The importance of webshops in the mobile market | David Stelzer from Xsolla

[Music] we are now joined by David stza from exola how are you doing doing great fantastic we have spoken to exola in the past um I won't make you do the full recount but just the the one sentence slug line what are you folks all about we are all about empowering developers to have that direct relationship with their game player and consumer and to be able to keep more of their money excellent now I was reading you guys did a state of play last year the first of your kind I think another one is due to come maybe in March sometime um but one of the things I took away from it was that we all acknowledge that 2023 bit of a difficult year for the industry and uh 2024 was all about hopefully bouncing back and being a bit more optimistic now we're actually one foot into that year are we still feeling that way how optimistic are we yeah very much so uh I think we saw at the end of 23 uh privacy restrictions uh idfa from Apple things

that were making it really difficult for game makers to actually be able to do proper UA have a communication with the with the G the games players that they had uh and really making it hard to blow a game up so exol's got a product that kind of leans into that a bit and then as we get into 24 you got recent rulings from Google you got recent ruling with apple and that's going to allow more of the uh the Commerce to be able to happen off of the Apple Store stores and the Google stores so that there's a direct to Consumer relationship and this is what we call Web shop you're going to do a talk about that later aren't you yeah talk at 3:30 about the importance of web shops and web shop allows you to have this relationship with the with the game player where you're able to sell them items directly through the web shop you're able to interact with them you're able to share the the data points with them and get to know who these players are and the players then have a better closer relationship with the game as well and as a result sold you're not

paying the 30% that you would pay to Apple or Google by doing this I know that like when the app stores initially kicked off there were lots of people who did their own independent ones Samsung had their own one they were quite bullish on it um and there's a lot of independent Android markets is it tricky to be able to compete with something as large as the App Store and survive outside of that ecosystem do you think so you're really you're not surviving outside of it and you're not really competing with them your game still lives on the App Store you're still promoting your game through the App Store but what you're hoping to do is bring some of that Commerce off of the App Store so that you can have the relationship with their customer there's going to be things that organically happen still through the App Store quick inexpensive transactions but as developers want to give you know better offerings to their customers uh give them the ability to have larger packs of gems or things that they they might not be able to get through the the app stores they're going to be able to know that they can get these things on the company's web page store and from there

they'll start to develop a place and a bit of muscle memory as being able to go back to the web store and knowing that these offerings exist and they can get the best of the items that they want uh that but if they want a quick fix they can still go and do that from the traditional stores there's likely to be a a dip in VC investment this year we're anticipating fewer games being made over the course of the year how does that affect the way that you folks would do business if there's fewer games being created potentially fewer clients is it about retaining the exist and making the most out of them or I think like with any business where you have if if growth actually slows in terms of new companies coming to market then you look to work more deeply with the companies that are already in market so how can we take those companies that are in Market give them more of the exol a product to work with than what they may be working with now show them ways to expand the reach of what they're using within those products so that they can make more money uh and and it's actually good for them at some point it's it's a little harder for us because it becomes uh as

you said a smaller Market but for the people who are making games it's a little less competition so if we can show them how to leverage what they have and then work within that smaller pool of competition they can actually do really well in return as a payment processor as a web shop owner for them being their merchant of record will earn well as well but you know our philosophy is that we want to empower these game developers to have the best tools and be able to make the best games uh and will all benefit as a result of that what about UA all the focus is often put on acquisition and then maybe the churn but what about keeping existing users engaged or re-engaging users that maybe have dropped off a bit that's a different CH of challenge how do you tackle that and again uh and I I'm going to keep Haring on this but you know on the traditional storefronts uh where that data doesn't come back to you it's really hard because you're putting money into UA but you're not getting the information back that you're used to

and so it becomes more like advertising on traditional media like television or radio you're you're advertising to a demographic as opposed to a key group of players uh and again by having these web shops and starting to have this relationship and building off the store you can not just promote the one game but you can promote multiple games you can have a network effect and then you get all the data from those transactions so the more that you put towards what's going into these web shops and the more that you can engage the player there the more you're going to know about them the more effective money spends you're going to have uh the higher ltvs that you're going to see as a result of that plus for every dollar that they're spending it's a dollar that you're keeping as opposed to having to give that 30% back to the stores gotcha we talked about AI a lot last year and it was in the the generative stuff was just hitting the mainstream now it's out there and there's been I guess a little bit of Suspicion about it and the threats of people losing their jobs to it some of that started to materialize a little bit

with what Google is doing um now you folks have always used or been using ml for a long time which is a form of AI but not the generative kind um a are you worried about anyone turning around and pointing a finger and go you use you use all the a you're one of the bad ones or are there new things coming from the generative side that can actually be employed in addition I think the types of AI that um are good for our industry and are helpful uh that don't run into the issues like generative AI people get concerned about the legalities around it copyright trademark all these things as we look at the helper type of things um that's where I think that the machine learning AI piece is actually decent uh things that can help developers make better decisions in their processes uh as they're talking to their consumers what kinds of uh data are they getting back how can that data be analyzed to make better choices within that that's more of the machine learning side rather than they're not they're not using it to generate uh the ads or to generate

pieces of game or anything like that that feel a bit contrived and do people get a little bit suspicious of the black box of it all certainly with ML it's doing an awful lot of calculations behind the scenes and then it spits out some information and you kind of have to to some degree go with it trust trust the process when you deal with your clients and customers what's the thing that they ask for most in terms of transparency or is it more data point I think we trying to be as transparent as possible with these processes um the customers want to know what it is that we're giving them they want to know how we're we're getting to our results and transparency I think is really important for that make sense and what about you're doing the talk later on shows like this or coming to these kind of compasses in general what's the benefit for for you folks is it about meeting the competition meeting the clients what's what's the area uh it's a it's exposure um making sure that everybody knows the exola brand obviously the exola solutions and products that go with it and then

keeping people informed about what is newest within the industry so web shops today is the talk uh it's going to be the area that we think has the most growth for this year uh it's going to be the thing that brings in more revenue for customers who are having trying times coming out from last year uh and as we get towards GDC we'll have more to announce with more products but that's kind of where we're headed this year is to bring more and more products to Market that will help developers retain more of their money have better relationship customers and help developers to put out great games well I look forward to seeing how that shakes up David thank you talk thank you [Music]