The Most Important Number in Unity’s D2C Launch Is Zero

So, let me actually push on that a little bit. So, are you saying that whether it's today or maybe in the near-term future that Unity can actually be more of a mediator in addition to not only implementing the web shop, but potentially allowing a game developer to integrate multiple D2C solutions and then having Unity be kind of be the mediator that that tracks all the analytics across those things and potentially switches between the D2C solutions depending on what a a developer specific uh preferences are. Is that there or coming?
That's even there today.
As of June 30th, Unity's IAP SDK now lets game developers basically sell directly to players. So, taking payments in game and through their own web shops instead of routing every purchase through the app store, so the Apple or Google app store. But, if if I can start with a little bit

of a pointed question, I I think when we look at the Unity business, most of its money is derived from ads. And your AI ad platform, Unity Vector, runs on data. So, I have to ask, is this product is this really a a payments product for developers or is it more of a data acquisition product for Unity's ad business that developers happen to benefit from?
I think that's a fair question to ask, but how I think about it and what really drove me to come to Unity in the first place is that the developer success and Unity success are joined at the hip. They're completely aligned. Unity wins when developers win, Unity suffers when developers suffer. And first and foremost, this feature is about helping developers keep more of the revenue that they're generating from selling these digital goods to their players. And we'll get to the margin and I don't think of it it is being about a margin play for developers. But certainly we believe there's a

revenue opportunity for developers. Now when it comes to the data and what that represents for the developers, yes Unity has vector and vector is fed from data from the apps. But I would just say even current state is when users make purchases in games, those purchases of you know, in-app purchases, that data flows into vector or whatever ads network that you're using and it optimizes to find the best players for your game. So really when you're talking about introducing direct-to-consumer flows, unless that substantially that same data it continues to flow into vector or your ads products, you'll actually be losing signal. So there's a risk that if you don't act and start bringing in those same signals, you'll actually suffer from a user acquisition perspective. So we want to make sure that as developers start selling more and more directly to their players, that there isn't they don't start suffering from a user acquisition perspective. Now going forward, of course we haven't launched this yet, but in the future as

we have more signals coming from web shops for example beyond just purchases, that has the potential to improve the user acquisition through vector. But again, [clears throat] what I would say is we're completely aligned with the developer because the whole point is to help them require better users who will monetize better on those web shops, etc. So long-winded way of saying that I fully buy into this principle that what we're doing is for the developer success, whether that's to help them keep more revenue or to acquire more users that will be payers.
Great. And just to be clear to our audience, I I think that sometimes when people hear sharing data or leveraging first-party data, they think bad. But to be honest and from my perspective, I I've always felt that this was kind of a missed opportunity for Unity to basically use more of its data to help improve like margins or performance uh especially on the ad side. So, what can a developer do now what versus what they couldn't do 2

weeks ago? Like, what's there now in terms of the product?
So, Unity developers can now, with relatively little development effort, sell their digital goods to their players directly through Unity's IAP SDK. And they can do that that experience can either be a streamlined web checkout flow from their app or it can be a standalone webshop, which Unity offers to host one and manage it for you. And both of these options are live as of June 30th. They're both free. The webshop is free. And developers only pay their payment provider. So, on June 30th, what we have supported is Stripe and Coda. So, you would create accounts with those the companies and pay them, not Unity. What Unity offers is free.
Okay. And maybe the other question I could ask is like, how did we get here? Now, obviously there have been a number of other vendors that have been kind of pushing in the D2C space and the the landscape has been changing over the last few years in terms of the legal and

regulatory environment. But like, in terms of Unity shipping this now, how did we get here with Unity versus the situation 2 years ago?
Evan, this is an interesting space and I've been following it from for years even before I even came to Unity just from being formally in the games industry. So, as you probably know, historically games were prevented from selling directly to their players. Apple and Google both had policies that prevented what they called steering. That would be steering users toward making purchases through um non-platform billing. And so, that was that's been going on for years. Largely, it was implemented by you know, social casinos and those sorts of games. And they would drive traffic to webshops outside of the games because they they weren't allowed to send users there from the game. And so what happened over the last couple of years were legal challenges to these policies. And so in the US you had the Epic challenges against Apple and Google. And in Europe and UK and other territories as well,

