDK and up in one game means getting benefits and all the games since it's free games we're focusing on we do have prima games

will focus on free-to-play what do you get like would you get free games free obviously not what you get is the kind of benefits that you would otherwise get in the games but you get that as part of the subscription now and you get it by signing up long game you get in all the other games in our network as well so we as I said are we integrated into the live games this means that we are meeting the players where they already are and the games they're already playing this makes it very convenient for people because they don't have to think about another game that they're not playing around us so what do I get in this very game oh I need more lives or need more this or what this really cool gun or whatever it is so you get this prop up basically showing you what kind of benefits you get so the game developer decides that and then you sign up for the trial what we have then is we have the Unleashed app this is not streaming we're not a distribution platform either it's simply a sort of a

service app to tell you which other games are in the service and to sign up for the troop for the for the subscription eventually the trial and all that you sign up for in the game so the reason why publishers are joining us is because they get to be part of a large subscription network that they would otherwise not be able to offer themselves so most games can offer ads most games except for the most hyper of hyper casuals can offer in-app purchases and theoretically most games can offer their own subscription we see they actually in particularly in hyper cacher but you have this single game subscription however they are not doing generally doing that well because people are getting used to a subscription being more than just one game or one functionality for example no ads so this is what we're offering and we're also offering a way good way to re-engage

your players to reactivate them and of course there's a lot of discoverability in this network because subscription drives retention this means that you're more likely to go to where already paid so you go back to Unleashed and check which games are in Unleashed so you can play some of those this brings that so yeah the last point about what we do actually before we head back into the topic it's the way of we're signing up now publishers for launch more than 45 publicist signed up with more than 65 games and in those 65 games more than 300 they have more than three and a half million monthly active users so when we launch we'll be exposing dozens of games to millions of users yeah and of course if you want to know more my contact info is right there so going back obviously to the topic of the Trinity of mobile monetization we're then providing the subscription the way Unleashed works is that you are still

allowed to show the water video and have in-app purchases we actually encourage both of it we think that this is a good combination for you to have whether it's your own subscription or our subscription I should say that this goes for both of them it's a good way to offer both often here that companies talk about oh they have maybe five percent conversion and they have ninety five percent non pay us and I always say I bet these people they're paying for something at some point in their lives they're just not paying for what you're offering them so maybe if you offer them something they were comfortable with if you only have ads maybe it's in-app purchase if you only been a purchase maybe it's a subscription etc cetera what is it that they normally use outside of outside of your game and what we also see is that typically people are critical whales in one game but then they would play several games where they don't pay so it's not that people as subjects are whales is that in a

particular game they invest a lot and then in other games they do not invest at all so I'll go through each of them and and talk a bit about them and how they work starting off by talking about ads and I'm going to say straight off the bed I know very little about it luckily in this track and in some of the other tracks as well there's lots of expertise it's this this is one of the great things about ads is that you have so many places to go and you have so many easily accessible tools to help you set up your ads one thing I'll say though that that we have seen is that there's relatively high tolerance towards ads and they are not as ill perceived as people might think especially when you're game developer and this what I said in the beginning knowing this is a being game development myself I I see that it always pains you to put in an ad in your beautiful game but actually

people they don't really care that much if it's rewarded video add and add this example to show that this was just one review from one one game I was stumbling upon when I was researching in the Google Play Store and I could have found a hundred like these but it's quite interesting to see and this is something that publishers sellers as well is that people really like rewarded video ads it seems like a like seems like a fair deal it seems like you go in you watch something and then you get a reward back you you are doing something and you get something back people don't like the kind of ads that forces you into a bad experiences this could be watch this ad for 20 seconds before you can progress but you don't get any immediate rewards of course we understand that the reward you get is being able to progress we understand that but when when you are a player you you don't feel rewarded you

don't feel that getting access to that next level is just sitting awaiting is really your reward so what we really recommend and again this goes for any kind of setup you have is that make sure that if you have a subscription service in your game that you still have reward video you keep involuntary and you make sure that it's the players that initiate the ads now we actually had some publishers tell us they took out reward video and then the reviews dropped because people said you know you took away my free stuff please give it back yeah so moving on to in-app purchases again I'm not really an expert on a net purchases either but I'm gonna talk a bit about the things I do know about it so this is not sort of a everything you know about in-app purchase I think one thing we notice a lot is that most games are focused on consumables and I think that they're I

