Web Shops: From 10% to 50% Revenue – The Playbook Top Games Don't Want You to Know

Hello everyone. Over the past few years, the growth of web shop adoption has been pretty phenomenal. Anecdotally, we've heard of some games that have even over half of their revenue now coming from web shops, which has a significant impact to profitability and the ability to more effectively compete using margin as a weapon. So, today I've got Archie Stonehill, head of strategy from Stash, who recently published a comprehensive guide on how to grow your game with a web shop. We also have breaking news very recently in terms of the Epic versus Apple court ruling. We'll dive into that. We'll break it all down, the good, the bad, and what most studios are missing. Welcome, Archie. Hey, great to be here. I'm very exc I love your content, so I'm very excited to be on. Great. So let's start by diving right in talking a lot about some of the changes happening in the market today. Uh we have seen this massive

adoption happening over the past couple of years. We also had the Epic versus Apple court ruling. So I wanted to ask first about the recent guide that you guys published how to grow your web shop. What's changed in the last couple of years that made this kind of publication more urgent? And then if you can, it'd be great to get your sort of take on the court ruling that just happened recently. Absolutely. Yes. Uh so as you mentioned, I'd say web shops and direct to consumer has been probably the major trend of games over the last 18 months. Um and what really kicked it off. Uh I would say there's two things. The first is um there have been major changes in app store policies uh and governmental regulation uh that have heavily favored uh developers being able to do direct to consumer things. Um and then the second major thing is just some trailblazers like the likes of Scopley and a few others play that really led the way in establishing what direct to

consumer can do. Um, and really I think you can trace the origin of this boom in web shops to 2021. Um, the first consequence of Epic's uh lawsuit against Apple uh was that uh Apple changed their policies to allow developers to communicate with players about alternative purchase methods outside of the app. Um, so Epic launched a clearly non-compliant alternative payment rail embedded in the app. um in 2020 they were kicked off the app store they sued in response and the first concession that Apple made in that trial was previously if you acquired those users via the app store i.e. If you got that email in the app store or you got their social information in the app through apps distributed through the app store, you weren't allowed to tell them about alternative purchase methods even outside of the app. So even via email if you'd acquired them that way on user data obtained in the app. that was changed in 2021 and it's a bit

overlooked I think in the narrative but it was a pretty major change that really unlocked a lot more possibilities because then so long as you got the players info from within the app we talk about this in the ebook then you could start communicating with them um and you know until very recently uh you were extremely limited on what you could do in app um so in the ebook I think we talk about kind of two main ways of getting users into your web store the first is compliantly um directing them to a web page or to out a direct to consumer channel. Um so you know the policies that have stood are called anti- steering policies and they prohibit developers from steering users to alternative purchase methods within the app. Uh and then the second major bucket of tactics is how do you get communication information within the app that you can uh use to communicate more freely about the web shops like emails, like following on socials, like Discord. Um and so, you know, being

allowed to kind of obtain that info within the app and then message them was a huge unlock. Um so that was the first thing that really kicked it off. And um right now the biggest development that happened in the last 2 weeks is that those anti- steering policies um have been ruled to be basically illegal in the United States. Um and in response, Apple has been forced to update its policies to remove all restrictions on how you can communicate with players inside the app about alternative purchase methods. Um it's even had to remove restrictions on linking out. It's had to remove a fee that it wanted to take on linkouts. So it's a really big development this collapse of antisteria right now. So if you think about the the guilt the delta between when you publish the ebook and with the sort of Epic versus Apple court ruling. So it you're saying it's mainly in how consumers or players are directed to web shops, how you can message them. That's like that would be the main difference. And you

also said the court ruling in the United States. Does that mean that policies would need to be different based upon a geographical basis? It'd be great to hear a little bit more about that. Yes. So, uh, let's tackle the geographic question first. Um, right now the scope of that ruling is is very limited. It's just iOS in the United States. Um, and I think we could pause for a minute and talk about what the outlook looks by platform and geography. You can kind of imagine a grid, right? Android, iOS, and then different geographies. So there's um kind of three buckets of countries I would say. The first is the United States. Um this is a country where all of the movement here is really happening in the court system uh through a combination of civil trials like Apple versus um Epic or Epic versus Google. Um and indeed actually from the federal government who launched an antitrust case against Apple last year. Um and you know major news they they won an antitrust case against Google about their search product. that doesn't

necessarily address the app store, but it just demonstrates the kind of change we've seen in regulatory and and judicial outlooks on on um digital markets. So, um in the United States, you have movement happening in the judiciary. In Europe and the UK, the second bucket of countries, and there's a couple others like South Korea, Japan, etc., you have new legislation being passed that um regulates these digital markets for the first time in a serious way. In the UK, that legislation is called the digital markets act. Sorry. In Europe it's called the digital markets act. In the UK it's called the digital markets consumers and competition act. Um and those acts were passed. DMA was passed in 2022. It came into effect in 2024. In the UK that act was passed last year and it comes into effect you know end of this year. So um all of that is very much ongoing and you're seeing a negotiation between Apple and um and the EU. They were fined three weeks ago which is already big news and it was totally overshadowed by the Epic case. Um, so I anticipate you

will see a lot more movement in Europe that will almost certainly catch it up to where the app store policy stands in the United States and very likely exceed it. When Europe goes and then the UK, then you have like the third bucket of country which are, you know, everyone else. So um, you know, right now Apple has different policies by by geography. Um, we'll see if that continues. I think for the very near term it will um because the you know different rulings will have different levels of certainty and appeals and stuff like that. So, it's a complicated landscape for a developer to navigate, right? And I think before we move forward too much, I wanted to like stop and talk about the business case because I I think that some people in the mobile games industry understand that this is important DTOC overall, but also web shops can have a massive impact on a game's profitability. So I wanted to just basically underscore the importance of this

concept to some of the people in the audience who may not fully grasp what kind of impact this has and why it's so important. Why so many people especially in the last 10 days or so since since the court ruling are now talking so much about web shops. And so can you just break down the economic case for a typical studio that goes from say no web shop to implementing let's say a good web shop. How do the numbers specifically break down to profitability? What can somebody that's operating game that then implements a web shop what can they expect to see from a profitability perspective? Yeah, the first thing I always say when I talk about this is that Apple and Google take a lot more money from developers than developers typically think. I always ask a developer, if you're a developer and you make $10 million, right? You have $10 million coming into your bank account from Apple and Google. How much do you think Apple and Google are making? And almost everyone when they

don't think about it for very long says, you know, 3 million, right? Because they take 30% and I make 10 million. But the thing to know is that actually it's more than that because your 10 million is not the 100% number. It's not the gross spend number. It's the net spend number. So the ratio of what you earn to Apple and Google is not 10 to three. It's 7 to four more or less 7 to you know and four and a bit. Um uh and so like there's a lot of money on the table. you know, in fact, what players are spending, if you're getting 10 million, players are spending 14 point something million. Um, and so that's a very significant amount of money. Uh, so they take 30% on gross. If you now switch to a direct consumer channel, your fees will vary, but it's typically 5 to 10% instead of 30%. Uh, and what that means is that let's take the case of like a game which is spending which is making um, you know, 100 million, let's say. Um, if then your web shop provider is taking 10%, which

