Superstar Session: How to Actually Succeed With D2C Web Shops for Mobile Games.

[Music] with our first uh session will be how how to actually succeed with dtoc webops for mobile games and I'd like to welcome to the stage David vogle from Far spring and Justin saxs from Nexus yeah please come up and please give a round of applause I like a bit of energy I like I like it all right thank you y please uh take it away thanks Craig and hello everybody Welcome really honored to be here on the first session of the day thank you all for braving coming out this early after spending some time at the parties last night I know it was a

good time I Justin left early to make sure we were nice and fresh today but thank you all so much for showing up here for the first session of the day so what we're going to talk about is how to actually succeed with a direct to Consumer web shop for mobile games now I had the opportunity to speak to many of you yesterday about director consumer strategies some of you were ignorant to the strategies um that are needed to be successful others were much further along with a live web shop that was fairly popular but what was consistent with everyone I spoke with was that everyone was still learning as you're aware things are changing in the director consumer landscape very quickly particularly in the EU and so what Justin and I wanted to do today was to spend a little time talking about the uh strategies that we see and our customers see that drive success in their business one thing I want to remind you all as we embark on this journey to learn about success in D Toc is to think about balance balance and how you approach the

strategies in with your players and bring them to Market and also balance with how you manage these strategies relative to your relationships with the mobile platforms and so we'll keep that in mind as we go on this adventure together and learn about direct a consumer so uh joining me in this conversation I'd like to welcome Justin here Justin tell us a little bit about yourself sure thanks David uh hi everyone so I'm Justin Sachs I'm CEO at nexus. I've been in the games industry about 16 years I kind of have a weird entryway into games I started as a competitive player so I played a few different games competitively before it was called Esports um and then I became a content creator myself so I made uh videos on YouTube and also blogs which is aging myself yet again um and then I joined a media startup in games that was called curse a little over a decade ago that joined when they were a startup and then eventually we were acquired by twitch and Amazon in 2016 I was running bis Dev for them when I left to start building

Nexus we call ourselves a Creator program in a box which is basically really inspired by what incredible games like fortnite and Publishers like supercell have done with their supporter Creator codes we make it really easy for any live service game to have their own supporter Creator program and we'll talk soon about how those content creators are a critical part of how to operate a really successful DC strategy awesome thanks Justin a little bit about myself I'm the chief marketing officer at fast spring or a direct oops direct to Consumer payment platform I leverage about two decades of digital marketing influencer marketing and monetization experience at fast spring both for the benefit of fast spring and our customers I'm an obscure fast game publisher if there's any flamor fans out there raise your hand I'll meet you on the Discord server later I love shooters and I'm a science fan and have a pretty awesome family it's a little bit about me um but what we're going to talk about today is really three things one we're going to talk about the basics of time travel did

you know that time travel is real we we'll learn why in a second number two we're going to talk about the present opportunity in direct to Consumer and number three we're going to help you map your direct to Consumer future so let's talk about time travel if there's anything that Einstein's special theory of relativity and my fifth grader science project has taught us it is that it is possible to move into the future as a matter of fact when one object moves faster than relative to another object that object will move into the future and so what we're going to learn about today are techniques that allow you to move fast to help realize future direct to Consumer profits today the second piece of time travel which is also Real and True is that you can look back in time astronomers do this with their telescopes they look at Starlight from millions and billions of years ago to see what happened in the past to help inform the future and so

we're going to look at the directed consumer launches that came before you and think about the lessons from those and how you can apply them to help you realize your future So today we're going to use these two elements of real life time travel the ability to look back in time and the ability to move fast and be able to achieve future results faster so let's start with why now is why why is now the right time to invest and direct a consumer so Justin help us understand why is now a good time to invest in direct a consumer so the biggest reason is that now you can and so in the past you you really weren't able to um but more recently there's been decisions made in uh the judicial courts that have enabled it through the primary App Store so through the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store that you're able to sell your inapp purchases off platform there are some restrictions to that that we'll talk about shortly but what epic has been able to do by bring bringing the lawsuit to Apple um