there these anti-competition claims brought against Apple and Google. And basically the net effect of those was to open up the policies of these stores to allow for more competition and more options for billing and selling digital goods to your users. So as of today finally you can it is legal by these by policies to be selling digital goods directly to your users on these platforms, though there are some nuances to that that you know we help to help developers to address and deal with.
Okay. And so maybe one of the nuances we could talk about is when a player does use the App Store's payment flow, it's pretty seamless, right? You kind of do a one-tap or couple-tap confirmation or Face ID and then it's done, but when you now use more of a web shop or web payment flow, the user experience gets a little bit more cumbersome. And so I'm wondering if you could talk to me about how have you guys thought about that

potential loss in conversion? Do you think it's a real concern? Is there a specific number that developers should have in mind that ensures that using this kind of D2C flow is more incremental in terms of margin and in revenue for them rather than potentially losing revenue?
I think you bring up a great point. That and I think all of us can can relate to that from a consumer's perspective. When you bring up a screen that asks for your credit card information, that can be a jarring experience and it can turn some people off and they could at that point decide not to purchase versus if it was a one-tap experience where they already had all their information, you can imagine that's much higher conversion rate. And I think this cause this brings up a couple of interesting points. One is that from a D2C implementation or strategy perspective, it's really naive to just take all of your user base that would have been directed to the platform purchasing and 100% [clears throat] direct them to one of these D2C flows which might be, you know, higher

friction. That's not really the strategy we're seeing emerge. So, the first point I would raise is that developers need to be thoughtful about whom they direct to these new flows. One of the strategies that we're seeing that's more and more commonly implemented is that you should be be directing players who show a pattern of already engaging with your game and buying digital goods before. They're already in this pattern, they see the value in your game, they're willing to spend money. They're the ones that are probably more likely to deal with a little bit more friction so long as there's a value proposition for them. So, like bonuses or bundles or things like that built into it. So, being very careful with your segmentation is really important. And I would say that the second piece that you touched on a bit is like the the extent to which it's a jarring experience could be related to friction or drop-offs in your funnel. But I my my belief is that over time, as D2C becomes more normalized, more common, ubiquitous in games, that a couple of things will happen. I I believe that patterns will emerge in the

user experience so that end users aren't so shocked when they see one of these screens come up. They'll be used to it. They'll trust it more. They won't be so turned off by it. And secondly, that the credit card information, there's that checkbox that says save my information for future purchases. I think those sorts of patterns will emerge so that the friction will reduce in these alternate purchase paths. So, where we are now isn't necessarily where I believe we'll be in a couple of years.
And just just so I fully understand and for our audience, admittedly, there is a little bit of friction in the D2C flow, but if I'm hearing you correctly, I think what you're saying is pretty smart, which is to say that if you already have a customer, a repeat purchaser, then they're most likely going to be okay with it and they want that additional value that they can get from going through the D2C flow. But if you're talking about a new player, you just want everything to be as seamless as possible. So maybe you don't target them. And in terms of the actual implementation because you know, a lot of people in the audience are operators

and actually game studios who are who are implementing this stuff. Does that optimization in terms of the targeting exist in the Unity product today or is that something that a developer should be managing?
That optimization doesn't exist within the product today. The And so the developer should be managing it. But this is one of the things that that one of the hallmarks and value propositions of the Unity IAP product is that it allows for both the platform purchasing and the direct-to-consumer purchasing to live side-by-side allowing for developers to intelligently route their users to one or the other. In the future, future roadmap items, certainly we want to make this stuff more automatic and more intelligent.
And maybe I could kind of go back to the previous question I asked you about potential loss in terms of conversion because I do think one thing that we're going to be thinking about is modeling this payment flow to try to understand what the potential incremental margin