is the highest it normally would be, um, then instead of making 70 million, you're making 90 million. That's a really substantial increase, right? It's a more than a 20% increase. So, typically developers are making 25% plus more revenue through direct channels than out of app channels. Um, and uh, if you build a fairly good web shop, you can expect to shift anywhere from 20% is like a okay web shop. depends on your genre, but 20% is okay. So, you know, if you take like the kind of like if you think about how much that's capturing you capturing for you, it's like, you know, 25% plus of 20% of your revenue. And I I think you can get to far higher DTOC numbers. So, um I really think like this is going to become a necessity if you want to remain competitive as a mobile game because if your if your competitor is you know getting let's say 10 to 15% more revenue on average for players they will be able to very easily

out bid you on CPIs and so um I think that uh like this is right now a kind of like mustave already but I really think in the future this will become an area of major competition and that actually if you were more successful at getting players into your direct to consumer channel that has all sorts of downstream implications on your ability to fund more aggressive UA because your LTVs are increasing by 10 15% on the same exact user spend right and I want to dig in more into like the benefits of web shop besides margin but before we dive into that I wanted to also set the stage for our audience and just understanding the landscape of the bigger movement around DTOC and D TOC and webshops are kind of those terms are used a little bit interchangeably but maybe you could help set the stage for the audience. Webshop is the primary pillar underneath DTOC but could you also characterize some of the other kind of initiatives other

kinds of pillars underneath the the DTOC sort of umbrella? Yes. Um, so the way I would think about it is you have distribution channels, which are basically ways that you get products to players or ways that you interact with players. And those distribution channels can be, you know, a variety of things. It could be a web shop, which is kind of like e-commerce. Um, but it could also be sideloaded app distribution. Um, or it could be web playable versions of your game that players are acting accessing directly or it could be a desktop distribution that's direct. It's really about are you intermediated by a platform and who is your customer at the end of the day? Like developers might not think about it this way, but really if you're a developer, a mobile developer, you have two customers, Apple and Google. And then they sell your goods on behalf of you to play. Um, but when when players, you know, try and do refunds, they ask Apple and Google. When they look at their receipts, they ask Apple and Google. And that comes with a

bunch of nice things for developers because Apple and Google take care of a lot of the annoying operational work and taxes and compliance and stuff like that, but they charge a lot for it. Um, so really I think about DDC is any way you're directly distributing to to players. Um, and I think maybe this is a good time to think talk about like okay well what are the ways in which Apple and Google actually restrict you or any intermediate channel. And I I would say there's kind of four main ways that they restrict you or four main things they tell you you can't do. So the first is you have to use their payment methods on if for apps distributed outside of through their app stores. I think that is the least likely to change. I think for going forward if you download an app through the app store you're almost certainly always going to have to use Apple's payment methods. The second way they restrict you is directing players to alternative payment methods or channels. Anti- steering. That's the most vulnerable. Um and uh I think we're already seeing it collapse. The third way they restrict you is um they mandate your distribution in certain ways. So um

Apple until now has never allowed uh direct download or alternative app stores. Um actually in Europe now they have been forced to allow this. So in Europe you can download Fortnite directly or you know Apptoid or some of these um app stores. Um, and uh, you know, there developers can either go through an alternative app store or they can sideloadad, which is a direct download from your website, a bit like you would with any any kind of app on your computer. Um, so that's the third major way they restrict you is how you distribute your game. And then the fourth way is they actually place pretty pretty strong restrictions on content and and what you can actually do with your app. And um, a lot of this developers like don't really think about because it's almost so obvious. Um, but a game like Roblox, for example, could never have scaled on mobile because it's clearly non-compliant. Uh, it's what app stores call a store within a store. Um, which is that you can't launch a competitive app store within your store. So, if you are a publisher and you want to, you know, publish multiple games in

the same app, um, you can't. uh and and if you look at how the internet ecosystems have evolved in countries that don't have this ge uh these restrictions namely China you have these super apps like WeChat which would never be allowed in the United States and this is been frustrating for Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and uh and so you know there's a real hope I think that when you eliminate the distribution restrictions developers will have a lot more room for innovation experimentation um but going back to what you had um originally asked So I would say the list is web shops i alternative purchase methods purchase locations in the web um direct distribution uh alternative app store distribution web based distribution so that would be web playables and then on desktop you have direct distribution of launches and you can see from successes like Fortnite or Riot how powerful that can be if you actually directly distribute on desktop. I mean, you could imagine a company like Riot being built on mobile um by

building a killer mobile app and getting direct distribution, owning those players. And the major benefits you get are really that like customers who you interface with in a direct channel are your customers. And I think we all learned through IDFA deprecation how vulnerable we are to these platforms whims. So you have their emails, you own their data. There's no third party data broker or anything like that. you can, you know, communicate with them completely freely. Really, you're going from a model where Apple and Google are selling on your behalf to a model where you're directly selling to your customers. And that has all sorts of implications for cross promotion and long-term customer relationships. You can look at like what Riot has done in terms of how it incubates its ecosystem. You you couldn't do that if you were as intermediated as the app stores uh mandate. Um and so you know tactically the major benefits are the margin um you know direct access to player data, email communications, retargeting etc is a huge one now. Um and then there's a couple others about like what you can do

and experiment and you have complete freedom in what kind of content you make and how you make it and how you update it. So those are kind of three main benefits margin player info and you know more room for experimentational functionality. Okay. Should we dive into some of those areas now in terms of like for example let's say players get access to additional data maybe you could help characterize how does that help the game studio for for example from a UA perspective or or other other ways. Yeah. So there's a couple. So one is that you have direct communication channel in that you have a player's email. It's also you know a pretty deterministic identifier. Yeah. So um you know if you start accumulating you can more accur accurately attribute your installs if you get access to their email which helps you do make more informed marketing decisions. So the first two are direct communication. You can actually message your players directly um onetoone. Second is uh more accurate attribution. The third way that

this can be pretty useful is feeding into lookalike audiences. the more information you get about your highest spending, most engaged players, the better you can find players that are similar to that um by feeding in emails to look alikes on Facebook or Google etc. I'd say those are kind of the three main main ways this this facilitates user acquisition. The kind of fourth one which I mentioned earlier is just this incremental margin completely changes the CPI LTV equation. And this is why I think there is a competitive necessity for developers to adopt direct to consumer because if you want to remain competitive in the user acquisition landscape, you you need to be getting, you know, higher higher margin on every dollar, right? Just think about if you do nothing else to your game and you increase your, you know, margin on every dollar from by 10%. You know, before that that that could completely transform your UA equip. You mentioned margin, data, and control. So on that third aspect of control, can you just give a simple

example just to I again I just want our audience to concretely understand what you mean? Yes. Um so do you mean control and functionality or control over well what what what do you you know so when you talk about the primary advantages of of web shop and and you you know characterize those those three aspects. Uh what do you think um that our audience should think about with respect to advantages from a control perspective? Well, I think store within store policies are one major one, right? So, I think that developers who have a successful game and want to use that as a um springboard to scale other games or to publishing or to scaling a next game, you know, this would really allow them to do that to operate, you know, super apps or multi-game apps which could massively cut down on user acquisition costs and really prolong your players uh relationship with you. That's one I'm very excited about because this concept has been so successful in in other geographies. It could also really unlock new publishing opportunities. Um, for

