The importance of in-game chat with Ali Nhari from Agora

[Music] [Music] so i'm now joined by ali nutty head of sales from aguero how are you doing this morning i'm great you know so great to be here you know with all all the the up of game developers so it's been a while in a while so we've all been like expecting you know those events to come back so i'm very excited getting back into the swing of things well if folks aren't familiar with agora and what you guys do what's the what's the slug line what do you guys do so basically we enable uh creators developers but also like fortune uh big 40 like 500 companies to embed uh real-time interaction within their their apps in order to build new revenue streams or creating more retention stickiness etc

so that's what one of the main questions i always have when talking to people who deal in this kind of technology is lots of people have apps open in one window and they have discord in the background or skype or g chat or whatever it might be so people are quite attached to these third-party services that focus on this from your perspective what's the benefit of integrating this kind of tech into the apps themselves do you see a benefit for the folks who are creating these apps or for some people is it like an extra layer of complication they don't need yeah that's a great question so actually on the the answer i will say would be quite obvious especially on mobile so imagine how difficult it would be like to open like multiple apps i'm not even sure how that could be possible but at least you know it would be like very much uh resources consuming so like whether it's the battery cpu or memory uh that's not necessarily a great experience for for the players or users

right so having multiple apps open uh on going from a game to an app on mobile it's it's not like the best experience you can you can imagine right uh so already like building uh in-app uh on embedded uh form of interaction that that's the best experience that you can offer to the players in general uh from an end user front of you right from a publisher or developer point of view uh dialect much more uh advantages into it so whether it's uh retention or acquiring new users uh you can imagine not if you are playing a game on uh you want to invite friends or family that are not familiar with like platforms like discord it's much more easier for them to just jump into the game and open open an account and start playing the experience is much more seamless

we cite some statistics on your site which shows that users will spend up to an average or like 2.5 times longer per session if there is some kind of in-game chat or in-game video is that something that you've seen like proven across the board and if that's true is the solution to get people to stay in your game just add chat even where it's not needed just throw chat in there and people will stick around yeah so so basically it's all about engagement right the more interactive the experience is the more engaging you know the game how the experience is right so so obviously the decision time is will get longer than if just not interacting or playing without any sort of communication with others just imagine like the time that someone could spend on on a phone call or on whatsapp or on the video chat from on tick tock for example you know the station camera very very uh very long

so we definitely see a direct impact on the on the on the engagement of the session time you know directly from those uh type of features do you think there are any use cases where this kind of tech isn't really suitable because a lot of stuff that we do is still you know solo experiences there's no not necessarily any need to have like chat built into excel or something like that but in some ways with the introduction of cloud documents people do wind up weirdly communicating with these when everyone's in the edit at the same time we've all seen you know text appearing in google docs so people end up using this tech to communicate anyway but are there are there softwares or programs or even games that you think it's not suitable or do you think there is always an argument to use this kind of tech yeah i think that's a good question because you know when when we started going deeper into the gaming industry we we started to understand like the different like game jars on

use cases etc so of course you know the video on voice chat will be much more suitable for multiplayer games but actually not only because you can also uh think about like live streaming okay so what we do of our or the capabilities that are available to you within the live interaction type of experience are like either text messaging or voice chat video chat or live streaming right so if you think just about like uh text messaging it might be not suitable if you need like to be really like playing into the game or emails into the game so you can't in in the same time like text chat on homeplay it's quite a difficult experience it's it's actually much more easier just to voice chat so that's something that we have seen with gaming studios

but when the game actually is not multiplayer or single player we have we found out that there are like many games that are single player but they still have like some small chat rooms before the game where players can interact and give you know some tricks which each others or our challenges so that's like a way for those games to build some communities around the game so which actually could be like a good acquisition channel as well the other way to use live interaction or live streaming even within single player games is a live interactive or live or live stream so you can play a single player player game and use agora in order to live stream your your game into uh third-party platforms like youtube facebook twitch etc with a much higher uh video on voice quality

whatever device your end users are using whatever countries they they are from they will always experience a very high high level you know uh quality i feel like voice chat is far more prevalent on pc and console at the moment and whenever i see chat being used in games on mobile it tends to almost always be text is there a kind of barrier to comfortably using voice chat on your phone or because people don't tend to plug in headphones and things like that have you noticed that people don't really use that or are you seeing that actually taking off now are people starting to use voice cons when they're playing games yeah we are not only seeing like voice chat taking off but also video chat into mobile games a good example for that is monopoly uh from marmalade studio uh so they started you know using video chat into the money plan so any game you can think about being a social game or that you you used to play like physically is is the perfect you know fit on the best the best of the restaurants that

you can talk about so we have seen like good traction you know whether it's from casino game or poker game like poker face uh punch as well uh which have been a pioneer you know into video chat gaming type of experiences but uh i think it's much it's more on more uh uh speaker it becomes more and more normal right now in order to the pandemic and the fact that everyone had to fall back on voice chat and video chat in order to stay connected has had an impact on people's mindset for the games that you guys uh host or the games developers you guys work with did you notice a change in behavior yes actually uh pre-coded you know we we already had like some good traction from the gaming space but uh during the code it it made things much more i would say easier on normal you know to be using voice or video chat so a lot of

the gaming studios that were a bit hesitant before the curvy they were just like you know started to use more voice on voice shot and we have seen like usage exploding within the gaming space during the last two years until now so especially now going into i think we are going to go deeper into it but into the metaverse type of two stages on vr that would be like even even bigger so how do you take what you've gained in some ways or the the fact that everyone's become very tied and connected to voice and video chat over the last two years how do you make sure that they stay connected going forward into the future is is there a way of like holding on to these customers or do you feel like people will gradually drift back into pre-pandemic lifestyle habits there's always this question about like uh possibly don't break of it so i think that i don't think so because you know i

jumped like agora more than three years ago then i am in this space for more than five years now so we always had like a good traction from different type of verticals or the game gaming was actually one of our top verticals i think it's going to stay on where we are we are seeing uh uh we are seeing good indicators that shows us that this is going to stay uh yeah i mean it's just like it's just like too much advantages for for a game to just get rid of like voice or video chat once it's it's there you know you know it you can you can prove the benefit right away whether it's on the session time or the new the new money the new monetization channels that you are opening when you think about it you know there are like some uh revenue stream that are not available outside of those communication channels

that's voice filters for example so you can sell voice filters uh in voice chat experience like uh on players are willing to pay for it you can you can sell face beautification filters avatars uh different features like 3d positional audios etc uh on top of all other like monetization streams that you have but those like monetization uh uh features are only available within those specific channels right so which is at the end like more revenue for developers and more of newport studios [Music] [Music]