and revenue could be. And so in terms of this cannibalization risk. And if you're like a monetization PM at a game studio, how do you think about this? Or how would you recommend that people model kind of like the potential risk of cannibalization?
Well, first of all, you need to have sort of your hypothesis. It's typical like product manager and data science. You need to have your hypothesis about which users will spend more and you need to experiment and measure a lot. So I think there's really no shortcutting that. Every game is going to be different and what what strategy or segmentation you use for one won't necessarily work for the other. So, for product managers in the audience, I would say that you you have need to have this infrastructure in place so that you can divert traffic to one or the other. And any intelligence that you can put, whether it's heuristics or machine learning predictions of the user's value in the D2C flow, any intelligence you can bake into this diversion of traffic is the better so long as the the signals are trustworthy. And then you need to

experiment and see is it actually working so before you bake that in and and push it out at scale.
Right. And maybe the one other nuance we could add here is to the point that you just made in the previous question that you might actually want to model against different segments, right? So, if you're if you're a new player and you want to just put up the D2C flow, what would be your hypothesis in terms of what that new player like first purchase conversion would be because maybe it might even make sense to do it then. And then also for your repeat purchaser, what would that conversion look like? So, you might want to actually add a little bit of of that nuance and and segmentation into the model as well.
That makes sense. I think to the extent you can use machine learning, for example, to understand whether a player is likely to become a VIP in the future, whether they look a lot like segments which perform well on D2C, the the sooner you can incorporate those into diversion tactics, the better, too.
Right. And maybe shifting gears a little bit. So, one potential question that that

that I I think some people will be thinking about in the back of their minds is that so for the past 2 years, Unity's kind of spent time rebuilding developer trust after the runtime fee episode. And now for developers who are like, "Okay, well, I'm going to be trusting Unity with a lot of my D2C, you know, data and information as well as the relationship." And so for the developers who would then rely on Unity for for their D2C relationship, what would prevent Unity from kind of changing the revenue share or terms of the relationship with customers moving forward? Is there anything structurally that that would help game developers trust Unity more this time?
So, first one I acknowledge that the runtime fee was a very hard lesson learned from Unity. This is before my time, but even joining now, this is very commonly talked about and is a lesson learned that Unity still takes very, very seriously. And what it led to is not just a reversal of the actual

policies, but led to more transparency and closer consultation with developers as Unity considers any changes to terms and pricing. So, these are good outcomes of what was a very hard lesson learned. When it comes to IAP, one thing to keep in mind is that this is a 10-year-old product already. Developers have adopted it in large numbers and are already using it to manage payments from for end users across different platforms. And it's it's a free product. The terms of service says that they it charges no fees and notice would be required before Unity even considered making any fees or changes. Nothing retroactive or silent about it. So, these this is a real structural constraint and not just an intention or a goodwill from Unity. So, I would just say that think about this not as something new that Unity is introducing, but something that's been around for 10 years and it's just an extension of what we've had before.
If a game studio were to use a Unity D2C solution, what is the actual vendor

switching risk there?
The lift of integrating Unity's IAP, we we've tried to reduce that as much as humanly possible.
Right. Right, but then I mean, are you actually locked in? Because I think that's might be one of the concerns that some developers have or is it as simple as just, "Hey, I'm just going to switch."?
I I would say ironically it's that's not one of the concerns that that developers have expressed. It's quite the opposite that when they've implemented very deeply a certain solution and then they want to try out another solution, there's some cost and it's actually difficult to switch. There's a lot of cost related to switching from one payment provider to another. Unity IAP, by abstracting the differences among and across all the different providers, actually makes the cost of switching much, much lower. So, this ends up being a key value proposition for our Unity IAP as opposed to something causes concern.
Right. And now I wanted to talk about the competitive landscape and why Unity, from a game developer's perspective, why should a game developer choose Unity over some of the other leading D2C