example, I know Snapchat in particular for years was trying to find a way to do um games within their app. The problem is that the app store policies restricted them from doing monetization within app purchases. they were only allowed to do advertising based monetization because if they started allowing the developers they were publishing to um you know implement purchases directly in the app that would make them a store within a store um because they were allowing third party publishers to distribute through their kind of publishing app. So I think having like deeply integrated Snapchat games with microtransactions is a really cool idea and super interesting. So, so as a specific example, would this be for example, if Supercell were to create a Supercell loyalty program by having a web shop, whether you made a purchase in Clash Royale or in Brawl Stars or in another game, you could provide like a uh like a loyalty program that goes across games. Is that a specific Yeah. Or you can have a single Supercell app which distributes all of their other

games in one place and so it's an integrated universe like yeah I think that's exactly the kind of there's a lot of benefits for crossame collaboration when you remove these restrictions because what Apple and Google's policies really want to prevent is competition to them and so anytime you get to multi-game distribution or or collaboration they get very upset. Okay, got it. So let's say I'm a game studio. I I now realize wait a minute web shop can be a huge part of revenue can increase profitability by a dramatic amount. I can basically uh car I could basically get a higher arpoo based upon the that higher margin and so now I want to implement a web shop. So could you walk us step by step by what does that mean in terms of time, resources, what the game studio needs to do from the moment they think about I want to start a web shop through like having it live. It'd be great if you could kind

of walk us through that step by step. Sure. Yes. Sure. So the way I would think about it technically is kind of there are three things you need to set up um in terms of an integration. Uh so the first is you need to have an account system that is separate from a device ID. A lot of mobile developers don't really have a concept of a player account. They have a a device account, right? And so you track gameplay locally, but unless you have cross app um crossame progress or or whatever, a lot of them don't have their own accounts. Many of them rely on Apple and Google, so game center for example, for um tracking progress um and account recovery. Um and so the first thing you need to do is build that basically have something that can link the same identity to multiple touch points and um and then find a way to link that to the web instance. And so you can do that either by you know on boarding a full like ath account system um and then just having users sign in in both places. Uh

I'd recommend against that because most developers don't most players don't really think of themselves as having a game account to mobile games. And so what we do is we try and use the game client itself as the authentication method. So using deep links on mobile and QR codes on desktop, you can just scan the QR code, click the deep link, it opens the app and then you say yes, this is me and it it sends a token back um that then logs the user in. Um so that's the first thing you need to do is like sort out identity. The second is sort out purchase receipts and notifications i.e. granting the items to players upon the successful completion of purchase. Um, this is basically just finding a way to um get like a transaction, a 999 transaction, identify the right product, and then send notifications to your own servers and update your inventory system based on this. It's not super difficult because like we for example have

architected some of our systems to basically have a very easy port from the iOS from from Apple Store kit for example and Google Play billing. So to the extent possible we try and make this really easy and and mirror the kind of setup you already have if you're doing IP on mobile. Um the third part that's a little bit more complex and and more work or requires more thinking is um how you do your catalog. Um and the reason that's so important is as most developers would know with sophisticated monetization systems, catalog, monetization design, offer design, personalization is incredibly important. Which offers you serve to which players and when is at the core of incredible design thinking by mobile games. Um, and um, and so you need to think about, okay, well, how do I sell items on my web shop? So, what most developers start with is they will say, all right, just the universally available resource packs, the ones that have no purchase restrictions or limitations. I'll start

selling those, which is fine, but very few players actually buy those. They're not, you know, your core monetization drivers. So, then you're faced with an option. Okay, do I do I create a separate catalog that I operate on the web? I create some web exclusive offers that I basically carve out and sell them. Um, that is simple and it's easier to do. Um, the problem is that it then requires you in order to think about your web shop as a channel, it requires you to like find find ways that we will either screw up your economy um or just make your mission more complicated because most most games economies are already, you know, fairly optimized in the game client. So then now if you have to introduce a bunch of new offers that are compelling enough to get players to purchase them in the web um you know it's kind of hard to carve out a substantial amount of um resources um in order to do that. And so at Stash, one of our most compelling products for a lot of developers is what we call our

unified catalog product, which is um basically it syncs with your existing catalog management system to pull all of those offers into the web in real time. And so whenever a player loads up our stores, we call game servers, we say, "What products do you have?" And we we we show those products based on. And what that is really great about that is it requires you to do absolutely nothing to um you know to put cataloges on on the web shop once you've done the integration. Uh and then the second great thing about it is it means all of your personalization segmentation etc that you do um in the games economy it automatically transfers because you're just calling the same offers on the same logic etc. And so you can add to that with web exclusive offers but again you know you do that in exactly the same way you would launch an offer in game. Um, so once you've done those three things, you have players who can log in. I know who this player is. Um, you have a catalog that they could browse and and find items. And then you have a way of um kind of actioning and granting the um inventory uh upon successful purchase

completion. You've basically done everything you need to do technically. Um there's a lot more to the payments aspect, right? And this depends on how you do it. Like the standard model in the games industry is what's called a merchant of record. And the reason for this is that as I mentioned earlier, games developers don't really sell directly to players. They sell to Apple and Google and Apple Google sell on their behalf. Part of that is because there's complexity in terms of operating such a global ecosystem as games, right? Unlike an e-commerce site when when you launch a game, you have to take payments everywhere, not just your local country. And so um to do that you have to do um compliance, you have to register for taxes, you have to calculate taxes, um you have to integrate payment methods, um you have to manage player um chargebacks and refunds and customer support. So there's a lot of operational complexity comes which most developers almost every developer you know doesn't think is a core competency of theirs, doesn't want it to be and doesn't need

to build. So it just makes a ton of sense to work with a payment partner who will do who will give you a better payment system that you could build yourself and remove all of that work from you. Okay. And so from the perspective of implementation I two questions. One, what kind of uh resources on the studio side do you typically see implementing a web shop? like the kinds of people, the amount of time it takes to implement, uh how how much how many people are actively looking at the web shop, things of that nature. And then from the moment that you start the implementation to when it's live, like what kind of what kind of time frame are we typically looking at? Yeah, so that's a great question about the um you know, who at the companies are doing it. Um so at Stash we we we only really work with large and at scale developers. Um so I can talk most about them and less about you know

smaller startups and scaling games. Um what we've seen is um and a model emerging where there is a product manager that is the key PC for the web shop and they interface between the web shop development team whether that's internal external and the game teams because you need a lot of buyin and cross functional collaboration um to to do this uh so normally we will have a PM that will like work with us to make the strategic decisions about design incentives program structure feature prioritization etc. And then on the implementation side, Stash has does all of the development and design work um ourselves. We don't require anything from the developers except kind of approvals. Um we build very custom stores. Um uh but there are some depending on how you want to operate your store, there are some internal tech investments that typically need to be made principally on catalog management. You know, it seems like a silly small