is really make it possible for game Publishers to be able to monetize outside of the app stores in different ways and we're going to get into the big reason why but the number one priority and focus for almost all game Publishers of why they want to bring reach Their audience off platform is one of fees how do you avoid the significant fees that happen within the the the core app stores there are some restrictions and so for example on iOS um if you want to have a DDC policy without the fees you can't embed you can't steer and you can't Silo you also and critically cannot Market that you have a d Toc strategy inside of the App Store itself all of those same things are true except on Android the big difference is you are able to do side loading there's a lot of challenges with side loading frankly the number one is that it's kind of a confusing process and it's not uh the easy easiest thing for players to do but

at the end of the day if you're able to avoid some of these restrictions you're able to have a d Toc policy without the significant fees of what you'd partake if you're selling your inapp purchases inside of the App Store itself so we're already seeing that there's a lot of incredibly successful companies both in gaming and outside of gaming that are utilizing d2c strategies this is a big reason why um it's one of the the hottest topics of this conference but really just endemic to the industry there's a lot of focus on how can people leverage a d Toc strategy how can they work how do they connect closer to their players in a way that is not just avoiding some of the fees that they have inside the App Store but building that closer relationship with their players and so emulating what some of these really incredible companies are doing is something that it's worth looking at and all of these whether they're game Publishers or some of the non-endemic folks are utilizing different forms of their strategies that we're going to get into later in this presentation

so one thing I like to really think about when I think about direct to Consumer and you know how you're driving success is you know how you're to think about the fact that you already have to Market direct a consumer to be successful with your games as sensor Tower reports um only about 15% of mobile game downloads come from App Store shopping so if I'm on the homepage of the iOS game store or in one of the category pages only about 15% of new downloads actually come from these experiences if you're not a AAA title that can rank in one of these uh locations then your percentage of mobile downloads that come from this may be even smaller so as you're thinking about directed consumer marketing you got to remember that you're already having to do this in apps Flyers um recent report they reported that game companies spend $29 billion a year on user acquisition so that's money being invested Ed to help uh augment the

fact that you're not able to get all of your new customers all of your new players from the App Store specifically and of course ranking in these places is incredibly difficult so I think a directed consumer strategy is already part of your um marketing strategy and so coupling it with the payment side um to get that increased profitability is a natural Next Step um the other interesting thing and I think about is a really probably one of the biggest reasons why you want to consider a direct consumer strategy with your players it's about establishing that long-term and direct relationship of course with direct to Consumer you can do things like uh include the player in your newsletters um and other things like your Discord communities and so on and so forth but of course the biggest reason for me is about establishing that brand Affinity with your players so that you own the relationship with your players your players play your games on their devices and so Direct consumer provides you unique opportunity to

decouple um that relationship from any particular device what about money Justin can people make more money with direct a consumer oops you certainly can um and one of the interesting things if you're really focused primarily on the bottom line around your D Toc strategy is that it doesn't require you to have to convert all of your players so you don't have to get all of the players that are currently in the game to visit your web shop in order to make really meaningful additional margins in fact if you focus specifically on your VIPs on your most engaged players and you bring even a small portion of those folks as it's relative to your total player base over your over to your web shop you're going to see a really significant increase in profitability um for example here we have PL pla's D Toc platform made up 23% of their total revenue in 20122 up from 20% and then 133% in the previous years and that was already a couple years ago I wouldn't be surprised if we see that

play because you know more than a quarter of their revenue is happening off platform yeah it feels like there's not a lot of strategies to increase profitability by over 9% or double digits uh that are available yeah it's especially when you think of repeating it into the future um because usually like the biggest challenge around acquisition is your most effective and most efficient acquisition channels really in any sort of marketing but certainly in gaming only get more expensive over time but once you build a relationship with these VIPs outside of the platform you can continue to retain them much longer and work with them much longer build them custom products a bunch of stuff that we're going to talk about excellent so let's say you want to have a DTC strategy you want to have this web shop where you can work with your players outside of the game what is what is what needs to be true in order to make that possible broadly three things one you need a way to actually take in payments and be compliant globally that's where you might work with a