mean I'm not going to be speculating why that is but I think a mix of consumables and on consumables is probably right for most games but I also understand that sometimes non consumables can be can be more difficult to manage because once you've bought it you sort of you have it and so how does that you know how do you balance it easier with some soft currency or some extra lives or some power-ups but the most important about in-app purchase is it really that compared to ads which is not as no transaction at all and compared to a subscription which is just a single transaction really or more like a relationship this is a series of transactions this means you're constantly selling that some of the things you have to consider when you are using in-app purchase is that you are always pushing for the next purchase this means you get into this always be closing that's the ABC there and the

slides I don't really remember that scene always be closing and this this gets players really annoyed thank you oh I just bought this and now you're already pushing me this and it is a weird relationship that's hard to get out of because you do get stuck in this quid pro quo mode you can never really you can never give more because people not expecting to get more they're expecting to get exactly what they pay for and just one thing we noticed is that even if you buy the seasonal content at every season like Christmas Easter summer whatever the seasons might be there's no combos there's no yeah you bought the last five packs now you get an additional pack there's nothing like that it's all each transaction from the player's perspective looks like it's the first transaction there's no bonuses no upgrades no benefits no wow you're a

really good customer you spent more than $100 on our game let's give you this all for now it's it might be I'm not I mean I know some games to stuff like that behind the scenes but it's not shown so the player is always like there's no they don't even know you just you just get served another offer another offer another offer so the last the last pillar is obviously subscription so this is something that is relatively new to the industry but as the old crock mats will tell you it's that you know we remember subscription from back and the feature phones that's when you would have a game description as well typically bundle in with your with your phone's description and description unlike the two others is really about building a relationship with the player it's hard to build the relationship with the player if you're constantly trying to sell something if you're constantly pushing the next in-app purchase the next this the next set so a subscription is about okay now we entered a

relationship where you pay us X every week or every month and we give you something in return based on the trust you have shown us that you will continue to pay and we will deliver you something and vice versa they we trust as a game developer you trust the player to continue to be a subscriber and you want to then give them more to build on instead of this quid pro quo that you had from in-app purchases I could talk a long time about subscription I'll try to create a brief to stay on topic you have words for the three others but one thing that's important is again because you're in a relationship as I said before your reward should increase with the level of engagement the longer you've been a subscriber your bit of benefit you should have I don't know if there's any big benefits of being a subscriber to Spotify from one year or five years I haven't seen it at least why why is it not it's not like you you sort of you

get in a closer relationship again communication should be a dollar it shouldn't just be used spamming people with with emails and offers because that's again that's not really a relationship it should be you asking for input but asking open questions not just these sort of rating questions like how you know how likely are you to recommend our game to another one of your friends stuff like that it should be in actual dialogue and say hey which we are we're about to release this new feature how what do you think of that what would you like what should nothing next thing we should do whatever is relevant for your game and then unique and personalized it's it's surprising to see how many companies that have all your personal info that will not send you like a birthday greeting or like a birthday gift for example right and say hey happy birthday here's a hundred coins well I did I did put in all my personal data what are you using for it if not to create a good relationship that's that's weird and we wouldn't see that in any

other kind of relationships even the even your colleagues in your workplace typically remember your birthday so I think again make it unique make it personalized you have all the data so use it for that yeah as when I said I could talk a lot about this I wasn't lying and I have talked a lot about it in this very format and with pocket game and he'll sing he had talked about kind of how you can integrate it description I in in early January I talked about this more relationship I had talked about that and then just last week I think it was I was in this roundtable off the future of monetization and how we talked a bit about how that will rest on these three pillars ads and in a purchase and subscription so this should all be on YouTube where now if not maybe the last one will be up soon but I think it's on there so check that out and again if you have any specific questions

please let me know so combining all three of them what's what to consider well the first one there's a consideration of time at what how early in I you and are you trying to apply this method to each of each of them own associations so obviously when the player starts your game then we assume it's not a premium game but rather it's a free game you're downloaded and the first thing obviously you will use ads I know there's some strict rules about whether or not you should use ads the first day or you sort of build up the data and then on the third day you start using it what kind of ads again I don't think there's a problem with ads if you make sure that these are relevant to people and they are the kind of ads that they like so for example with water video why not give your players a chance to get reward a video from the from the first day maybe you shouldn't sort of pester them

with the most annoying ads but those should be really cool and then typically your first purchase in the game could be an in-app purchase start a pack of some quite some kind and obviously you're not gonna buy the in-game content or the you know most rare sword or whatever you're selling but a good sort of yeah like this game let me get into it I think that's a that's an ideal and time and way to have that first purchase and then once your players I engage this is where you can say actually you'll see you're enjoying it why don't you get a subscription to unlock this and you don't have to how to say maybe you provide some of the things that you provide in the starter pack I'll get back to them in the next slide so about what here but sort of her makes it clear that's a really good way to sell them on a subscription if you don't have any purchase you can of course show the description pretty early but it's very unlikely that people when they first download the game on the first day is