thing, but that is really where a lot of the hard work of game develops comes in. Um, because either you can maintain these separate cataloges, in which case fine, that requires very little tech investment from the game team side. It just requires, you know, your web shop PM to set up a few products using our our catalog system. Um, but almost every large game we speak to recognizes the need for the unified catalog product. In fact, you know, most of our sales conversations are customers who have got live with something, often using one of our competitors and have now realized the major pain points they face in terms of catalog management and um you know, scaling the user acquisition for the game webop. Um and so, you know, that idea of the unified catalog resonates most with developers who are already live with the web shop. They're like, "Wow." Um, and so if you want to do that, what it requires is giving us access to your um, catalog management APIs. This is kind of assuming that you're doing serverside catalog management. Um, there are other ways of

doing this if more of the catalog offer configuration logic sits on the client, but so long as you you know use a catalog management system that communicates with your game clients. Um, we basically will plug into that. uh and so that requires from the developers um uh side probably one engineer giving us some time on a weekly basis to open those APIs to create new endpoints if needed um and to uh you know then uh help us if you don't already kind of host the images and creative associated with the offers um you know we need to set up some kind of content hosting uh system uh but that's not a ton of work and then when that's when that's done it's it's done forever Um uh and so there's no ongoing management. And then on our side, what we'll do is we'll construct um component systems for each offer type. So most developers have a bunch of offers, but you know, they they kind of can be bucketed into a few components. Um and what that means is

once we've set those up, what those do is they retrieve the assets from the server in kind of a bundle um with different images and layers and types of data. And that allows us to then reorganize how we present those assets and that data and those backgrounds um using this component system um without any changes from the developer side or it allows for the developer to just swap out the components of those offers to create new ones. So if you have you know a new offer every day um almost always those are going to follow the same kind of layout. And so all you need to do is switch out the foreground assets, the background assets, the price and the name. And all of that is reflected in the story in real time. Okay. Now, when you think about whether it's working with your customers or seeing some of the more seeing some of the games that have been more successful at implementing a web shop, can you talk about what are some of the best practices? What are some of the things that the better web shops are doing better than those who may not be

seeing as much revenue being driven from their web shop than others? Yeah, with this is basically the thrust of the ebook and I think we looked at like 35 shops. So I I would recommend checking that out. Um and uh the best practice I would say okay so the first one is creating an interactive engagement first experience on the web um that is kind of recognizably authentic in your game. A lot of the web shops we see just look kind of bad and sketchy and it it sounds pretty fraudulent. Um just being like, "Hey, if you buy things on this website, I'll give them to you in the game." It's like, "How do I know you're going to do that? That seems like a fishing scam." Um and so making sure that you reflect the authentic look of your um game is is incredibly important. And so the best ones like ours, I would say, or Monopoly Go very very mirror um the interface. Um so the second thing I would say um you got to you got to do is is build an

engagement first experience. Um so think of the web shop as a place players go to engage more and in new ways with your content and what that t what that practically looks like is very variable based on game genre and game type. Um, but what we want to do at Stash is create these like new forms of engagement. Um, broaden date players uh, experience of your games and its universe and and the tactics and the community uh, in a way that actually enhances your experience of that game. Uh, so for a strategy game, the best ones I've seen like Scopely is is really really great at this. Well, for example, like their Monopoly Go Shop has really awesome luck based mechanics. Um, so you know, for example, you can there's a spin the wheel feature. Um, there's actually an amazing tutorial for the game on their website, which is incredible. It's this 3D thing you can click into. So, it teaches you how to play. Um, there's updates, there's content about there. There's a I think

they even have some of the collection mechanics are now supported in the web. And this is just an awesome way of making this like a delightful experience where players go to this site frequently um, and make some purchases every now and then. Um, but if you make something that's engaging that brings players in, I think that's that's a huge plus. Um, I will say I think the third point I'd flag is that um, your the catalog system is almost always a problem for developers that I speak to um, and I think is a huge blocker to scaling these channels because if you offer on your web shop only um, your standard resource packs and web exclusive offers, you know, you're you're capping your maximum monetization in DTOC. And so one of the reasons I think that the 20 to 30% number has emerged as a standard is because that's actually the maximum that players could purchase on the web. Um because 80% of their budget is still

going to the office in game that you don't want to get rid of as a developer. You can't get rid of them. Um uh but you can't host on the web. So really look the best developers and and one of the guys who ran D at Take 2 like flag this as a really important metric. um what is the offer coverage in DTOC? What percentage of your purchases can be made on DTOC channels? I think that's hugely important. Um and then what else would I say? Oh yes. Um the fi the fourth thing I would flag as a as a really important best practice is how you think about incentives. So obviously with web shops, you know, it the the most important guiding philosophy for me is that direct to consumer channels are never more convenient than than intermediated channels. Um but they they have to and can be a better experience. Um and this is true for other industries. If you think about um shoes, right, it is it is more convenient for me as a purchaser to

go to Foot Locker and look at a whole bunch of shoes in one place and make a decision there. And yet Nike has built such a phenomenal direct to consumer channel. Um they have other ways I engage with Nike on a daily basis like Run Club or Training Club. They have things like customization on the web web. So one of the reasons I would go to Nike's website is that I can customize my shoes. It can change the laces colors, the kind of like you know all all of the um small small aspects. Um like that is a phenomenal way of creating an enhanced experience without actually giving away any value or cannibalizing yourself. Um and so the best web shops understand that what you're building here is a better experience. So you want to minimize friction as much as possible. Those are the kind of two levers you can pull in web shops. How low friction can you make it and how highly motivated can you get players? And so, um, the best web shops understand that they have like linkouts with pre-authenticated ID. That's what we have. So, players when they click a link in the game, they're already signed

in when they land at the website. Um, and they can ramp up the the incentives. Um, and just to deep dive on incentives. Um, like I think where some web shops go wrong, even when they're quite advanced, is making it too transactional. Literally going to players, hey, we get 30% more, we'll give you 10% off. That's actually not the most effective way even to give away a 10% average boat discount. Um, but the the thing that we always try to do is one, never discount your prices. Um, never lower the amount players are spending. Always give them more value instead of um, you know, lowering their spend. So give them a 10% resource bonus. Two, kind of obiscate the exact value they're getting with other systems. So the predominant way we we kind of give value on web shops is through a loyalty program that's progression based. You earn loyalty XP. You also can earn a loyalty currency that you can spend in a web exclusive shop on you know offers. And so all of

that uh kind of does slightly obiscate the amount of value players are getting than a 10% purchase would 10% discount would. And then the third best way to implement incentives is to kind of gify it. Again, keeping in in mind that this is like an interactive delightful experience, like we want to establish a motivation for players to use the web shop and progress in the web shop separate from just a very transactional motivation. So, um you know, we build our web shop loyalty programs to be kind of gamified. Hate that term, but it is appropriate here. to make like an intrinsic motivation for players to to progress them in order to get levels um in order to get to a higher level. And you do that by associating higher levels with value. So, you know, high levels in the loyalty program, you might have um you know, some cosmetic upgrades that you can offer on advertised and stuff like that. But you also would have just a whole suite of benefits. Like for example with our store on Tacticus the