partner like a fast spring two you need the actual literal mechanics of how does the player come to the websit so you need to build that website experience how do they choose what SKS they want to purchase and then how do you provide that information back to the game so that the player has that product that they've bought inside of the game as well and then three you need a way to actually get your players to visit the web shop and again critically you today you are not allowed to tell your players in game hey don't buy here go to my web shop and do it and so you need you need to find other ways to communicate with those players and tell them hey we really want you to go to the web shop it's a great experience for you you can get a better deal and communicate more closely with us all sorts of stuff and so those are like the three really high level things that need to be true in order to have a true dtoc experience and so we're going to hop into what sort of games are a great fit and we're really going to focus primarily on live service titles there's going to be a little bit on some other stuff but why are live service games are

really like the perfect fit for this D Toc strategy so one uh we talked a little bit about that VIP experience where you can focus on a small portion of your players but capture a lot of the opportunity of having a d2c strategy that is most true for live service games and often that's because of the way the attributes inherent to live service titles where in Live service games you're going to see a small percentage of your total player base actually monetized and an even smaller percentage of that monetized player base that makes up the majority of the total revenue or profit for the game and so what that enables you to do is Target those people where you really just focus on those VIPs and when you can bring them to your web shop when you can build that direct relationship with them you're going to have a really incredible experience when you think about not just your bottom line as the game developer and publisher but also how to keep those players long into the future so Justin if I have a

premium game and maybe I'm releasing new maps or DLCs slowly over time is it that those players are almost worth all the same where with live service we have like a very small percentage that can represent an outsize percentage of the revenue that is exactly right yeah the more um the more that your game has a small percentage of players that make up a large percentage of Revenue the better fit you're going to be for a d Toc strategy so um I'll talk briefly about the the flywheel of live services and this is really the the core idea of what does it mean to be a live service game and really what a live service game is just a game that players will play for a long period of time that is consistently updated by the developer or publisher and so what that introduces is sort of flywheel experience so not true for all live service games but many of them are multiplayer many of them are PVP many of them have a leaderboard experience or a clan or Guild experience and all of these things introduce consistent ways to reach out to an audience and give you

multiple opportunities to bring your players from in-game to that web shop to that D Toc where that's not as true when they don't have some of those features when you don't have multiplayer when you don't have Clans when you don't have friends list when you don't have all of these different things you really get very few opportunities to communicate with your players in a way that can bring them out of the the App Store itself so as you're releasing this new content over time your battle passes your skin as part of a live service strategy this is kind of like recurring Revenue in a sense and so is the true value there with converting that player to transact D to C is that their future transactions will also be hopefully converted as well yeah it's exactly that and and I think a big part of it is that one of the scary things with non-live service games um really around all sorts of strategies but particularly around monetization is you only have one chance like with a premium game almost all of the player base the attention and the

opportunity around purchasing and monetization happens right at launch but with live service titles you can keep relaunching every new content update which is often monthly if not quarterly okay thank you you know the other interesting thing I thought for me as we were kind of preparing this presentation this is my favorite mobile game um U magic tiles 3 although someone came by from a competitor yesterday I think I might switch for that uh is really subscriptions um so that same idea that you have have this recurring Revenue effect with life service models um obviously if you have a subscription model um this is also a good fit for direct a consumer again because you're trying to get that person to convert to the direct to Consumer option and then take advantage of that flywheel effect of getting that additional profitability in the future um so um subscription games are also a great fit for direct to Consumer all right so we're going to talk about a player experience optimized web shop nice I already knew you were going to do that though yeah okay so uh

