Web Shops make up 30% of game revenue in 2025. Here’s how to build yours!

And it's been great for the developers and the publishers because they're seeing in some cases they're transacting like 25 to 30% of their business now on these web stores with a savings of about 50% on the monies that they're paying in fees. So it's becoming a very successful means for them to make additional money. Yeah. And can I just I thought of quite an interesting macro question here because one of the trends I've talked quite a lot on this podcast is that everyone keeps saying that mobile is dead and basically IPS are decreasing. But I think that's basically disingenuished because I've worked with a couple of developers where significant amount of payments are actually driven now by web shop and there's no tool that currently [Music] pros. We're the two and a half gamers the midnight crew talking UA adverts and game design too. Mate feel bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early day lives. But hey, you a master eyes on the prize. Tracking data

through the cyber space skies. Feeling stacks dollars like a wizard in disguise. Jack realms lift us to the high. Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey sick. Got your back. Ads are beautiful. They like the way. Click it fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Aha. Uh-huh. Awesome. Hello everybody, welcome. My name is Mat Lancharich and I'm Felix Broberg and we are your hosts and today we have a very special guest, David Stelzer from Exola. David, welcome to the show. Can you give us a a brief introduction about yourself and the company that uh you are Yeah, thanks for having me. As as you mentioned, my name is David Stellzer. I'm currently the president at Exola. Exola is a company that many people have associated in the past as being a payments company. Uh,

but we've really evolved over time and I like to call us now we're we're more of a monetization company. What we do is we help game companies make more money from the games that they're making and then we help them keep more of the money that they make through our products and services. And just a little bit about me, I've been in the games industry for close to 30 years. Uh, used to be an attorney. I was general counsel for Sega way back when. Um, I ran the games practice for creative artist agency for about 6 years. Was really big into helping game makers kind of put their studios together, find their projects, find their funding, and make sure that they had a path to get their games made. And then for the last 8 years, prior to being at Exola, uh, I ran the Unreal Engine business for Epic Games. And, uh, been here at Exola for about a year and a quarter now. So, uh, David, you're a you're an OG, huh? Yeah. Been around been around for a bit. Yeah. It's interesting because this uh this brings me to a different part of the games making cycle, right? Like I've been involved in all these things from the

beginning of getting things made all the way to the publishing function and getting them out the door, but this is like the afterrelease life of all these things that we're talking about around monetization and how games make make money and stay alive. Since you've been around for so like for such an impressive career just before we get started with the report I'm just curious to ask like since Sega Unreal this like what kind of are some meta trends that you've seen throughout your career maybe that you're seeing right now repeat itself or basically what's different now before we get started some things are different some things are the same but like going back that far you have cartridge-based games moving to CD based games moving to you know what could be done with like a modem making like these clanging and binging noises and what you can play versus full-on internet digital delivery of games and then moving from from genres even or or hardware is probably the better way to put it, right? The the ability to go from, you know, playing on a computer on a floppy

disc to, you know, having games that you can download digitally to mobile games to handheld and all of these things that that come with them. Mobile was really the one that I first saw the biggest changes in the way that business models kind of went. It was it was the first time that it was different than you're just buying a game off the shelf somewhere and you own that game and you play through it. Now you had, you know, compulsion loops and you had invite your friends and you had the invention of microtransactions and all of these things and that was a big sea change. And then seeing things coming out of Asia with service-based games doing a similar thing but on PCs to really prevent piracy was really the first means of why that was being done. I I I lived through the the building and the launch of Fortnite at Epic and that was like a crazy rocket ship going from 300 people to 6,500 people. Watching the the I I can't say that it was probably the invention of the battle pass, but the first time where I really saw the battle pass blow up as something that became uh

a standard for business in a lot of this space. And now that that latest fight which you know took place started while I was still at Epic and is still ongoing saw Tim Sweeney at at GDC last month and we chatted briefly trying to blow up what's going on within Google within Apple for fighting for the ability for game makers and publishers to not have to be stuck in that that loop of paying, you know, 33% for the privilege of of hosting your game there. Um, and Epic's doing an amazing job of that. And that is is really legitimizing a lot of the business that we do at Exola for offstore payments and and other types of means of monetization which we'll get into later as we talk. Yeah. But you know those are all some some fairly big changes over the years. Also David you you mentioned that going to like in terms of the Exola kind of more towards helping developers with the monetization rather than just being a a payment prior. Can you unpack that a little bit