benefits you can get are one you have higher bonus multiple ratios for web your web bonuses. So we we give out their core currency blackstone kind of the baseline is when you spend a dollar on the web you get five blackstone as you rank up that goes to six seven eight also for our web store like kind of loyalty store you unlock more offers as you rank up. One of the major benefits is actually getting access to really really high value weekly offers. Um there's just like a whole bunch of ways you kind of associate higher ranks with value and then suddenly you have like a new bonus you can give to players that doesn't directly impact your economy. That was quite a few. So I'll stop there. Right. So I also wanted to hit upon because I I think this Epic versus Apple court ruling is so impactful. One of the things that you mentioned is that one of the big biggest changes in terms of the the the recency of the ebook to now is going to be how game studios are

able to message players. So, can you talk about what do you think like maybe giving us specific examples of what's going to be possible now? And if we can message in a better way, do you imagine like that 20 to 30% that many game studios are seeing from web of web shop revenue increasing based upon the ability to better message to players? Yes, I would first say I think that 20 to 30% number is was even before the Apple ruling, right? Like I think that with a high quality web stores like ours um you you can be looking at 40 to 50% especially if you have a launcher and stuff like that. Um so yeah the main change is that you can now say whatever you want in app and directly link out to alternative purchase methods. So we have a product stash pay. Um you know I mentioned earlier the way I think about this is two levers experience and and convenience. I can like lower friction increase motivation. So this does a lot

to to decrease the friction, right? Because it means you can always inform players about this. You can directly link out. You need to be pre-authenticated with safe payment methods, all of that. Um so it goes a long way to um to like enabling much much more convenient DOC. However, it will still never be as convenient as the app store um APS. Um, so unless you're going to rip out the App Store IPs, which I think is a terrible idea and I don't see any developers doing it, you still need to give players an incentive to use DTOC. And so all of those loyalty systems that I mentioned are still very very important. Um, uh, so I would imagine I've already seen apps that have every time you're making a purchase, you get a popup next to the buy button with like visit the website um for 10% off or 10% more value. Um, that was I saw developers already doing that prior to Apple even though that's totally non-compliant. Um, going forward that is now 100% compliant. Um, so I see every

developer doing that. But I actually think what's more, and for us, our StashBay product, that product is really lightweight and simple integration because all you're doing really is sending players to a link which has a price and you can complete that purchase for that price. You don't need to worry about what the offer is. Um, you're already authenticated. So like on a transaction bytransaction basis, I see a lot of developers going to do that. I think probably the more exciting thing for me is that it just allows you to more naturally integrate your web shop experiences and your web-based TOC experiences without any worries. So like even for some of our games that have loyalty programs or like you can look at you know the red club for example from Angry Birds you know you have to be you had to be a little bit ky about when you mentioned it, what language you used. We had to build custom dedicated landing pages that um you could link to with complete confidence. So, in our stores, we build a special page that doesn't have purchases on it because the the

kind of the inferred rule that a lot of us in the industry kind of guessed at is that Apple was okay with a link out so long as you were two clicks away from completing a purchase. So, you couldn't land on a store page. You had to land on a page where you go to the store page and then you complete the purchase. Um, and so, you know, for example, our like landing pages removed the top left um, link to the home store page um, so that you weren't one click away from the store and you had to click into the menu and then the store all of that is like just annoying and kind of like and so all of that goes away. I think you and then how and when you link out to the web shop is going to be totally changed. So, I think you'll see like a persistent, very visible link to the web shop on homepages. Maybe the best example of this is Monopoly Go's web shop, which you can click into the menu and then you open the web shop and it just looks identical. They call the tycoon club. Um, and so I think just having more freedom and more relaxation

around what you can do there will will enable much smoother user journeys and user flows. um from the web shop to the app from the app to the web shop and then back again right and then how painful is managing for example because as you mentioned there are legal rulings that apply to the US versus other geographies and so whether you're one step away or two steps away in the specific kind of UX and UI that's presented to different players in different geographies do you guys manage that or how is that currently managed today or will be managed based upon the the the ruling We manage that like our knowledge of and trying to stay as up to date as possible on the latest well one regulations and then app store policy that complies with that regulations is a big part of my job. Um and so it does get complicated. It's always a risk calculation is what I tell developers and I can tell you what's high risk, what's low risk, but even for lowrisk things like I could never say it's completely safe because Apple is not

like you know a fair democracy. it's it's a dictatorship and so what they deem to be in violation of policies they deem and you can't really appeal it right um now having said that like you know it's not as if you link to you make a mistake and Apple's like no you're gone never again right they have a huge incentive to keep you on the app store and for you to make money so there have been examples like for example the Monopoly go web shop um when it was announced the tycoon club um they were told by Android that they had to change the link out. Android didn't like the link out. Apple curiously did and so you you don't have that really smooth tycoon club UX on Android right now. Uh so already you've seen divergence by platform and there really will be like a grid where what you can do in Europe for iOS is different from what you can do in America for Android and that's different from what you can do in America for iOS. Like this Apple ruling only applies to iOS. Um the Android case is is separate. It's ongoing. The standing ruling there

is even more radical. um it's just under a junction, but I I think it's very likely that case results in a much more radical ruling. Yeah. I mean, I would say this is one of the main reasons why I think especially for smaller Well, I guess you work mainly with larger um studios, but especially if you're a smaller studios, having to deal with all of the geographical differences as well as potentially local currencies. If there was a provider that could manage all that for you, that would be a big headache off of the minds of a lot of studios. And so yeah, and we also have like you know a as I mentioned these pre-made products like compliant landing page which will pull in the components of your store that are compliant and that you know you can link out to. So we do that on behalf of developers but and we and then it's up to developers how risky they want to go. Right. So I I was wondering if if you have specific ideas about web shops that are doing really well, could you walk us through some specific case studies? I don't I don't

know if you can share screen or anything like that, but um if you can walk us through some of that, that would be great. Sure, I could maybe share screen. Um uh so I would say like the bestin-class teams are like Scopely is by far the best. Um and then you know a few others I've seen kind of following them. Uh, but I can give examples of for Scopely like what I think is so great about their We actually wrote a a a piece um about Scopely um uh on our website which we can link to as well. Um I should pull some stuff up. I mentioned this earlier but like we're always thinking of ways how can we actually make the web shops um a like something that enhances your experience of the game. Um, and one of the ways we do that is by building content and community. Those are the two big kind of like levers. Um, and so content could vary based on your game, but writing your own content, guides, onboarding, tutorials, richer law, expanding on your universe,

like Riot has done, for example, with their web shorts on YouTube or Raid Shadow Legends did this with Call of the Arbiter. um that's a phenomenal thing um you can lean on and you can also kind of you know harness the power and the creativity of your community. Uh so um you know UGC is a huge opportunity here in terms of get players to write guides for other players. Um we're building what we call like a socially incentivized um UGC model where you can reward players for positive social behavior with in-game goods. So, if players write guides that are super popular or make videos or respond to a bunch of questions, kind of like the Reddit karma system, you can rank up. Um, this is Scooby's WWE game. I think it's one of the better shops there is, period. Okay. Um, uh, and I can highlight a couple things I really like about so like integrating social systems like leaderboards is like is an

