The Change in Mobile Landscape: What Does it Mean for You as a Developer?

let's get things started uh first up we have the change in mobile landscape what does it mean for you as a developer and we're going to be hearing from mika from zola mika are you with us so how are you today mika i'm great i'm splendid i uh had some taking noises so my background might not be exactly up to par but uh it's pretty close um but yeah uh other than that great it's a lovely monday i mean to be honest where i'm calling from berlin it's pretty gray and all of that but i'm just trying to keep the positive wipe going exactly yeah it's always sunshine at pocket gamer connect event so um are you ready to are you ready to go yeah i'm totally ready to go i will

share my screen if that's okay um so go right ahead i will fade into the background and i'll reappear towards the end so take it away all right sharing my screen here presenting mode uh just making sure uh this is visible um can you see my presentation we can indeed oh perfect all right so hello everybody um thanks for joining in um on a monday monday afternoon um uh hopefully your weather is better than in berlin uh where where you're calling from my name is mika luati i i work at exola as the director of business development for europe my background just for the context of this whole presentation is coming from 15 years working with mobile game industry with mostly mobile game publishers so i you know produced about 12 titles myself and and uh today

here to talk to you about how to monetize your mobile games beyond the traditional platforms really and and talking about the opportunity that um uh that is kind of opening itself up uh and and the kind of walled gardens so to say are slowly slowly kind of opening up their doors and and um what that means to you and what can you do today uh because this is like the the two things that we get most of the questions since xola we are a video video games business transaction engine or some some would say a payment payment uh payment company that we work as a merchant of record for video game publishers um and we handle payments so we've been getting a lot of requests lately from from the mobile game industry about you know because this topic is very relevant today in in many ways not just apple but also

google all the mobile platforms the topic is out there about them opening up to the payments and and what that means and i get a lot of questions so this is kind of you know what i usually answer to all the people that contact me about this like hey you know how can we sell outside of the traditional mobile platforms what can we do to do today what can you what you what you should be careful of what are the challenges uh what's gonna happen in the future so so first of all i'd like to start actually by by talking about um talking about the the the market and the situation and the kind of opportunity from a business perspective so um at exo you know when i joined exo about a year ago uh over a year ago um coming from the mobile space axolotl has been working with video game companies for 15 years or so and mostly actually on the online and pc side of things and not so much on mobile

so um and only when i was joining that's when we were kind of starting to work with mobile publishers in different ways um so my first question was really like coming from the mobile space myself dealing with only apple and google when it comes to payment and handling in-app transactions so the first question i had was you know what what's the really that bottom line difference between a uh the coverage what for example a company like excel can offer or uh versus mobile platforms like how much what are we talking about here what's what's the difference like how how well does apple and google cover payment payment methods around the world um and uh you know i asked the team our payments team to kind of do a to a comparison and what we found us found out is is really really interesting so well most people are always asking like you know how can we avoid the so-called platform tax

um i think that's really just the tip of the iceberg the platform packs what's what's really bigger actually when you go down the iceberg and you start looking what's under the waves um that's where the real difference starts to kind of add up so you know we took a look at different regions in the world um and and there was a few key regions where you know there's like a marginal improvement because mostly you know these uh traditional platforms uh what they do is they work with credit cards uh most of the time and then they work with popular e-wallets like you know paypal and and etc the stuff that we you know pretty much everybody in the western world is familiar with but you know one of the missed opportunities that i think um these platforms at least currently are not really catering for is is alternative payment methods local banks um local e-wallets um and all of that which is getting more and more popular different ways to pay you know we got

you got so many new things happening in the world consumers are you know using bitcoin to pay and they're using other things to pay local banks um different banking applications and and we see certainly this we see at xola when we look at our revenue all together we see that uh roughly um you know half of it is credit cards and then other half is more alternative payment so essentially you know those traditional platforms you've been missing out on a lot of the alternative payments what that means in numbers is you look at europe for example we calculated that the difference of coverage what you're missing out there if you just rely on the mobile platforms today i'm missing out on 20 of coverage russia you're missing out 60 percent of coverage um latin america you're missing 40 of coverage which is a huge emerging market and india that's a huge uh huge area

that's completely like um uh you know not covered in terms of alternative local payment methods by these traditional platforms so uh and and then there's south korea which is like 40 percent uh that is not covered by by uh you know traditional platforms where for example a company like us at xola we can actually cover increase the coverage which will increase your lifetime value actually uh your potential lifetime value so essentially you will have more people that can pay in your game and that's a huge deal and that's something that was a big revelation to me that wait a minute like you know i never asked a question as a product manager of a mobile game that you know my ltv now in for example in brazil is it artificially low could it be better and why it's not better than europe for example the reason really tends to be that you know people in emerging markets don't necessarily have