cuz that's really interesting. You know, originally what we were there for was for this this really started as a company where our founder uh guy named Shurik was uh in a little town in in Eastern Europe and was not able to pay for games so easily. No credit card. How do I get the games that I want? And created this business of finding ways to to get people to be able to pay. And so what we call alternative payments, right? If you think about it, like a WeChat pay or PayP in in Japan is another good example of that or any QR code payment type systems, gift cards, etc., etc. All these methods where people are not using a traditional Visa, Mastercard, American Express, how can we help you as a game maker or publisher to find a way to collect money from people who want to pay you, right? And so over time that's evolved into, you know, we have thousands and thousands of users. We have very happy customers on the

payment side and how can we help them make more money. And we'll talk here today about web shops and subscriptions and things like that. But those are two of the things that we help to power. So, the creation of web shops, the running of web shops, which is basically an alternative store for your game in particular or your games, subscriptions, that ability to keep people on a monthly payment where they get a a value for that money every month gives you more predictability in your revenue and what you're doing. And all of these things happen offre and direct to consumer. And we we'll talk a bit about what hybrid means in that setting. But yeah, what these off storere things do, which is great, is it allows this direct relationship with your consumer, which game makers haven't had in forever. Like even even on Xbox and PlayStation, that's the gate right there. They have the player has the relationship with Xbox, they have the relationship with PlayStation, and it's been the relationship has been with Apple, the relationship has been with Google. And

having these web stores that gives you that that direction of like, hey, you don't have to buy over here. Come buy over here. We're the actual game maker. And if you come here will give you a reward or value for being here. And in doing so, they pay. And that money goes more so to the game maker/publisher because they're not paying a store fee. They're paying our Exola fee. They're paying the cost of changing money, etc., etc. And and those fees can be about half or less. a lot of the time than what they would pay on a traditional store. Plus, they now know who their user is. And they can have dialogues with these users. They can AB test what kind of offers are working. They can have direct dialogue of what do you like about the game? What do you hate about the game? What would you like to see in the game? If a game is is popular enough that it has a life in linear, this would be a great place to engage with your consumer. Push your linear model with them as well. One of our cloud-based products gives you the ability to put your cloud streaming

directly into your web page. And so there's another place where you can engage with that audience. So build it's will give you the shop will give you the place to kind of have that relationship and then it's up to you within your marketing and how what stories you tell and how you want to tell them and how you want to engage with that audience to make that your home as a game maker or publisher. Yeah. the the report that that you pushed live uh for Q1 2025 what we want to talk about a little bit kind of highlights obviously the rise of web shops and direct DTC sales which uh makes a lot of sense um can you go a little bit more into words like how g game developers can successfully implement yeah successfully implement direct to player monetization kind of strategies in 2025 because I mean there's lot of chatter about it but still people don't understand that that much. No I mean look by launching

proprietary web shops which we will help them build. Yeah. And selling content or currency that's outside the traditional app store you get the developers having the ability to bypass those fees. Like we said they get to gain more control over their own pricing, their own promotions. They're not driven through what the app store is doing. And they, like I said, they build that direct line to their audience. And so direct to consumer is what we like to call that side of the business very clearly. And what this does is it opens the door for a bunch of things. So now you have CRM strategies that you can use. You get all the data that's coming in that you can use to personalize offers. You can create rewards. You can create loyalty programs. And in essence, you get this seamless crossplatform experience. Right. Now, it's not to say that it's just you put the web shop up and people will come. Right. Yeah. Because that's what that's what people think. Yeah, it's it definitely takes a strategy and we help with that strategy. We help to understand through our other customers what's been working, what's not been working for different people and it's different for different types