enormously powerful tool. Um, we always approach social systems by looking at what developers already have, um, and then seeing where we can integrate those and then add on top of them. I think that one of the nicest things I've seen from Scopely, I'm trying to remember which, um, of their stores it was is it touches on uh, what I call social discovery. Uh, here it is. So, it is in the Marvel. So um games are very very good at what I call social activity, chat systems, friend systems, message systems, guilds, etc. Once you have people to play with, they're great. What games have not really solved is what I call social discovery. So this is like how do you meet people to play your games and how do you actually build a community or facilitate players to build a community? And this is a phenomenal example of one of Scopley's which is their alliance recruitment tool to to what degree. So to the point that you raised which is that uh associating content with webshop would be helpful to

to drive players to the web shop. To what degree are studios out there trying to integrate things like for example maybe you you stick your forums in the web shop or chat in the web shop or essentially like you know one thing that we've been considering is should we should we do a web tune and have that be part of the web shop? like could you speak in a little bit more in depth as far as like some of the content that you think would be successful in helping drive players to the web shop? 100%. So, um I think that there is like three kind of types of content. There's content you write, there's content you generate based on game data that's kind of personalized, and then there's content that your players write. Uh, and I think across all three, it's like a super exciting thing you can implement in the game. Um, so some of the content that you write when we speak to developers, they don't want to take on a huge burden of coming up with new content. Um, and

there are some tools we're we're building to help with that. Um, like for example, fine-tuned AI models that can look at your game, your content, even like your Discord chats, um, and kind of generate custom content. Now, obviously that would need to be approved, but it means that you can have a fairly large content output with just one community manager, for example, approving it. Um, and so that would be stuff like guides, law, background, um, other kind of like late game strategies, etc., as well as all the content you already make for new content releases, etc. Um, this is like a really good example of this. um in Scopley's like they have these great kind of like card bycard um law database um so you can look up um specific people you can filter um by class etc and actually a lot of stash's inspiration comes from something like this for hell from the raid world this is actually not

like the official raid website but it's an amazing tool for anyone who plays raid it's got tier lists it's got content guides so all the time. I'm looking for things your community are already doing because that proves players want it and how do you bring those inhouse? Um, so creating like structured tier list makers. We have a tool for example that um allows you to that's not good that allows you to create your own tier list and then you know that could be integrated with the game. Um so that's kind of content you make stretching into then there's game database content. So you can actually programmatically generate content based on the specific um based on the specific data of a player has or like for example if you have a um a game with levels and team composition you can pull in you know this was the most popular team for this level or on average these are some of the builds we've seen work. Um and then you have content your community creates which is the most powerful but

comes with some risks so um we always want to be careful about that. Um but I would say like across the board the content you can make are guides, lore expansion, um uh you know development updates, road mapaps, etc. Um which is basically a loyalty program and online community um uh that you can access um that has a friend system, a web store, etc. What you want to do is create a habit of players visiting the store on a daily basis, right? That is ultimately what you want to work towards. um because uh you know it's it's kind of like on opportunistic sale if they do that. Um so on content you have competitive elements um you have matchmaking, team finding etc. Um as uh as well as like other community features um I I think it could be worth digging a bit more into like loyalty programs. I I could showcase one of our stores where which I think like has a great demonstration of what like a good

loyalty program looks like. Right. And are you seeing that for a lot of the folks, a lot of the players that are going to web shop, are they accessing primarily through mobile versus PC? Primarily through mobile, but like depending on your game genre, there's a non insignificant amount through desktop. Like I would say not untypical to get 20 30 split. I see. Um you also have iPad which can have different layouts. Um and so you want to make sure you're very flexible in what you can handle. As you rank up, as I mentioned, you get like new benefits. So, for example, you get new offers that you unlock in the tactician store. This is the kind of VIP store we've built. Um, real money offers as well as virtual currency. This is our web exclusive virtual currency that you earn um as part of the loyalty program. Um, and actually getting access to these highv value offers is itself a very very powerful benefit because these are such good offers that players would purchase them weekly and regularly. And then one of the kind of best ways I think to show

um how this works is by um walking you through the checkout process and just highlighting the rewards. We do have a cart. It doesn't have to be a cart, but actually carts are very beneficial for DOC because um the higher your average transaction volume, average order value, the lower your average fees basically because there's often a fixed portion of a fee in payments. It's like 2% plus 39 cents. And do you see a lot of game games doing exclusive shops to the web shop? Meaning you can only get these cosmetic these exclusive items from the web shop and not you can't like so let's say the more you purchase on the web shop you get a certain token the web shop token and then you that web shop token you can use to buy exclusive items only accessible through web shop. Is anyone doing something like that? Yeah so we're that's exactly what this is. So, this is um it's not exclusive content like cosmetics, but they're exclusive bundles. I would say very very few games exclusive content. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um

it definitely is something I've pushed for um uh in that like I think there are ways of doing it. Maybe not exclusive but giving early access to content as part of a web shore benefit. But yes, I would say when you're selling content the kind of that would be a very powerful driver. um depends on your game, but like very high value regular bundles. So if you have a very very high value weekly bundle um that is unique to the web shop, that's very very typical. And in this one, that's actually a major benefit of being high rank. So as you are high r higher and higher ranks, you get access to more and more highv value bundles. Um okay. Yeah. So the actual catalog selection is is a major kind of reward. Sure to speak. Um but yeah, as you make these purchases, these are the different rewards you get on a per spend basis. I mentioned earlier this is like the Blackstone bonus here. It's seven extra Blackstone per dollar spent because I'm a high loyalty rank. If I was a lower loyalty rank, it would be five extra Blackstone. And that it's a

way to really get players like bought into the web shop ecosystem and to the loyalty program that you give them these kind of background benefits. Um I always think about like airport loyalty programs. did a lot of research on how those work or hospital or or hotels because economically those industries share a lot with games in that they don't really have like the most significant costs for airlines are not unit costs, right? It's each incremental seat you sell on a flight doesn't really increase the cost that much. What really costs you a lot is flying the plane. And same with hotels. If hotels are at 90% occupancy or 70% occupancy, it costs roughly the same amount to operate that a hotel. Same with airlines. That's very very similar to how games work because we don't have an incremental cost per unit sold. Um, so we do have opportunity cost, we have customer acquisition costs, but like you know it doesn't cost you any more to sell a,000 gold than 10 gold. Um, and so you could use that in similar ways to how airlines do. Um, so long as you're increasing total spend

and usage. Um, so airline loyalty programs have kind of these background benefits in terms of like your air mile accumulation rate as well as more visible like I would say acute rewards like lounge access and upgrades. Um, so we're also trying to always gamify the progression and bring it back to um showing you how you um are ranking up. I'm trying to think if there are any other kind of great web shops we talk about a lot in the um ebook. So I would recommend people check checking that out. But like quite frankly there aren't that many web shops that are great. I think a lot of them have a very significant room for improvement. Um Supercells are quite good. Um I can bring those up. So if you're thinking about some of the best examples, you mentioned Monopoly Go, you mentioned Marvel Strikeforce, you're going to talk about Supercell. Uh I guess you've got uh Tacticus. any any other web shops that some of the folks in the audience should be checking out

just as a reference? Yeah, the other ones that do quite a good job are a thinking ape, I will actually say. Uh, and they are very good at integrating their web shop and more they're good at integrating their direct consumer experience into for example emails. Um, so I think they must have quite a good CRM because their email communications are fairly fairly strong. Um, uh, yeah, a thinking ape I would check out or or a sideloaded app, right, where you get all of their games. Um, it's still pretty bare bones, though. Like, this is very limited offers. I think that's a result of the challenges I described about catalog uh, personalization. Um, uh, I would imagine the Clash of Clans one must be good, but it's welldesigned. Um, uh, yes. um seems to have like a solid uh rewards layer. One of the things Supercell used to have that I think they deprecated, but I thought was quite good