the same payment options credit cards and etc that we have here in the west they they use local payment methods they use bank installment payments with the local banks they use local e-wallets that you know might be completely unknown to most of us in the western world and same thing in south korea and russia so i think that the the conversation of just looking at the platform tax it's it's really just the tip of the iceberg here and and then um when we're looking at uh you know generally that market itself the emerging markets are the ones that are really not well covered by the mobile platform so there's a lot a lot of revenue growth that you can do in those regions if you choose another payment partner and that's the exciting news like about the world garden opening the publishers would have the choice to look at different payment providers um and do comparisons and decide what's best for their game what's best for their games and their whole portfolio and their

audience and and give them more options to pay in your game which is really the essential right um so that's that's the kind of business fundamentals now the second question i get is like hey well what can i do today uh when it comes to um you know selling uh outside of the mobile mobile platforms like what can i do um to get to that point what are what are the kind of situation in terms of um you know there's the apple epic lawsuit that's going on um obviously there's developments every day you know uh you look at some days there's december 9th apple appeal and etc it's it's it's fun to watch but you know you should look at it as a professional in this industry like you should not make any business decision based on on how our lawsuit actually ends up being and because none of us even if even if this world garden open up opens

up we don't really know what that actually exactly means um uh to to the small guy you know what are the regulations like do you still have to pay platforms something or not like how much et cetera so i would say it's still a wait and see you know so uh the best thing you can do is prepare um to do that and and one of the ways to do that is already if you already have a a you know a web or pc version or you're planning to do a web or pc version of your game you know now is a good time to do it because that'll get you acquainted in the world of you know dealing with merchants of records like excel and other payment providers that you know you can kind of exercise your exercise your approach to um you know set up your business and your in-app purchases with those other merchants of record and payment processors and see how how that works because it's a slightly different world there's bigger opportunity there

so it's a perfect time now to actually do a proof of concept um especially when it comes to what what what we call at least internally is like a web shop for mobile games so website for mobile games is really the simple way to think about it it's you're taking your mobile in-game store and you're just taking the in-game store and then you're putting it in a website and a website that can be read can be accessed by mobile browser or desktop browser so it's just the in-game in-game store in a web web shop format so essentially you are duplicating your in-game store and you're giving access to your players to go there so players that can you know who have created an account in your game you can they can log into this um you know web shop for a particular game mobile game and they will see the same virtual currency same virtual items and and even some cases what we're seeing our partners are doing

they're doing special offers like that are exclusive to the web person so you know they're actually adding more value they're treating it almost like a like a you know vip concierge service so they're giving some of their most valuable players um unique special offers special bundles really that give more value and are more exciting to the players while they sell the same content there um and and then the the the last question i think you know when you look at these different solutions what you can do today webshop we've seen some great results we've seen results with some of our partners you know increasing their revenue by 40 percent um you know calculating from the mobile version the growth of 40 is very significant and even in one particular case they one of our partners managed to you know uh managed to uh get their webshop to generate more revenue than their mobile version so

effectively they they almost migrated their whales to go and buy in uh in the web shop instead of in-game because they were seeing better value offers there was timed exclusive and etc that i think made made the web shop compelling for that for the kind of loyal super fans of the game um and and then you have to remember like whatever you sell in a web shop you work with xola for example you obviously you don't have to pay the platform tax you pay like a you pay a small commission um so you get like easily over 20 more profit per each transaction there as a publisher so it's a very lucrative business proposal for you plus then you can actually grow your business in different regions where you didn't have those payment coverage as i mentioned in the previous page and then you know the the follow-up follow-up question that comes often is what about mobile purchases like you

know when is that going to happen like you know and this is really to do with the fact that you know it's still a wait and see situation you know we we're looking at i think that the writings in the wall um and i would say get get ready for that like look at certain like for example we have an ios an android sdk that's ready to go technically it can be already used but obviously you know as a publisher you should be following closely what are the kind of guidelines that will come when things open up how do you need to implement it how do you need to follow the guidelines as a publisher you know our service is already you know ready there you can already plug in in-app purchases for ios and android for your games using xola's sdks or api and it works so get fun get your engineers to get familiarized on the on the developer documentation