of games. So, you basically have to train your group of UA people and your marketing folks of how to work directly with an audience as opposed to with a platform. Number one, and then number two, you're doing a real psychological retraining of these players, right? because the player base the easiest no friction way to do this if I'm playing my game on a phone is to just transact on my phone in in the game, right? But what we start to do is we start to move that player base with something compelling or or something that that catches their attention, gets them moved enough to push on something and take them to the web shop. And when they're there, then the developer gives them enough value or something to delight them enough that they want to transact there instead of going back to that game and transacting. And so hopefully you give them enough time that you build a habit, right? They say it takes 30 days to build a habit. Well, you keep giving them that reason to come to the store and get more value and more value. And then essentially what you have is a

group of people who play on their device but pay on the web. And that's the way that we like to think about how to move that that dynamic around. And it's been great for the developers and the publishers because they're seeing in some cases they're transacting like 25 to 30% of their business now on these web stores with a savings of about 50% on the monies that they're paying in fees. So it's becoming a very successful means for them to make additional money. Yeah. And can I just I thought of quite an interesting macro question here because one of the trends I've talked quite a lot on this podcast is that everyone keeps saying that mobile is dead and basically IPS are decreasing. But I think that's basically disingenuished because I've worked with a couple of developers where significant amount of payments are actually driven now by web shop and there's no tool that currently tracks this. Yeah, I'm just macro you are correct, right? IP and mobile look like they're dying if you look at the trends. Micro is where

you'll find that there are successes in the space, right? There are people who are evolving. There are people who are figuring out what works for their game and they're tweaking things that are out there, right? You know, our most successful customers, I would say like in our our list of top 50 earn earners, they're all mobile, you know, and as a result, that means that they're doing something right. And one of our bigger customers who I I won't say who the name is, but I can say that they make some of the biggest games in the world. I can say that they have taken an all-in strategy on direct to consumer. And what that means is that every one of their games has a direct to consumer side. They have a direct to consumer hub where you can go to get access to those games and things you want from those games. They have people who are solely dedicated to the direct to consumer process. So, they've gone all in on this and as a result, they're seeing massive amounts of money coming from this side of their business. Like, it's a real portion of their business

where when when you have that kind of success, those folks will tell you if you don't do this, you're leaving money on the table as a game maker. And how can you if you have investors or board members, how can you look them in the eye and say that you're doing everything you can for your game if you're not doing this? Do you see um any any big or not any big any differences between the the actual genres? And I mean you mentioned that there is it's case by case and we've heard that Midcore is doing better. I mean al also social casino is doing quite well but they've been doing this for years anyway. Is there a way uh for casual games how to to make more money on the direct to consumer? It's hard for casual games. I think there's a future I think there's a future coming where casual games will be able to get more of that. But yeah, midcore social casino is definitely winning more. I would say

there you've got the problem that that on midcore you have battle passes, you have AP with a very engaged audience that's looking to spend quite a bit of money or they they want things that other people don't have. casual is more like I almost finished this level, you know, could I get a little spiff or something that would help me do it? It's a little bit more play to win, which is not what a lot of the the folks who are coming over on the website are looking for. But as we start to develop new products like how does ad monetization fit better in on a web shop, things like offer walls, right? So, we just launched our offer wall product and it you would think that it's a little bit outside of like the casual mindset of, you know, play repeat play repeat, but if you still get casual grinders, right? And those casual grinders want more for nothing. And so, here here's something where we want to keep you. We're going to offer you this reward here on the website that we're not going to offer

you in the game because now we can kind of get a better understanding of who our spenders are, who our non-spenders are. And so I think that you'll get some folks if they have the attention span to engage in it. It's a good way to to bring back in these casual players because it could be things in an offer wall like a slot machine mechanic. You know, play this and get your coupon for for Walmart and in return here's a number of gems that will give you more for your game on a casual front. So I think I think there's a path to casual having a a way back in. But I think part of the problem too is like not as many casual games are being made because there's been such a casualty within casual. Yeah. You mentioned sound bites. Yeah, that's true. That's very true. You mentioned battle passes and season passes quite a lot. So, do you think that that's kind of the the way to go for for the revenue driving like for 2025 and subscription on the side as well? Like like what do you think about?