vendors? Like, most of our audience probably knows who some of the big bigger vendors are, but these are kind of more focused, established D2C specialists. They've been doing it for a little bit longer, but from a Unity perspective, at least in theory, there should be specific advantages that Unity could provide. And so, I wanted to hear from you directly as far as a game developer thinking about using Unity versus some of the other vendors, are there specific advantages that come from from the perspective that you guys are coming from, which is from the engine?
Yeah, it's interesting that you sort of position in your question as Unity competing with these providers, but actually I've spent the last 7 months since I've been at Unity trying to court these other payment providers to join in partnership with us. So, already we have Stripe, we have Coda already implemented and in the future in our road map we have Stash and others that we'll announce going forward. So, I actually don't think about it as Unity versus those, but

would rather have you implement, you know, develop Unity developers know how they implement D2C. You start with Unity IAP and as a secondary choice, you choose one or more payment providers.
Right. I guess I'm not speaking in terms of merchant of record or payments, but more some of the D2C specialists as far as web shops are concerned.
Yeah, even that I would say. We want to make that abstracted so that you the developer has freedom in the choice of which web shop they implement, but they still get gain some of the benefits from Unity's like engine native implementation of these things. So, for example, the data that they would get irrespective the purchases and transactions that happen whether they happen um some of them on the platform stores or some of them in your web shop, the developer should be able to go to the dashboard and see singular reporting that that on how much revenue they're making and from what sources, for example. Or when it comes to using that data to power their user acquisition. Regardless of the source of the purchase, it should be able to flow into Vector and to power their user

acquisition. So, we we want to be as compatible as possible actually and partner with as many of these net these payment providers, merchants of records, and their web shop solutions so that developers aren't restricted in their choice, but they still getting the benefits of the abstraction layer that Unity is providing.
Huh, I think that's interesting. So, let me actually push on that a little bit. So, are you saying that whether it's today or maybe in the near-term future that Unity can actually be more of a mediator in addition to not only implementing the web shop, but potentially allowing a game developer to integrate multiple D2C solutions and then having Unity be kind of be the mediator that that tracks all the analytics across those things and potentially switches between the D2C solutions depending on what a a developer's specific uh preferences are. Is that there or coming?
That's even there today. So, today we can implement both Stripe and Coda and

of course the platform stores all together at the same time in one game. And this is actually not too uncommon because these plat these payment providers have different reputations of being popular in different markets. So, it's not too uncommon that you would implement both say Stripe and Coda at the same time. And again,
But, payments or like I guess there's two levels, right? There there's the payments merchant of record and then there's also like the web shop solutions as well. Are you mediating just at the payments layer or also at the web shop layer?
Currently at the payments layer, but we also are thinking in the future about at the web shop because you might want to experiment with a different shop and different provider and that could be a unique value prop that Unity is going to offer that, you know, probably these other providers won't be offering.
Can you walk walk us through the integration process and why is this now and I think I've heard from somewhere that it's like hours and not days in order to implement the solution? So, to stand up a web shop, what does it take today if you can walk us through what

exactly is required and what's part of the process?
Sure thing. And yes, this one of the things I tried to to bring to the team is this sort of mission to obsessively and systematically reduce the level of effort for developers to make it D2C as much of a no-brainer as possible for them. So, to get running to get an a web shop up and running and sell your digital catalog directly to users, first you need to get the Unity IAP SDK into your game. So, some developers, like I mentioned, already have Unity IAP, perhaps an older version of it, and some don't. They're just using Apple and Google directly. Either way, we've built and published AI skills both in our engine and editor as well as in cloud to help you sort of scan, plan, and implement the changes to your code necessary to get on to the the version 5.4 of our IAP SDK that's ready for D2C. So, that's step one is SDK integration. The second step is to actually choose a payment one or more payment providers.