um for example you know that's like look at the options out there um and i'm you know i'm very obvious that you shouldn't just look at one company you know take a look at the whole market like what are the payment providers out there um because they they are very different from each other some work more like a payment provider some more merchants of record like us um you know so you so you should you should look at the landscape you should look at the solutions technical solutions that are available um and that's something that you can certainly do and kind of mentally get ready and understand what that will take in terms of your your team to implement those sdks once things open up and and i think that's important to kind of like look into that look into the companies that can work in this space talk to them establish connections you know compare analyze and and find out what is the best solution for you um now talking about the webshop in particular how it actually works and and and what the flow for the for the

from the policy point of view is really so what you need to set up is you you essentially set up a web page that is a webshop you know we have for that we have like a site builder that allows easily for you to you know set up the in-app purchase in the back end and display them in a kind of web subway and you can obviously customize how you how you want to do that but you know this is something you can do yourself as well we see some of our partners you know they did it internally or hired an external agency to even build their webshop and they just use us there as a payment payment provider or merchant of record really and we also provide like a login kit that allows you to really tie in the user account because when they are making purchases on the web you need to make sure that they get entitled to the right user account so having like a facebook twitter social login authentication that can help easily tie the player id your player user account to to the webshop so that they can actually

see their inventory they they can buy more and they kind of see their player name it makes them feel like this is like the true external in-game store of your mobile game and the in-game purchases subscriptions obviously happen within the store we handle the payments on our on our side and the things that are bought getting transferred and entitled into the game server under the right user account now the big question is how do i get players in there so so in this case we see our partners do many things not just one they do they do a mix of many things so for example um we see that the most uh powerful ones are interstitial certainly so people even directly um you know target certain players in their game and they tell certain players about special bundles and offers that they have in the web shop

that they're really highly targeted targeting these high spenders or whales with with really unique bundles so they're going kind of surgical into targeting that seems to be extremely efficient because you know you're catering for a specific player or a specific small group of players and you're telling them that there are some you know time-timed exclusive uh bundles that that give them a big value offer and that very quickly goes viral so it's good good idea to pair that with you know game forums or your blog and kind of mention about your webshop and mention about some of the offers that come there that generate word of mouth within the within the player community of your game um of course you can do user acquisition as well i mean uh you know using influencers or using um paid user acquisition um which is of course cost money but you know we see that uh people are you know you don't have to install

anything and if you're an existing player um they're essentially you're guiding them to a place where they have better offers so so the roi is potentially quite good there we've seen some good results from from our partners on that um yeah so that's that's uh pretty much actually it because i'm i'm more than happy to take some questions now um and actually make sure to check out you know my email is m.luatio xl.com if you have any if you want to have a private conversation if you don't want to check it out excellent.pubs last web shop um that kind of gives you an idea as well pretty much what i talked about already how the webshop works um but yeah i'm happy to take questions right now um if that makes sense it does indeed it does indeed mika that was fantastic thank you very much indeed an absolutely a wonderful introduction to a really important topic because uh monetization is no longer the simple

uh you know model it used to be when i started back in the depths of ancient history we only had retail uh so before you before you could play a game you had to go and buy the game and if you hated the game as developers we didn't have to care it was glorious but of course those days aren't coming back and i think more and more developers are becoming savvy to the idea that the monetization lies at the heart of a successful long-term game and we've got some great questions coming in from the audience and um i'm just going to work my way through them i've got a few of my own but i want to make sure we get to the audience once first so first of all what advice do you have for an indie company getting involved in monetizing their game yeah for indie companies i think number one is uh you should first make that make sure your game works mobile first like um and i think you know the future is very much like cross-platform and really it's actually less about platforms and

more about screens that you can put you should build your game that it can't be played on every screen that's where it's still fun but um you need to peak your battle so really make sure that the game monetizes well on on on the platform alone like this is a monetization strategy that you know webshop for example um that works right now the webshop that i mentioned it works for games that are at a scale a good scale already so you know you got to make sure that your approach your game works mobile first and then you know start expanding into other types of monetization strategies now for the future if you're in india and you're looking at you know the world gardens opening up their kimonos um you know you you you might want to actually look into the different uh you know providers in the space uh like excel for example like make start mapping out like what are the options like if if um one day you are able to opt in in a program that you have to pay less