I mean, I I think subscription battle pass is kind of the same thing. You know, when you buy a battle pass, it is your subscriptions. Yeah. Yeah. Fair. You know, subscriptions and season passes, they're no longer, as we talked about in the beginning, they're not experimental anymore. They are primary to many games and how they make money. Fortnite is another great example there where the battle pass is really what drive so much loyalty and so much return. However, you know, I don't think that they'll totally replace how we layer monetization. Uh, I think you'd still need a full stack of monetization, particularly where you have genres with strong a strong player retention. You need to offer something that's that's really like the win-win that players get, the consistent value, the exclusive content, the sense of progression. You know, while studios can benefit from that, they'll get more stable cash flow, deeper engagement. They like I think they like to say more stable cash flow, deeper engagement, but it gives you the it gives that's the positive, but it also gives you the negative, right? Because what you can start to see is are

we losing engagement, right? Are we are we seeing that number of subscriptions decrease and what can we do to counter that, right? And that's great because it's it's more than just the day-to-day of like what I have to look at from a a 90-day player retention or a 7-day player retention. I now have something like deeper than that. Uh that I have really engaged players who were paying for something that stopped now. How do I how do I work directly with them? Going again to your direct to consumer strategy, I can contact them. I can give them special offers like what would it take to bring you back? Retargeting, you know, that's another big thing um that works very well when you know who your subscriber base is. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess what uh what you're saying is also that the the UA managers are now need to evolve a little bit again and not only think about the Yeah. Yeah. because personalization you know personalization becomes key here right surfacing rewards or content that reflect what the players are interested

in their play style etc. And the retargeting firms are really good at at helping with that. But you know it's not just about like throw up a subscription or a battle pass and again success. These these things need to feel like they're enhancements and not obligations. You still need to be able to have that mechanic where I can play and grind and do all that. This is just like I know I'm going to get cool [ __ ] every month and it's always going to be there for me and then I've got bragging rights over things. I don't want to be the grinder every month, right? So, what we do see is the best performing models here are the ones that are treating players like members and not like customers. Yeah. I I kind of wanted to shift the gears here as well because you guys sit at such an interesting point in the market if you deal with monetization, right? You see a lot of success cases, what works, what doesn't work. What kind of should international players think or publishers think about if they want to expand to APAC? Everyone's kind of cracked the US market. That seems the holy grail, but basically there's a lot of money being spent in APAC as well. Yeah, it's it's

not just AP pack. It's also I think Apac and LAM are too to really talk about because for the west Apac is definitely I think underserved or I'd say even like they just don't understand how to engage best with that audience to fully extract what they can from that audience. So we look at those as high growth regions APAC, Middle East, Africa, Latam. Um and those are requiring like really strategic approaches that that go beyond the simple things. So the the easiest thing is like localization, changing up language so that people have the ability to play the game in their language. But sometimes we're even seeing like in Apac like China is a good example for this in Latam there's certain places where they and especially in the Middle East they want a cultural change within the game too. So how do you tweak the game for certain culturalizations? How do you make it friendly and appealing to all the different places where that game is being played? Now, sometimes it's a full redo of a level or something for that

particular region, but sometimes it's as as easy as the skin for this month is something that fits culturally within a region. And you'll see like it doesn't really sell in a lot of places, but that region where you targeted it through the roof sales, right? So, that's one way to go. Localizing your payments is another thing that really needs to be done. And this is going back to our old school business at Exola, right? So, in terms of payments, we have we're partnered with over a thousand different payment partners. So, what that means is wherever you're you're selling your game, wherever your users are, we probably have some sort of payment solution to help them pay the way that they want to pay, right? And so, you shouldn't have the problem of I don't have uh money to be able to give you because I don't have the right instrument to make that happen. Uh that's the benefit of using Exola and we're adding more and more PSPs uh or payment solution partners every month.