what does that really mean um one of the things that we talk about and one of the things I've seen work really successfully and uh you know because I'm on stage I'm able to say this this is also one of our web shops that we've helped build um is that you can really build a web shop that is a balance between The Branding and the continuity of the experience and what that means is you want when the player visits your web shop to not be surprised they shouldn't see a brand they're unfamiliar with they shouldn't have a shopping experience that is totally dissimilar to the to what they're used to it should really feel really similar to what they're doing because you want to reduce as much friction as possible for the player you want to make it as easy as it ever possibly could be to get them from going to the app store which they've been doing for years which they're used to which they're comfortable with to going to your web shop and partaking in your D Toc strategy and one of the key ways to to think about that is design and so make sure that the actual brand feels like the game and so you can see uh on the

left here this is the actual ingame shop for a wonderful game called Smite and then on the right is their web shop and you can see that it it it feels like the same brand it feels like the same experience the sort of skews that you're buying are really similar all that sort of stuff is really critical to making the player experience as frictionless as possible you know some of our customers have multiple games of course and the games have different designs so the other thing I've noticed a lot of folks will do is the main shop will have the brand of your publisher studio and then they'll have Micro store sub stores for each of the games where the design of that sub store matches the design of that particular game so that's another thing to keep in mind as you design your stores out is um you know if you have multiple games how are you going to approach that kind of overarching design and then how are you going to have those shopping experiences for each game to to touch on that it is um uh exciting as the publisher to think about having a publisher brand web shop and then again having like you know maybe all the SK listed in the same

place and just be like look this is our publisher this is all of our titles I would warn you again you want to make it really simple convenient easy and the most immediate understanding for the player and so it's okay to have the publisher top level sort of branded domain for the web Shop but you do want to have those micro sites you do want to have that experience that you're sending the player directly from learning about the game going to the blog hearing about it from an influencer content creator to the specific micro site of the game that they play and that they're interested in so one of the things and one of the the best tools you might have in your toolkit for your D Toc strategy is how do you actually incentivize the player to purchase in this new way that maybe they're a little bit more unfamiliar with and one of those is better deals and so that can be discounts but more traditionally this is additional content or exclusivity where you get unique content that maybe you can't get in any other way and so a really traditional

thing is basically passing on a lot of the savings that you get by going off platform to the player and so for example if you're in uh any traditional app store you're probably going to be losing about 30% to the platform for their fee but on your DSC on your web shop it's going to be a lot less than that it's mostly payment processing and maybe some other vendor sort of experience and so you can pass on 10 15% additional content so additional currency to the player when they come to buy on your web shop and another thing that you can do is offer exclusive experiences and you can think of this in two ways one might be an exclusive item or battle pass or skin or whatever it might be that any player has access to but something really unique that you can do especially if you're focusing your strategy on those VIPs that you have is that you really make unique bundles and unique offerings to your players based on their activity So based on the sort of content that they purchase the sort

of player experience that they that they use in in inside of the game you can make them offers that they're going to be more interested in in a way that's really hard to do inside of the game one of the other ways to think about it is there's actually limits to how much you can charge on an in-game item um but none of those sort of things are true outside of the App Store whether that's subscription based or a one-off skew it's really totally in your control for how you're working with your players when you're able to work directly with your players so if I'm a VIP and I go to the web shop and I'm going to get more value for my money over time because I get 10% more in-game currency these are the kind of pieces of bait you're kind of referencing in addition to things like exclusive items in the shop yeah and an easy one for sure that I'd recommend everyone to do is some sort of like uh daily unlockable where the player visits your web shop each day or each week and they get something just for visiting it encouraging that sort of pattern and that behavior is really helpful to the player to feel less

friction and feel excited about going to your web shop and the players that are going to be most excited about that are your VIPs and so this really helps to sort of bring those players you're most focused on to give them the experience that is better for them in a way that they're going to be happy with as you're building that long-term relationship yeah I remember my middle schooler was getting out of school and all of his friends were standing outside all playing the same game that had been released it was one of our customers and I yelled out don't forget to go to the store to get 10% more in-game currency nice so uh unique marketing strategy yes yes one one one player at a time uh what about Creator programs just so uh I'm biased but this is one of in my opinion the the the best growth strategies that you can have for your web shop but also for your game and so going backwards one of the big challenges of a d2c strategy is how do you actually get your players to go there because remember you you actually can't tell them inside of the game you cannot tell the player directly hey go to the web shop you can get a better deal that's not allowed and if you do that you know the platforms will