commission to the platforms and you can kind of have more liberty to choose your own payment provider um i think now is the time to start doing that homework just to see what's out there so that you understand and you know the space um when the liberties come because obviously if you're an indie indie developer and publisher if you're self-publishing in that case you obviously want to maximize all the profits for yourself and pay platforms as less you can i mean that's everybody that's you don't even need to make a poll that's what everybody wants so for a small indie company it can mean that you can you can stay bootstrapped longer and you can sustain paid user acquisition better cost of user acquisition has gone up a lot um for mid core core games and even casual games so you know this can be a leverage for you as an indie company especially when the mobile payments get enabled but that to happen the walled gardens truly need

to open their kimonos a very very good point um and it leads us really neatly on to one of the other questions from the audience which is at what stage in the game development process should we work with you to integrate the webshop yeah i think i think uh in in terms of the development process um when you get to a point where you are actually live and your game is live and it's it's released globally that you have enough data to see that which countries monetize how well so you can you can start making different hypotheses about maybe i could generate much more revenue in brazil like if i use for example webshop um i think the better way to approach is you need to have a certain amount of data to understand your players already so like i said earlier your game should be at scale which means like you globally launched and at that point you start really integrating um but you need to still create a hypothesis internally

like you yeah let's say look at the numbers of what xla can do for example you can do the math to see like if you have uh x x amount of million da u's in brazil what is their ltv there if it's lower than in the west and we offer more payment coverage you know that already could be a good good um proof of proof of case for you to kind of see how the performs so you i think you need to be at a global scale um that you your launch will launch globally and you kind of reached or you can see the plateau coming where user acquisition will kind of your growth will flatten that's when you can kind of really boost your revenue up um uh and that's for the website for direct mobile payments yeah do your homework now i think that's it you know there's no there's no alternative now you know you you have to be aware of this stuff or if you're not

you have to be able to find a partner who who is and who can work with you um so one question from our audience do you find subscription to be more popular than one of purchases and how do you know what will be right for your audience yeah it's a good question i think uh subscriptions are are you know gradually uh definitely making more more headlines on mobile gaming space especially i i think traditionally like online and mmos massive multiplayer online games um subscriptions work really well but i think there are some models where you know publishers that have you know certain franchises um large franchises that contain multiple games i think they have definitely you know under capitalized that opportunity so far i think there's much more much more space for innovation when it comes to game franchises and subscriptions so you know enabling game passes that have that

transcend um you know pretty much all games that have to do with one brand or franchise of a character that are you know and and you you as a fan of that franchise you should be able to subscribe to all of it um no matter the platform so you know i think that's something that i uh i see subscriptions can can you can innovate and publishers could innovate much more especially the publishers that own large franchises that are well recognized i i think for individual games subscriptions um may work pretty well especially if you your game is like season pass based so you have a lot of season passes and stuff like that that may work well of course mmos but i think there's still a lot of innovation to be done with subscription model for sure yeah yeah i i think it's only now that we've really got the opportunity for developers to innovate and kind of be creative with business that we're going to see that innovation coming through and we're very very nearly out

of time we have one last question and then unfortunately we're going to have to move on and of course it's a biggie um and it's about the world of blockchain so is zola looking towards blockchain payments as well as you know is it growing globally yeah i mean today we we already accept uh bitcoin payments in like if if you enable us as a merchant or record for your game but what we do is we you know take the bitcoin and translate it to dollar value at purchase so we don't like uh hold the uh hold the bitcoin so to say uh so so we accepted us and converted it to real money the one issue is like generally for the industry i wouldn't say easy but a challenge is really the the fact that um when you work with blockchain or with nfts or these kind of things um there's a lot of fraud and and uh money laundering happening in in in the world that that's kind of going in that space right now because it's just easier

so operators like us because we have like a highest level of compliance financially to handle handle uh transactions for even large public companies like roblox fortnite etc who we work with you know these are very big games and big companies and you know we are we obviously have um partnerships with financial uh you know credit cards banks and etc that that when they uh if you get into that space you are kind of like opening that whole door to all this you know fraud and potential money laundering and all of that so so yes we are looking into that but it's it's definitely not trivial because of that and there's still a lot of stigma attached to that especially in the financial world like yeah processing and transaction side it's easier to set them down i think and um you know we we are definitely like uh doing a lot of things i can't talk about right now but you know it's it's

an interesting space for certain man stay tuned you know understood understood well we'll get you back to the next pocket gamer connect event and hopefully we'll hear all about it live mika it has been an absolute pleasure thank you so much that was information dense uh but i think everybody who's been following along is going to get an awful lot out of that session again and we look forward to welcoming you back at some point in the near future thanks brian uh great host thank you very much