is they used to have Oh, missions. Perfect. They still have it. Yes. So, they have these a bit like the missions I showed you, these engagement based missions, which I think are awesome. Um and uh these also give you a compliant mechanic you can mention in the app. Um pending the Apple Epic ruling, like the policy was you couldn't direct them to alternative purchase channels. So, we would find all sorts of ways to notify players about web- based stuff that wasn't um uh that that wasn't mentioning the shop. Um and so was that was compliant with app store policies like the loyalty program and stuff like that. Um so, Supercell do have this is a great tactic. I think these are the Supercell back back catalog skins. Uh, and I've seen a couple examples of this, and it actually really gets at what you mentioned earlier, which is that for games with a long history that have seasonal skins, a lot of them have put those up as as purchasable items exclusive to the web. Phenomenal tactic

if you have the catalog. Yeah. And how how much are game studios or anyone doing web shop rewards that are offline rather than kind of digital? So like merchandise and stuff like that. Yeah. Because I I would imagine that if if some of the offline rewards are working that it would be it'd be great if if a web shop vendor could actually manage a lot of that. Right. So, so we've got these issues around different shops, different experiences for different geographies, but if you were to also say, well, we've got a specific shop for the US. And when you make a purchase, you get these additional web shop tokens or credits, and then some of those credits could be applied to to getting like the Supercell mug or the Scopely t-shirt or the whatever. Yes. So this actually is something we've explored extensively. Okay. And and actually we

operated a like real merch store or another customer that was just a a kind of PC or experiment in in taking purchase details with shipping information etc and logistics. I would say no one we've spoken to wants to do it so near-term that we've ended up really productizing it but we have done a P there. The most kind of like offline things I can think of are like, you know, some of the biggest casino guys have been sending their biggest players like tablets with their games sideloaded on them to try and get them to make purchases there. So that's an example of offline, I guess, um, contact info. I know that Niantic also is trying to create more location-based engagement, um, which obviously suits their game. So, creating this campfire social system that pushes players to meet up with one another in real life for special Pokémon events. Um, which I think is an awesome idea, but is probably fairly unique to

Niantics location based gameplay, right? Maybe now I could ask you, okay, so let's say you you're convinced about webshop. You've implemented a web shop. So then how do you know that your web shop is performing well? like what specific metrics or how would you evaluate whether the web shop is actually performing effectively or not? Yeah, so I would say the king of the web shop metrics is is um web shop revenue as a percentage of total spend or web shop spend as a percentage of total spend. um that is what you're trying to increase and that's really what Stash for example promises to do is we say like if you work with Stash you you will get a higher share of your revenue going through your highest margin channel. Um then there are various like inputs into that. I actually might have this but I always think about like the metrics any metrics as kind of building down into like a probing each area. So if you go into um the kind of like all right well

what drives adoption um it is um like uh it is um a combination of uh of number of purchases and number of customers for example there's a couple different ways to break it down um then I would dig into like what the kind of conversion rates are we we have actually have an article about that but so I say I follow the user journey basically so to prioritize features is I look at all right what is the number of visits coming in um you can increase that various ways then I would say what is the number of visits to account linking conversion ratio um because sometimes number of visits can capture a lot of noise because there's a lot of random visitors who you don't particularly care about um then I would say uh from account linking to first purchase is a really essential metric and you can look at the various steps along that journey um and then repeat purchase rate after that. Um, and then there's a a bunch of

other supporting metrics, but like those are really the core ones that I look at to prioritize features. Other metrics that are worth thinking about are like your traffic sources, um, uh, your account linking failure rate. Uh, if you have a technical issue, um, for example, you might want to like add additional ways of signing in. Like we originally just had authentication with the game client, but now we have like full authentication using email, password, sign in from Google. If that's what you want to do on purchase rate, I would say what you want to get out there is like why players that aren't purchasing their first purchase aren't. Um, and that could be UX design, it could be offer coverage, uh, or it could be motivation. Uh, so you kind of want to get out what the reason are there. One way of doing that would be for example with us because we have a cart we look at the add to cart rate and so we indicate we say like add to cart indicates purchase intent and then you look at why they didn't complete it and where they dropped off. Um and then on repeat purchase rate I would look at um you

know average number of purchases, frequency of purchases as well as average order value. Um and you can grow both. Um you can also look at cart abandonment rate and ways to get at that. We we integrate like all of our player communications with some of these metrics. So we can trigger a direct email to remind players about an abandoned c for example. Um but those are really the key ones I would say you want to drive up. And do you provide any sort of benchmarks across those or today are most game studios just kind of looking at it and just kind of comparing on a relative basis to themselves? It's extremely hard, I would say. Um, because there are unique aspects of the game and its player base. Like, for example, I've heard that WWE from Scopely does like maybe 50% plus DSC revenue, but it's a really old game with really old players who are super bought in. And so, you know, even a midcore game or a hardcore game with newer players, I think it's going to be tougher to bring in the web shop. Um, and the other unfortunate

thing is now all of these companies have, you know, been been acquired. we can't get any of these metrics from public financials anymore. Um, so roughly, you know, you're looking at like anecdotally what I've heard, a lot of the conversations we have with customers who are looking to switch, they cap out at like 10%. Um, of of web shop adoption. Um, and then, uh, you know, kind of high performing web shops are doing like 20 to 30%. Um, and then really exceptional ones are doing north of that. You can also look at like number of customers who have engaged with the web shop and um I know that for one of the biggest kind of luck based casual casino games when they launched their inapp link out to their loyalty program I think they got 50% of their daily activives for the next week um or their weekly activives to visit the web shop um and immediately shifted over 20% of spend for that timeline that time period um

Yeah. Uh, if you gave me like a specific game genre and age and game type, I could probably estimate what I think is reasonable for them. Okay, cool. Well, maybe we can now think about the future and certainly I I think the the court ruling will have an impact on a very positive impact I believe on the adoption of web shops. But when you think about other things that may be coming to the market with respect to whether it's DTOC or web shops in particular over the next 12 to 18 months, what do you think is coming up? Yes. So um from a regulatory perspective, I would say we are likely to see movement in kind of two main areas. Uh the first is Europe and the UK actually seeing what the kind of actually compliant app store policies look like once the EU has exerted more pressure on Apple and Google. I think it's highly highly likely that you see the removal of anti- steering

provisions. Um you see much more freedom and ease of uh out of app store distribution. Those are the kind of two main things I think are likely to see movement on. I think it's unlikely you'll see changing for app store distributed apps. Like it's fair that they take a fee and the EU doesn't want to decide that. Second place I would see a movement is in America you have um the Android Epic case which I would anticipate being like another real dark horse that surprises everyone. The standing ruling for that is really radical. It would basically open up every aspect of the Android ecosystem for the next three years. inapp payments, app store distribution, everything. Um, I think it'll probably be watered down on appeal, but we'll see. Um, currently that ruling is under injunction while it's appealed. So, those are the two main shifts I'll see from a regulatory perspective. I think then more generally about DTC in the industry, I do think it'll become a