So, today, June 30th, we offer Stripe and Coda. We've announced that Stash is coming in the second half of this year and there may be more coming after that. And so you want to choose and set those up. In the case of using stripe to reduce friction even more for developers, we've integrated the stripe sandbox. So this is a feature where developers can actually fully implement and test the flows out with stripe before they have to go and fetch a company credit card and to create a fully functioning stripe account. Okay. Now you've got the SDK and you've got your payment providers. Next you need to get your catalog in there. Your catalog, your SKUs of in-app purchases. For many of our developers, they already have that set up cuz they're using IAP today. For those who don't, we've built a tool to import your Google or and/or Apple digital catalog into the Unity editor. So now you have your SKUs in there, the prices, descriptions, etc. And then the next would be to the you

mentioned web shop. So the web shop itself is code-free. Once everything's set up, Unity will publish and host it. It pulls your catalog automatically and it uses a styling and formatting that we've we've created ourselves. So that part is like extremely fast and magical feeling. So end-to-end, depending on what your current state is, we we say this is something that it can be done in a day and for some customers just hours.
So it sounds like what you said is that AI helps with the integration process. So potentially helping developers integrate the Unity solution extremely quickly. It also sounds like there are some AI features that help you automate or help design the web shop. Can you go a little bit more into like how you guys have integrated AI into your offering because you know, there was certainly a time and still today where AI has been kind of more of a staple on rather than a true kind of integral part of the of the product

offerings. I I just wanted push you a little bit more on exactly what the AI is doing.
Sure thing. So, when it comes to the web shop, one of the key value propositions is that like I said, within a very short amount of time, you can publish a web shop without writing a line of code that pulls your catalog in there and sells directly to users. It's somewhat of a magical experience. The downside being perhaps that the developer doesn't have might not have a lot of opportunity to customize the look and feel of that web shop. So, we wanted to give that we didn't want that to be a drag on adoption. It's a pretty natural and predictable need for developers to want to customize that look and feel. So, at that point, you ask yourself, what do we offer? Are we going to offer a lot of UI controls? We're going to try to, you know, rebuild um like some of the common patterns in website designing tools? Or should we use a more natural, forward-thinking pattern? This is one of the ways that we brought AI into the picture. So, you you can do things like supply images for inspiration or use text prompts, and you can customize the

look and feel of your shop. An example would be that, you know, Halloween is coming up and you want your store to look spooky. So, you can really instead of having to use a lot of controls to operate that, a single prompt will do it almost immediately. So, it's really more of just about us adopting common patterns. Like most folks, if they go to build websites today, the the tools they use are going to have AI built into it. We just decided to to start there rather than have that be a bolt-on. I think over time, by virtue of Unity, this is road map item, by virtue of Unity hosting and managing the experience, any intelligence we can bring into the layout or the presentation of the catalog or recommendations or bonuses, all that stuff AI can factor into, and, you know, we can optimize for for the developers' success.
Okay. And maybe the one other aspect of D2C that might be top of mind for developers is just compliance, right? Because it's a little bit of a complicated space and there's a

lot to know and understand. And in terms of the legal regulatory compliance stuff, what you can and can't do with a D2C flow, external purchases, things of that nature. And so, what is there from a Unity solutions perspective that helps developers be in compliance with all of the kind of complicated rules that are out there?
Yeah, complicated is right. Ultimately, it's going to be up to the developer because they're the ones that have the relationships with say Google or Apple and they have these obligations. Our job at Unity is to make meeting those obligations as easy as possible, to abstract them wherever we can, to automate them wherever we can. So, what we provide is the tooling to make that compliance easier. We handle things like enrollment checks and token fetching and ways to handle the disclosures for US and European users when you link out, you have to show the URL that the user's going to be directed to, for example. We try to automate and make that as simple for developers to integrate and comply as possible. So, that's really the role

that Unity is taking on there.
We talked at the beginning of our conversation about the potential of leveraging, whether it's D2C data or, you know, runtime data or other data that you have access to coming from the engine side. And so, I wanted to ask you, if you were to like let's take a specific example of a mid-core game that does about $3 to $5 in ARPU and they're running UA through Unity Ads. If you could talk about what specifically changes in terms of the ad algorithms targeting and bidding when you feed it real D2C purchase data versus just like the IAP data and have you actually tested this? Are there customers who are actually seeing lift from this kind of integration and using the Unity D2C product?
Yeah, good question. First, I'll just mention we haven't yet tested it. So, this is not something live, it's something that's future roadmap. But,