gonna subscribe to it unless they know it already we do see some games that that they do sell subscriptions on the first day but that's typically where people just sign up to get a free trial and then they forget to cancel and that's not really how we see it again we're thinking about relationships bitching thinking about the long term here the long game so we don't really we don't really support that kind of that kind of methods and then when you have your players they are there they're retained and they are playing and they have this description you're sort of established a new face because now people are interested in investing on top of that so your new baseline is basically just your subscription and then selling on top this allows you to give different kind of benefits that you otherwise including subscription so now you can assume that people have a subscription you can give the kind of benefits and that would normally be reserved for let's say high end players or late late game or in game or very experienced

players whatever it is whatever fits your game you can sell that one thing we always recommend is giving a discount on your in-app purchase for people who are subscribers this is known from especially social casino in our industry but this is basically also how Amazon Prime works it's a you can prime and what you get out of that is free shipping and so you can spend more money on Amazon and actually there's a lot of data that shows that people who have a subscription typically they spend more on the very stores where they have a description and they have a subscription form and then the last stage is basically now you have some that are interested in investing more into your game then you could create it maybe it's here subscription maybe you have like the golden version of your subscription or platinum card or whatever it is you want to refer to something like that something you wouldn't buy a shaffer subscription for now you're really engaged in the game we really love it you want to go deeper into the typically

multi player or community something like that so the most important one when using these three is making sure they work together that they that they have an influence on each other and I'm pretty sure that's right now some monetization designers that was just you know pulling their hair out because it's got to be super complicated to do but it's really not it's not I mean of course you have to think it in but at the end of the day I think you have to I think you have to this is this is the future of mobile game and sensation for sure so just put in some examples here again you have to look at your your game what you have and what works but for example when you have rewarded video ads with your subscriber and you watch promote a video I think you you get more rewards or sort of no coins or whatever it's implicit if your subscriber and you should also get more the more you watch and I know so yeah but that's not really how sort of the whole video ad mediation work but that's well you have to make it work there's no

other way of saying it you shouldn't have any planets and interstitials when your subscriber for example another good example is we told about this discount on in-app purchase already but it could also be that if you spent a certain amount on in-app purchase then you can move up in in subscription tiers this is a bit opposite of I guess of a battle pass which is more like you get the subscription to get to the higher tiers but that's something you can do speaking of battle passes I haven't mentioned that there that's that's actually a good point to mention is that a battle pass ism is it's very much like a subscription coupled with this sort of in-app purchase idea so we think that battle passes are simply they function a lot like suits like a subscription zone if you have a game with the battle pest think of it as a subscription and maybe you have a subscription to get a new sort of renewed battle pass or whichever way you do it or possible passes or whatever they're called in the different

games so think about that so think about how can you if you have a subscription how would that improve your in-app purchase what kind of persistent upgrades would you give maybe you get 10x on your HP 10 eggs on your drops whatever it is you and you want to you want to give as part of that the most important that is that they have to influence each other you have to get a benefit as a subscriber and you have to give the same kind of rewards as you would otherwise give your other players so I'm a subscriber to Spotify and have been for many years and every summer I sort of pisses me off when Spotify runs another campaign a sum off Spotify get three months for free and like why am I not getting three months for free because I've been paying to you for five years you only give that to people who have never you have no relationship with you should give that to me and to them so that kind of that kind of thinking as well or if I spend a lot on a game I should get rewarded sort of

like frequent flyer points or that you would know for that you the more you spend the the higher to get sort of the Clement card so anyways so that was a bit about how they and how they work together so to wrap up this and I want to say and definitely ping me this code email whatever and so we can go into more detail on it but make sure you use all three make sure you offer something for every player in your game so every player should have a way to engage with you and your monetization and make sure that the three pillars sort of support each other well thank you for your time there we go well thank you so much for the talk like really interesting and fascinating and we've actually got some questions if you've got some time absolutely far away yes so one of the first we'll go through all of them but one of the first questions is does your