get really upset or you're going to lose that you know uh avoidance of the fee but if you can't tell your players directly the folks that can are influencers and content creators it is totally okay outside of the app outside of the the platforms for a YouTuber for a live streamer to say hey if you want the best deal go to the web shop and the best way to incentivize those influencers is through a Creator program which is basically a holistic Evergreen Revenue share experience with those influencers and so you would work with YouTubers and streamers and you'd say Hey you get your own unique Creator code if you tell your audience to use that code inside the web shop you get Revenue share so you as that content creator you can get some some amount of money for bringing your audience over to the web shop and not only is that good for the Creator and in that they increase their income not only is that good for the player because they get a better deal not only is that good for you as the publisher because you're getting that higher margin by beinging bringing the player off platform but it creates this

really virtuous cycle where that content creator wants to continue making more content and by having some sort of Revenue share experience by offering Commerce to the Creator they now can make a living making content for your game which is really the thing that you most want you want to keep that Creator not just playing your game not just making content not just bringing the players in but to do that for as long as possible because the VIN diagram of audience that watches a content creator and those VIPs you want to bring to your your web shop is like a circle basically the exact people that you want to bring over to your web shop are the exact players that are watching content creators and influencers and so introducing that support a Creator program is a really valuable tool to Bringing players to your web shop other thing I want to remind you all that pay attention to especially if you're just launching a direct to Consumer uh strategy a new is that there's going to be support as part of your strategy players are going to have problems with transactions this is

actually my son who texted me from one of our customers when they just launched just tried buying something on this store they said it was your problem on your end better fix it buddy um my son was using a Visa gift card from like a relative had mistyped in the credit card numbers like four times in a row was like basically spamming the checkout form and had got locked out for basically like a day and had to come back the next day so you're going to have players that have this experience no matter what you do with your director consumer offering so just remember you're going to need to provide some transactional support what you will find is a lot of payment providers that focus on the gaming space will actually provide that support directly for you um and so you can kind of offload some of that to your partner um but just remember to keep an eye on that and again you are already probably providing player support for inapp purchases that's also another opportunity to establish a more direct relationship with that player that can open up the door for future references direct to consumer but when you have your web shop you're going to need to have some

support mechanism in place to make sure to help players when they have issues with this or you can just tell them to text me either way will work um the other thing to think about on your web shop is localizing your currencies payment methods and sales tax now one big reason why players will actually go to a web shop is because they got the grandma gift card or something and they don't have the ability for whatever reason to tie it to their Mobile account um and so uh payment method diversity if you will is a strong advantage of actually having a directed consumer shop and allowing you to capture Revenue you might not have captured any way other way um but of course localization plays a big part um if you're selling into Brazil you need to support the Pix payment method everyone in Brazil uses picks for payments um it's way more popular than credit cards and so you can localize those payment methods and then you're also going to need to localize the tax so you can see for this particular P purchase it was not taxable in the US us but in Turkey it was a

666 kind of a metal uh vat tax there for this particular purchase again most payment providers focused in the gaming space um are what are called merchants of record they actually will take care of the tax stuff for you um but localization is going to be a big part of it both in terms of local payment methods but also in terms of tax and compliance uh David I think one thing worth talking about here that maybe uh you're too kind to to to announce is doing these yourself is really really really challenging in order to offer dozens hundreds thousands of different payment options in order to handle that Merchant record experience in order to handle Global compliance around taxes not an easy thing for you as a game developer or publisher to do and frankly largely totally irrelevant to making an incredible game and so often having that partner that can do all that for you is something that you're really going to want to focus on and bring on board yeah I'm definitely a shill for merchants of record um but I think the advantage to think