obviously something that's very, very important to us, as you could guess. So, there's this the first step is actually making sure we have parity. I mentioned earlier on that as purchases move from happening on platform in app to outside of the app, there's this risk that of loss of signal. So, we want to make sure um that it's easy to bring in that data, the purchases that happen off platform, into Vector. Want to make sure that happens. And And if you do that successfully, really it's about There's really no net difference if you're sending the exact same signals into Vector. But, longer term, what we are really hoping for is this sort of tighter loop flywheel between what is happening in the shops and what you're doing with user acquisition and monetization. So, you can imagine Earlier, we touched on a strategy whereby you divert your VIP users, users with the highest ARPPU, who made purchases before, you divert them to your web shop. And there in the web shop, you're looking You get more signal than you would have from the platforms. From the platforms, you basically just get a receipt. If a

purchase happened, you're told that the purchase happened and here's the SKU. But, there's a lot more going on in the user's purchase journey. When they're on your website, what items they're looking at, what have they added to their cart, maybe they removed items from their cart, or they bought things in bundles. There's a lot more signal there that you don't get when the platforms own that relationship with the player. And it's that the cumulative signal you get there from your VIP users that if you feed into Vector, the goal would be that Vector then learns who are these users, learns more about users who are more likely to become VIP purchasers on your web shop, and it helps you acquire more of those. In the even longer run, so that's user acquisition and for your web shop. In the long run, we believe these insights that Vector has on users and the and what they like, what sort of items they like to buy in your game and their their their behaviors in your game can actually inform the presentation of the catalog. If you have a ton of SKUs, what you show in that first screen and what orders, what bonuses you offer or

discounts, all of that is right for personalization and we believe that by bringing Vector closer to the actual game in the runtime, it can play a much bigger role in monetization, not just in user acquisition.
Okay. And for some of the audience who might be concerned, although I I think they shouldn't be and we could talk about that, who owns this purchase data and can developers, if they don't want to, can they opt out of this or is that the price of mission for using the DDC product?
Developers own the data. This is part of the the last year we launched the developer data framework, the DDF. And now with the new version of 5.4 of Unity's IAP SDK, we've brought even the IAP feature under DDF, which means that the data that's produced by virtue of integrating the IAP SDK is the developer's data. The developer can choose whether or not to share that data with Unity for the purposes we listed before. And so many developers like we highlighted before, it's pretty

commonplace to send your in-app purchases to your ad network to optimize your user acquisition. But when it comes to DTC, the developers will have those same choices.
And and by the way, just for audience as well, like I'm actually a bigger fan of you guys leveraging the data as much as possible because some of us do have fairly deep concerns about the ecosystem. So we're really kind of rooting for you guys to like, at least I am, to leverage more of whether it's purchase data or runtime data or whatever to make sure that there's a more viable ecosystem and especially having Unity Ads become more performant. So that was like my last big question. And then if you have time, I'd love to ask you a little bit more about you and your background, but just a couple of really quick questions first. So, I was hoping you could just like name one thing a developer has tried in D2C that you've watched kind of like potentially not go

as planned or or blow up in their face.
I think it comes down to having the right expectations leading to the right strategy. So, if there's too much focus on just the margin, and there's a lot of focus on the margin, the margin benefit of like DTC versus the platforms. If you think about it that way, and if your implementation follows, meaning you just divert all your users from the app stores to DTC, then I think this is not a recipe for success. What you'll find is that your conversion rates will fall, and it the juice won't be worth the squeeze. So, your DTC strategy needs to be really thoughtful about what flows you present to which users in which regions in order to to regions in order to maximize your revenue. So, I would say the biggest mistake is a one-size-fits-all wholesale migration that's not thoughtfully executed.
And then second question, like what's the most common myth or misconception that developers have about D2C?
I would a couple of things that relates