SDK I'm paraphrasing X is a bit long but does your SDK only support unity someone's wondering that it seems as though only supports unity and if so if there's a reasoning behind that it's supported unity unreal and native there we go so there we go that helps clarify that but some of the other ones is someone else's / why what do you think about other subscription services in the market for example apple arcade and game club i think i think both of them are great i think both of them you can find some really fun and interesting games on a thinking rhombus obviously focused on a very I think quite small segment which is sort of these like like old retro mobile games and yeah we are that old it's already old retro games on mobile and I think Apple arcade is great I think a blockade is obviously the biggest right now but I think they they're touching on a small part of the market by going for premium games only i

think this leaves like 95 or 90% of all the revenue is on free-to-play and I think there probably many reasons why Apple is doing this sort of they're they're heavily curating which games they want on the platform and I'm not sure that they give the same kind of benefits to to the developers and publishers as someone like also other other services would do we are here not to sell hardware we're here to create a subscription service that helps developers and gives good benefits to the players yeah yes so it seems like your platform is popular amongst our audience if someone's wandering there so he's asking about game maker studio and whether you support or will be supporting that or anything like that it's not something to support now but I'll note it down for support if basically because none of our publishers are using it so so I'll note that down there's a few other technologies like that out there that that we are considering supporting and but we simply just haven't had that

request yet so far unity unreal the native is covered all of them yeah actually I was going to ask my question but I should add a to our audience first which and someone's put in a question wrongly is asked so transition so transition traditional loyalty rewards you would get from face to face interaction and Tracy Royals sorry I'm just gonna work this out to make it shorts for you so yeah so transition traditional loyalty rewards you would get from face to face interaction and long-term pays for the subscription you know that sort of aspect is that something the most digital monetization lacks for example offering long time spotify discount subscriber and actually that links into one of the questions I was going to ask is do you think there's a better way to manage long-term loyalty rather than just attracting new customers I think so I think so I think there's done first of all I think people are thinking too specifically about what they can offer

only in the game as a typically an in-game consumable I think there's we I think there's so much imagination creativity and all that in the industry that we could put that to work on some of that and say what other kind of benefits could be really give that requires us to look at the individual players and understanding the players and I think it's a bit controversion to say but I think we have been so obsessed with with with data recently for a long time we didn't look at it but I think now the pendulum is maybe swung a little bit too far that we need to go back and look at people I mean it might be just a cohort in your in your data but those are actual people with actual lives with thoughts and ideas and motivations what is do they want what is it they interested in maybe you'll find there's a big overlap between your class and something completely different maybe if you are maybe it's a certain type of you know women's magazines or maybe it's something completed what do they do outside of playing your game and I think there we could do a lot more across a

lot more rewards across and then we do today we're very siloed very very siloed and I think also as I think the first question was about like you don't really build any loyalty with a company it's you just become like a whale in the system but but that doesn't really give you any benefits it's not like they they would call you and ask how you're doing it's not like you get faster support if you have a problem it's not like they make sure everything works on your device it's there's no really there's no benefit in building that that's why we're focusing so much on the relationship aspect make sure you build a relationship with with your player someone else is asked and I'll add a bit to it because I think it's interesting to sometimes thing devised will there be a Netflix for games do we need one or what about services like sturdier and solutions that are device agnostic and I suppose the behind ad is what kind if they are do you think they will have a considerable impact on how we monetize our games yeah so I think the answer is

will there be enough things again well of course Google is working something that's something called hatch which is owned by Rovio that's also a that's an Android streaming service again brilliant tech they are right now I think they're focusing mostly on kids games now I'm not sure I think one of the one of the cool things about games is that if you and I were to sit down or watch a movie it would be two and a half hours and that's that's it it's not like I could then watch five hours and you can watch an hour and a half that's the movies two and a half hours so think that what we have with games it's that there's so much flexibility to invest both time but of course also money into your experience as much as you want which Netflix doesn't give you everyone gets the same experience on Netflix if you watch house of cards there's exactly the same number of episodes and you couldn't pay all the money in the world to invest deeper into that experience there's just nothing there so I don't think a sort of all-you-can-eat fixed this is what you have like if you imagine this is one of sort of you could say this about a panic aid maybe is that

that is close to Netflix with games it's not streaming but the rest is small is there and that is its premium games so there's nothing more you can unlock this nothing more you can invest to you just pay your five dollars a month and that's what you get and I think we as as a games industry we have so much more to offer we're such a lot richer and deeper experience and we have this way you can invest what you want and make it sort of relate to how invested you islands in the game down to from zero to hundreds or even thousands of dollars it's it's up to you so I think that's that's something we should go for and try to be unique and not try to copy the movie industry yeah okay that's that's really interesting yeah well there thank you so much for your talk I'm sure if anyone else has got any questions then you know they'll be obviously the discord area which hopefully you'll have some time to pop in to or the people can reach out to you as well thank you I appreciate it it was fun yeah thank you so much it was a really interesting talk really good I

think it's really interesting to everyone in the industry thank you very much take a thank you thanks you