about as you consider a partner for that and there's many in the gaming space is that it's a very similar experience to a Marketplace and the fact that you're offloading the complexity of payments and tax compliance and so um that offloading of responsibility should feel really familiar to you and then of course finally on your web shop think need to think closely about uh fraud how do you keep players or really fraudulent people from defrauding you of uh your um there's all kinds of like negative impacts to this including increasing the fees that you pay for payments and things like this if you don't really get your fraud in in check so you want to Res uh one technique that really works is to restrict purchases only to logged in players only to players with accounts um fine-tune your fraud model for your type of players and then use things like VIP Flags or known player Flags um to help provide softer rules for compliance all right how do we get people to the store though Justin that's not easy um how do we make the players aware if we can't put links inside the game without

paying additional fees all righty so first uh reminder um critically the one way that you cannot get players to go to your web shop and make purchases is by telling them inside of the game on both major platforms that you are totally disallowed from doing so well you can in the EU with like 28% fees kind thing if you want to avoid the fees critically if you want to not pay the 30% tax you can't tell the players directly you sort of can in the EU but then you get this like backwards 28% tax that I'm not even sure how gets clawed back but somehow they look at your books and ask for the money um but if you do want to avoid those fees there's a few ways um so the easiest one and the one that should be most native to folks is through social so you can tell the players through your social experiences this could be Twitter or Discord or Facebook or however you naturally are already reaching your player players you can communicate with them that way and of course the great

thing about your social and your Discord is these are your existing players and direct to Consumers especi is really about marketing to existing players over new players that's actually a critical point of all of this is almost none of the focus of at least stage one of DDC is on user acquisition this isn't getting a player that has never experienced your game to First experience your game through a web shop it is instead getting your player who's already excited about the game who's already spending to instead start spending on your web shop and having that D Toc relationship so uh there's some other ways David yeah so I mentioned earlier um it was apps flyer that said 29 billion is spent on user acquisition um and of course as we just talked about really what you're focusing on on paid media is existing players so if you were doing Facebook ads you would want to select people who follow your profile these are likely players of your game same similar kinds of filters for YouTube videos I talked to a publisher yesterday who said we advertise on our

own Creator videos to help promote our life service releases and things like this um but the good thing about these types of campaigns from a d Toc perspective is you can make them fairly narrowly focused you can also leverage certain retargeting techniques in very particular ways just to Target ads for VIPs because again as Justin pointed out earlier you can Target just 2% of your players and affect up to 70% of your Revenue this is a really material um opportunity but again when you think about your paid media strategy you're really trying to narrow that audience to your existing players and preferably to your VIPs another thing that isn't super obvious saw a session on this recently at another conference um is you can promote other destinations on your website inside your game so you can promote promote your leaderboards hey you made the leaderboard go check out your place I talked to an investor recently one of their Publishers was about to deprecate their leaderboards and we were talking about this and they were like oh well we'll leave it there

because when people arrive on your website at the top they'll see your store in the navigation remember earlier when we talked about balance though what we don't want to do is send people to a leaderboard uh page from our game with a giant ad for your web store at the top of the page this is about balance and respect um you can do tutorials and playthroughs provide cheat codes on your website certainly player accounts visiting the web shop is a great time to offer a reward logging into your account on the web shop is a great uh opportunity for a reward and then you can also include things like lore content on your website use platforms like World Anvil to build that out but really provide make your web shop or website a destination and then in your website of course you have links to your web shop and uh the additional either exclusive items or discounts available uh that aren't available inside the game and we we talked about Creator programs earlier but this is one of the really great strategies that that you can use to to get players and tell them really