requirement. I think the removal of anti- steering provisions is particularly exciting for more casual games with impulse-based purchases because um Match, for example, has been very slow to adopt web shops, which is fair enough because a lot of their purchases are are made on a specific impulse and it's very linked to the momentto moment gameplay and they're small purchases, too. So yeah, they can be. They can be. Um, and I think that like those players are not motivated. They also don't pre-plan their spend. And for example, this is why I'm so excited about checkout links. Like if you think about purchases that made um a that are made at the end of a level, for example, to extend a level. What's awesome about our new Stash Pay product is it brings up the checkout interface in a web view. So you don't need to end the session. So you can continue the exact same session. And that allows players to kind of get the immediate benefit of extending their sessions. So I would anticipate we see some very

exciting movement there and just opening up for new genres that haven't been haven't been adopting workshops. As that happens, I do think it'll now become a competitive necessity to operate some version of direct to consumer because I just think the UA edge you'll get from first party data, direct player outreach, um, retargeting, for example, like re-engaging lapsed users is a totally different ball game if you have their email, right? Right. Um, and you know you can get at them. Um, so and then just kind of more like visionary. Um I I think that like we'll see um real innovation. Um and I think that like the best developers in this space will do things that are like a lot of what we were describing today just enhancing the experience of their game through new forms of engagement. I do think crossplatform we'll see a further expansion of like one of the things we haven't discussed much today is that stash has a launcher product and um you know a bunch of games are using our launcher um for either beta testing um

and the key with the launcher is that if you have a way to acquire users then you don't need to go through steam steam is um uh steam is actually great for organic user acquisition and so the problem with you know direct consumer distribution on desktop is that you need find a way to get your users. Mobile games already have their users, right? They acquire them through mobile programmatic. And so a great strategy that the likes of Scoply and Clarium have adopted is they have built these communities on mobile and then when they shift them to PC, they are able to use their own distribution channels because you know you're not acquiring the users through Steam. I think that strategy will continue to grow and expand. Um uh I'm really excited about it. Um uh and everything we build for our web shops is is supported through our launches as well. So I really see the launcher becoming a game hub for a certain category of games. Got it. Then the final thing is is alternative distribution. I think I am fairly

skeptical of alternative app stores. Um I think that as I mentioned some kind of like killer app riot style model that could then potentially turn into an app store is is is feasible. like we'll see with Fortnite, for example, could be that or some other game. Um, but more generally, I think that it's an exciting thing to think about sideloadaded app distribution for game developers to take on themselves. Um, again, something stash can support you in setting up all the infrastructure to support side loading, native app payments, distribution, etc. Um, but I think that's another one to watch. Okay. And maybe final question would be around well maybe two more questions. So the next question is what about Stash specifically? Can you speak a little bit to the product roadmap over the next six months to a year? What's what's coming up next in terms of capabilities or features? Yeah, definitely. So where we've been at is we've built all of the core like functionality we we built end of like well last year like you know and

I think we've built it to a quality that is higher than anything else on the market. So our web shop sells things very very well and our um and our launcher distributes things extremely well. Um then the uh other kind of phase that we then completed afterwards is um all about loyalty, rewards, checkout incentives and we're pretty happy with where we are there. We can support any sales strategy you think of promo codes, discounts, volume based sales, um you know in-game reward promo codes, um etc. Um now there are kind of like two main kind of priorities I'm thinking about. Um so the first is um uh player acquisition for the web shop. I break down the kind of product um feature set into three categories. Acquisition, conversion, and retention or engagement. Um and acquisition was the question we got the most from developers. How do I actually get players into the web shop? um you know some of that we've already discussed and might be changing with

Apple and Google but I think for the time that will continue to be a challenge. So we operate we already have things like creator codes are supportable on our web shops. Um and uh same with personalized direct messages through email or Facebook for example. Some of these areas are areas where we've worked with partners like built external partnerships. Um so I think there's continued we'll continue to work there but I would say the main shift in focus is now like how do we build some of these engagement features so content um and uh community and we're starting with content um and so the near-term road map for that is we've built content management system all of that is supportable we can host and display content um now we want to build kind of uh how do you actually make the content or get the content so we want to build UGC tooling for that um and this kind of socially incentivized reward system. Um we want to start with relatively structured content that has minimal risk

of you know gamers doing what gamers do when you give them the chance to write things. Um so for example like our tier list maker is our as kind of a big I think a great representation of that feature set but players will be able to create the tier list, share the tier list etc. Um, we also have um, uh, I think we're doing some experimentation with AI in this category and seeing what we can build. Uh, you know, none of us think that AI will, you know, without supervision create great content, but we're looking at ways we can augment and fine-tune models based on a game's universe, players, um, data set, etc. I'm quite excited about that, actually. I think it it's got a lot of potential. I'm normally pretty skeptical of speculative AI ideas, but I think this is like a great use case for it. Um, so those are two of the main things to watch. I'm trying to think. We we'll also really I think we've reached a like the the checkout links product, what we call Stash Pay, is at a really really good state. Like I think it's already

the smoothest checkout experience you can see and it's an extremely lightweight integration. So, I'm hoping to we speak to many customers who are like your product looks great, looks better, but like we're okay with where we are now and we're not like going to reinvest in prioritizing a complete overhaul of our workshop in the next like 2 months. Um, so let's speak again in 6 months to a year. Um, and I'm very excited to now have that as a standalone product that we can integrate because a lot of them have asked like what can we do that's like a smaller partnership. Um, uh, and so I think Stash K is a great example of that. Um, yeah, that's kind of most of the things that I' I'm thinking about a lot. Um, okay. Yeah. So, last question. Is there anything that I left out that you think that the audience, a game studio executive or a product manager, what should they know that maybe I left out or may maybe we've we've covered it all? Yes. I I would say that the kind of like what for what Stash is trying to build in particular,

our main competition is almost always in-house. like maybe they go with us or they try and build it themselves. And what I always try and communicate is that like the value of working with an expert partner like us is not an operational benefit. It's not just that it's like easier and fewer on on balance sheet costs to work with us. It's actually that by going with you know us I think you will actually make more revenue. Um, you know, I think a lot of executives tend to think like, okay, you know, yeah, we might build or buy or if we buy it, we don't have to do it ourselves and that's better. But in fact, like the main benefit for Stash is in DTOC adoption. So the justification of working with us is yes, you don't have to worry about building compliance, tax, web development, etc. But more than that, like Stash Webops will get a higher percentage of users to use your web shop and therefore earn your money and it more than offsets our costs. Um uh and so you know for stuff like our

catalog technology like that is a just step change in how much you can monetize on web if you can now offer everything you have instead of trying to carve out offers. Um and so I'd encourage you know executives and games industry product people to like think about it like that and and really think about like okay well what could we do in collaboration with um Stash. Great. All right. Well Archie thank you so much for your time. Just for our audience, final reminder, check out the ebook. It's a really really good ebook with a lot of um interesting best practices and a lot of great advice. Uh and hopefully you guys will also release an update to that given the the recent court rulings as well. Um but yeah, thanks so much RT and for our audience. We will catch you next time. Thanks so much for having me.