Uh when I started a year ago, I think we were at just around 700 PSPs. Now we're well over we're well over a thousand. Also helps a ton by the way when you have a way for everybody to pay. uh you'll you'll see less and less cart abandonment, you know, which is a big issue. I'm just curious just to follow up on that. So web shops that your OG business as you called it, right? That does the do they actually get localized as well for the different regions or what kind of is your recommendation? We can have the web shop so that they're localized. All of the payment methods that you want just are magically there because the back end of that web shop has the store built in which is Paystation which provides the access to over the thousand payment partners. What it also does is it gives you the protection on the compliance side. So if you're selling something all over the world, you need to be able to know the tax rules wherever you're selling. You need to be able to understand payment rules. You need to be

able to understand how much money needs to be set aside. You need to be able to understand fraud. You need to be able to understand bad debt rules, etc. We do all of that for our customers on the payment side. So, we act as what's called the merchant of record. We're the ones if you get a receipt for a certain game and you see Exola on that receipt and you're like, I didn't buy Exola. That's uh that's actually us getting in front of the game maker doing all that work for them, right? So that we made the sale for them with the paystation. In the back end of pay station, all that compliance work is being done. Our fees are extracted. The currency transactions are happening. And then we remit back to the game maker or the publisher the amount that they're owed after that. And that amount ends up being usually less than the fees that they would have paid elsewhere. Also um not talking about the language and the localization in these like regions like APEC, Middle East, LATAM is there like an connectivity mobile

connectivity issues or anything that 5G networks can improve on uh or is there any effect in terms of the game monetization or business model or how how should developers think about that? Yeah, I mean that's a little bit that's a little bit different. Okay, it's getting better I would say. So in in Latam in particular, uh you used to have last mile problems all over the place. Same in India. Um you had really strong fiber up until you got into like the neighborhoods and then it was like a rat's nest of wires and like all of a sudden activity went away. You had payment issues because a lot of the payments were direct carrier billing and so it just became part of your phone bill and became very expensive. That's more so in Asia and India where direct carrier billing happened. Um, what 5G I think is doing a lot of is helping helping to solve the piece of number one, I don't have to worry about that last mile problem at home because that's usually where this was happening

on a PC. I've got better reception on my mobile now or mobile connected device wherever I go. And so with more bandwidth, I should have the ability to pay play more games. I should have the ability and game makers and publishers should have the ability to utilize cloud streaming a little bit better, right? Because with 5G being on a phone or let's say even on an iPad or something like that, you still have limitations on storage. You still have limitations on RAM, processing power, the things that that make a cool game really hard to do locally on that device. And so cloud can be really helpful there. And I think we're starting to see, you know, the limitations of cloud in a couple years will continue to get better and better over time. I think for now, one of those great things to be able to do with that with 5G with cloud is to be able to serve up a level of a game or serve up a a game where you can play and jump into it uh for the purpose of being able to buy it somewhere later. There are

certain cloud services that are doing a good job like ExCloud from Xbox, but they they own a massive cloud and it's it's much easier for a company like that to worry about how they fix latency issues and and deal with things and and the delivery of that to 5G. But everybody that I talk to on on those fronts, that is a topic. Cloud 5G, how do we make those things work more seamlessly? How do we make it better for game players? There is also another thing that everybody's talking about which is AI. We've gone 30 minutes without talking about AI which is quite impressive. I was so happy. I was so happy and now you've gone and done it. No, but I think except like everybody's talking about AI. I use AI on almost on a daily basis for the creative uh production for you design your new tattoos. Also tattoos. Yeah, exactly. Rumor has it that Mate is actually not even a real person. Yeah. Honestly, yeah, I have an AI avatar of myself actually. So that's it's an interesting thing but I want to I want to ask about if you as using AI for any

types of uh processes or anything that is closer to developers and obviously like developers are using AI for any type of like content generation. I mean there's no doubt that AI is definitely you know transforming game development monetization uh it's working with player engagement by streamlining the content creation enhancing personalization optimizing live services etc. In development, we're seeing, you know, AI procedural content generation that it can reduce production costs by automating level design and PC behavior. We've all seen now asset creation allowing smaller teams to build more expansive worlds. And tools like AI assisted animation and voice synthesis for what we do on the payment side. We don't have a ton that I'm that I would say works within this, but we work with a lot of companies for sure that are using this. Some things that we're thinking about around monetization is more AIdriven dynamic pricing. Okay. How do you do AI predictive analysis? Personalization of those offers that we