to this belief that it's all around the margin again. For for customers who are reading the headlines and seeing announcements and seeing that it's very complex. Different regions offer different margins, the margins seem to be shrinking, and if they think margin equals opportunity, then they're really missing the big picture. The bigger opportunity here, above and beyond margin, is this direct relationship with your players that's missing today when you hand over the purchase flow to the platforms, and also this opportunity to really customize the payment flow, the catalog, and all of that to not just not increase conversion rate, but overall customer revenue from this more curated, personalized purchasing experience that you can offer them. So, a lot of it comes down to this myth of it being all about the margin, and it's not, or at least it's not primarily.
How do you forecast the D2C market? Where Where do you think it goes, and what would Unity's role be 2 years from now?

Well, today there's this sort of a threshold question whether or not you should have a D2C strategy and what that should be. In 2 years, my sincere hope is that it's no longer a question of if you have one, but simply a matter of how. And on the how, my hope is over the next the course of the next couple years that direct-to-consumer is so commonplace that developers have a pattern of sharing their successes and what works for them, that more of these winning patterns will emerge and be adopted to the point that in 2 years, there will be solutions built around them right out of the box, automated, that bring down the friction and increase the revenues that the developers can generate and keep for themselves. And of course, I hope that Unity IAP can be an instrument that brings that change about by virtue of like standardizing things, and by virtue of the massive adoption that Unity already has, and this is like our engine-native solution that we bring to our customers.
Right. And I think from my perspective, I think the thing that I will probably

be watching for over the next couple of years is if you could actually realize the vision that you talked about before, if Unity can actually become more of a mediation layer across different solutions. I think that would be extremely interesting, but certainly an interesting opportunity for you guys. So, okay. Thank you very much for all for all the insights and and for speaking very candidly about the Unity D2C solution. So, I want to now talk about you more specifically, Steve, and I think like when I look at your background, you've got a pretty interesting background. Like you worked at Google Analytics, then you co-founded a game studio, and so you were, you know, kind of you've got like this analytics background, but you also have a maker's background as well. And now in your new role, it's you're kind of leveraging a lot of your background, it's it seems, selling kind of like this Unity DDC product. And so, I wanted to ask you about your your path in terms of your career and the trajectory to today.

Did that path feel intentional? And it it'd be great to just hear a little bit more about your your your background coming to your current role at Unity.
Yeah, where to begin? So, yeah, my first love was video games. I started programming when I was 8 years old and always just wanted to be a game developer. So, spent 19 years in game industry. Worked at Electronic Arts, Activision, on the Tony Hawk games, and then founded my own game studio. It was during the 11-year period of running my game studio that the that the mobile game industry really took off and that free-to-play was established as the way forward. Making that transition as a studio was a pivotal experience in my in my career. Going from launching a game and having it be, you know, $50, and that was what you just had to do was convince players to customers to buy that game and that was how you monetized it. Switching from that to being free-to-play and having to convince users to part with their money

was extremely hard and a lot of game studios didn't make that transition. And we, of course, had a like a lot of others, some hits and some misses, and it was a it was a hard time and it was a challenging time. And ultimately, it was one of the reasons why I decided that I was going to exit the game industry, but that lesson and those challenges always stuck with me. So, I did exit the game industry at the time, went to Google, did something completely different, or so I I which was focus on data and marketing for 10 years." And a lot of that was was based on this hypothesis that the the develop the data that developers are collecting can actually be super powerful, not just for insights for their business, but for improving their marketing ROI. So, when this opportunity came up at Unity, it really was the marriage of my two careers. Bringing together both my game developer past and also my data and marketing instincts. But in a way, like I could resonate with the customer, the target customer so deeply. Like IAP, the product, is that