directly hey visit the web shop there's a great experience there there's a better offering there there's unique rewards there um and then again you can reward and incentivize those content creators those influencers for doing so through Revenue share by by having a really more holistic Creator program and then obviously you can rewards VIPs in ways that open up new ways to communicate outside of your game and so this is really building that direct connection with that player so D Toc direct to Consumer a lot of what we've talked about is direct to that VIP and you can think about how can you really support those VIPs in a way that they can't be supported through the game but you can do through the web shop and however you already are working with your VIPs however you're already communicating with some of your most engaged players now you can think about how you can leverage the web shop experience to augment that VIP program that you've either been building that might be or it might be really significant your web shop can be a

really good part and supplement to that VIP experience awesome so as a reminder uh there's three really core buckets that you need to solve for in order to have a web shop one you need a way to take in payments and a way to be globally compliant two you need the way that the player can actually come and make those purchases either they're authenticating with their player their in-game player account or they're entering in some sort of unique user ID that then you associ associate with their player account and then you can send them and reward them and give them the items that they purchase inside of the game and then lastly you need a way to actually communicate with those players to bring them from your game Into the Web shop itself awesome and so that's um basically what we've covered today the three elements as we promised the basics of real lifetime travel the present opportunity of direct to Consumer and hopefully helping you to map your direct to Consumer future um we have time for maybe one or two questions we got there

right on the time limit but uh are there any questions from the audience hey guys so a quick question uh I'm curious how you move over here do you do does games usually have a hybrid approach first so they keep the inap purchases and they start to work on getting people into the shop and H how does all that work how do you transition yeah I think um from all of the web shops and the in-game monetization that I've ever seen I haven't seen a game fully move to web shop where they're saying hey we really don't want to think about or focus on monetizing our players Ina instead it's really focusing on those VIPs how do we get our most engaged players and give them an alternative way to purchase that is a better experience for them either they're getting more content they're getting more support whatever it might be but at the same time you still do have to support those players inside their traditional experience of purchasing and a lot of that is because you're

not if you could get 100% of your players to purchase in the web shop rather than in game you certainly would want to do so that's just really unrealistic because that's so many players it's a hard thing to to to communicate directly to that many people um so I haven't seen anyone stop supporting their players in game um but it's really more about how do you target those most engaged players and bring them over to the web shop and support them in a way that they're not well it's also so hard to get players to play your game at all and let alone consistently and so focusing on established players that have already familiar and playing a game consistently is a much better use of your time there versus you know gaining that consistency to begin with I I personally would not interfere with new players I'd let them do their thing yeah and again the the web shop is not a new player acquisition strategy it's more a monetization strategy for your existing players thank you any uh any other

questions I do have I do have one question for you uh I you were saying early you know it takes time to to make a web shop successful so I guess is there some kind of raw I'm sure mileage varies in the first week month I guess what can you expect kind of Revenue wise to start making from your web shop and how long does it take you know to get up to say you were saying bringing 25% of your audience can get around 8% increase profitability how long will that take that process I mean obviously it varies company to company obviously the power of your brand um if you do not have a brand that stands alone outside of the game that the person experiened by downloading from the app shop it's going to be a lot harder go for you when you see champions in the space like epic come out and and you know epic has a giant megaphone if your brand doesn't have a giant megaphone if you have a popular game but people don't really know your brand is a publisher it's going to be a lot harder for you to get

that going if you don't have your own Discord Channel if you don't have a strong social following um if you have these audiences already in place it's a lot easier to ramp up more quickly um but it does take time it's not going to be an overnight uh sensation I don't have a good like rule of thumb average growth rate um but if you don't have those Community elements you really want to spend a lot of time focusing on that early in your store Journey um but if you already have a thriving Community it's going to be a lot easier for you to find success with your web shop one thing to add is again the players you're most focus on bringing to your web shop are your most engaged your most important players and so often you do want to have a soft launch where you make sure the experience is actually better for the player purchasing through the web shop than what they can do in app and so often I'll see Publishers really slowly roll that experience out to make sure that they're offering a uniquely better experience to the players and what they can do alternatively yeah thanks very much uh I think I think that's it I think we with we done for time so thank you so much uh both of you uh please give a big round

of applause really great thank you [Music] [Music]