talked about can be driven through through AI and tailoring in-game purchases on player behavior by learning those behaviors through through models that you build specifically for a particular game. Nice. Okay. We also have, you know, for a while there have been AI powered chat bots support systems. That's I think that's pretty well accepted at this point in reducing operational costs and they also help to improve a little bit of player retention along the way as they're doing that. Also talking about the data and and analysis and anything that you can use AI for. Obviously all the games are being kind of data driven and there's like you need to make decisions based on data and you mentioned some big games making 30% of the revenue on the on the side which is amazing. any other kind of KPIs that you think studios should monitor closely or like making decisions uh when they want to go to the web shops or like uh anything that you can you can share? There's one one in particular which is

that using a web shop correctly with a really good testing group with a really good UA group with companies data like apps flyier for showing you how your money is being spent. If you are not doing those things well, then you're not properly optimizing. And that is where margins are lost in one right there. Yeah. You have better control over that optimization and that margin flow when you're doing something that's direct to consumer. So for now, we're talking about web shop. So in doing so, like I said earlier, you need to have a very well-built web shop. That web shop needs to perform number one technically as you you expect it to do. It's going to have the beautiful things on it that you want. The store is going to be embedded within it. The content that needs to be served needs to be served properly. It needs to not crash, right? And then that

payment flow needs to look just like your content. It shouldn't look like I've been sent to a cash register somewhere and I suddenly am taken out of the experience of what I do. And then on the back of all of that, like how did you drive people there? Okay, how much did that cost to drive them there? Once I had them there, how long did it take them to make decisions? Did I have the right content in front of them? Did I test to make sure that for these particular users, I'm putting the right things in front of them? And being able to look at that data and going back to AI, AI can be really helpful here, too, because you're building essentially LLMs for your your games. Those are the way that you can get down to the real micro of razor thin margins that that make the difference between winning or losing here. Yeah. And how does that exactly work? Right. When you get started with a web shop, usually what would you recommend there to get started? Like is there a starter kit or is it just putting your own content there or how do you actually make a couple ways you can go? Yeah. When you work with us, I should say there's a couple ways you can go. So, some of them are as as easy and

this is totally crazy easy, but like good. We have a solution called the instant web shop where literally you put the art into an app and within 5 seconds you have a web shop spun up for you. Now, granted, it's not the most customized or anything like that. It will look like whatever it is you gave us, but it will automate spawn a web shop. Usually the way we work with our customers is they they say they want to make a web shop. We work closely with their teams to build that web shop and customize it with the features and the the look and feel of what they want. And then we train them on how to market it, how to do UA with it. We show them best practices. We show them what's worked with others. We show them what hasn't worked. And usually they'll go and they'll run with that. And if they if they're successful with it, we may not hear from them other than to say thank you. If they're not successful with it, they may come back and be like, you know, like a kid with a toy, you know, this thing's broken. It's not working. It's like, okay, well, let's take a look

at this. Like, how are you doing this? What are you doing? And then we'll find ways to help them do that thing better. But we're very, very hands-on with our customers. We're hands off if they want us to be, but many of them appreciate the help and we're there as a as a partner. The way our business works, you know, we we only make money when they make money. It's not it's not a feebased thing where you pay us upfront for the web shop and we do a transaction. Here's your shop. Thank you very much. We're on a percentage basis. Thank you very much. See you. Never we're on a percentage basis. So our interests are really aligned that you know they succeed, we succeed. So we're there for them. So I'm just curious. You might not know the answer to this, but like if you do an auto web shop or the autobuilt one, right? and then actually you start tinkering around and working with a client and they actually spend time optimizing. How much better if that is the baseline, how much better are those web shops performing as a percentage? I don't have an answer for that, but my my guess would be in line with the fact

that really paying attention to how you operate the shop is what's really driving the better revenue and the better margin that you're probably eating out some sort of better even within instant shop just by the sake of having one there. Uh that even if somebody stumbled onto it, it's revenue that you get incidentally. is revenue that is more in your pocket than in somebody else's pocket. But I'm not sure I'm not sure how much better one does than the other, but I'm I'm pretty certain that the more customized ones are crushing it compared to the non-customized ones. Now, that's not to say like you couldn't spin up an instant one. Uh if you're on the fence of like, I don't know if I have the time for this or what this is really going to do, spin it up, ask us some questions. We give you some help. And then you're like, I see the potential here. And then you scrap that one and put a new one up that we've helped you build and maintain. It's better to start with something,