was me. I wish this was around back in the 2012 days when we had our popular free-to-play titles. So, it connects with me in a very like emotional level, this connection to the developers and our
Okay. And for me personally, some of the most valuable conversations I've had with fellow game developers has been really about mistakes made rather than, you know, cuz like success hides a lot of things, right? And so, I'm wondering if you could if you could talk about over the course of your career, maybe the an honest failure. So, maybe like the biggest call that you've made that you got wrong. And if you can talk about that. And, you know, again, I I feel like these are the kinds of conversations that are from from me personally the the most valuable.
I think that the one of the biggest lessons I learned that we got it wrong was our first mobile game that was called Order Up to Go. It was a cooking game that we brought from the Wii to mobile. And Chillingo was our publisher. It was a hit. So, our first mobile game

gave us the experience our first experience publishing a mobile game was that this was easy or repeatable, I guess is what I would say. And rather than, uh, you know, we didn't know any better, recognizing that this was harder to hard to do and very special, we ought to have in in retrospect invested a lot more into building more content and expanding that game, making it practically infinitely expandable because we had this great engaged audience that wanted more. But instead, what we did, because we believe that we had sort of figured out a formula, is that we branched out and made lots of other titles in different styles, thinking that it was really just a not a formula so much, but that it was easier said than done or that it was we could recapture that success. And we spent probably two, three more years trying to chase that with other titles and not having invested enough back into the original title. So, if I can go back in time, really, it would be to double down or triple down even on that game.
Okay.

And I guess my next question is like if you could forget Unity for a second, we're living in a very tumultuous time, right? A lot of changes happening in in the industry and in the world overall. So, I'm wondering what what is getting you excited these days? Like whether it's in games or payments or just tech generally, what are you excited about?
Like a lot of folks my age, my contemporaries, I have a kid. And my daughter is a teenager and really what one of the things we like to do is play games together. And I wanted to not force her down the road of computer science at all, but to like actually make games together as an experience has always been a dream of mine. AI getting to the point now where you can generate fun games from prompts and succession of prompts is really, really exciting for me. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't I don't see the path to it being able to generate the high high-quality AAA type of games, but for simple puzzle games, certainly at least, that my daughter and I have ideas about,

it's been really fun to make those things together, really bonding experience. And it starts to make you think like, "Hey, this is fun. Maybe I should publish it. Maybe there's a business to be made here." So, as somebody who exited the games industry as a developer over 10 years ago, But, does start to make those creative juices flow again when I see what might be possible.
Yeah, that's that's interesting. And hopefully you're you're doing that in Unity. I I know there's a number of vendors out there that are trying to work on AI solutions specifically for Unity. And you you guys also have your own product as well.
Absolutely.
Okay, last last question. So, what's something about you that would be surprising or that other people generally don't know that might catch people off guard if they were to ask you about it at a conference?
Okay, well, one of my proudest career achievements was with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. I single-handedly put that online. I made the first ever PlayStation 2 online game back before there was a network adapter for PlayStation 2. We made all sorts of

deals with aftermarket vendors like D-Link and Linksys and all these other devices in order to to make it possible to play that game online. Super proud of it. But, what actually led to that was just prior to going to Activision Neversoft work on that. I was at Electronic Arts. And there was a policy put in place. It was like no one or very few people could have internet access. And there was like one internet computer in the center of of the office. And they outlawed a chat program. Back then we used ICQ for all you old-school people who know ICQ. And even though we had like a LAN-only version, it was not allowed. And we're like, "What is this? We can't chat with each other." So, that was my impetus for learning network programming. As an act of sort of civil disobedience, I implemented a chat program that I could use to chat with other people in the office. And that experience that I gained there actually helped me get that job at Neversoft to be the online programmer, which led to one of my proudest career achievements. So, that would be it.
Great. All right. Well, Steve, thank you so

much. And maybe the just the very last thing, which is for people who are interested in you personally, is there a way for people to follow you or to potentially get in into contact with you?
Yeah, follow me and find me on LinkedIn. Uh Happy to be chat with people and learn from you all and share my experience.
Okay, I'll add your LinkedIn profile to the show notes. But Steve, I want to thank you for this conversation today and for all all of the responses to to the questions. I know that a lot of people are definitely interested in what's coming from Unity. And for audience, we'll catch you next time. Thank you very much, Steve.
Thank you, JK. Stay safe.
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