Felix, right? And then then go from there. So at least you have some baseline. You mentioned you mentioned you share best practices with the with the developers. And I assume you also do a lot of like AB testing of the the conversion rates and like all how the the web show actually looks like can convert. Can you share one or two tips that uh you usually say to your your clients like hey obvious things like this button needs to be here like kind of like something like this. Yeah. Well, there's some stuff like um it's here in my notes just so you know, but in 2025 because I'm not so deep into the tech side of that where I work dayto-day on these, but I do hear that. You shouldn't you need to sleep at some point, right? But um it's it's it's telling me here that in 2025 studios should really focus and this is going back to the AI a little bit, but it is relevant to what we're talking about. 2025 studios should focus on practical AI adoption without overinvesting in hype. uh leveraging AI for and then we get back to this AB testing for live ops. So those two

things are very important within for us within the web shop environment. That makes sense. Um using doing plenty of automating your localization and enhancing recommendation engines for in-game stores. So whether or not you're using AI, those are things that are necessary for your web shop right there, right? You want it to be localized for everybody who's coming. You want them to see it in their language. You want the recommendation engines that are coming in to be as personalized as possible. AI is great for something like that over time, right? Because it has to learn. Studios are also going to be experimenting with AIdriven user acquisition using machine learning models to optimize ad targeting. Okay. Uh and community engagement in a privacy compliant way. And that's that's key privacy compliant way right. What are the ways to do these things in a privacy compliant way? So we can figure out some workarounds as humans. We can utilize AI to do a lot of different AB testing to see what works around compliance and what does not. It's also should be noted that like developers AI is not the

answer to everything. It's not like we'll just AI and and it'll be awesome. You know, you still need human oversight in AI assisted design. Uh you want to avoid the pitfalls that are there over reliance on procedural content. Smaller game developers tend to do that a lot where it's like, "We don't have a big team. What are we going to do? We'll just make everything procedural. AI will be great for that." And then, you know, you end up with like funky dog trees that just spawn everywhere. It's like this doesn't even look like my game anymore. Yeah. But yeah, like the the best thing about the testing, the direct offers, and this this ability to have this dialogue is you really get to understand your player base, right? And you really get to understand what moves them. You really get to understand what what repels them and and what do they want from your game in particular. And it's going to be

different for different audiences. like a co a cozy game maker may get, you know, commentary from their audience about, oh, this would be even better if you could just if we could do this, and then they do it because they know that the community is going to engage in that. Whereas, like on a on a a big midcore or hardcore game, it's like, can you just make the missile more powerful so I can blow up the ship? And you know, it's just a general comment that that doesn't really move the needle for the community, but hey, if I got something that I'm building, I I now know in my database, I've got this consumer that I'm going to target them for this particular offer. Um, and so all of that stuff helps to power better monetization at the end of the day. Yeah. Also, so actionable game plan for 2025. So if you if you if you were to suggest like one or two things like actionable that like developers uh or indust game industry uh people should take into 2025 based on

the your reports and the findings like what what should they do? Yeah. So for me you know build a web shop. Absolutely. Thank you very much. Yes. That's number one. Exactly. No brainer. nob brainer to me that's super important and then along with whether you have a web shop or not the idea of datadriven monetization uh becomes super important for this year. So, as games become more datadriven, you know, what are the key metrics that studios monitor closely um in 2025 to kind of gauge their health? And so, how can how can we as Exola assist in turning player data or behavior patterns, purchase history uh into actionable actionable revenue growth? And and by the way, to answer your question, I'm I'm speaking on things that will help people make more money. Yeah, exactly. Just not the games industry in general. This is like So I have to sell your audience on something here. But yeah, that those are two of the

areas where and they work really nicely together, right? So what this this can do for you in the gaming landscape, you know, because it's so competitive right now, improving data retention, increasing LTV, maximizing monetization opportunities. This is what becomes really important. And the most important metrics for the studios that are trying to track include, you know, average revenue per user, customer lifetime value as these these are really good indicators for the long-term profitability of the player base. And then you want to look at things like the conversion rates, whether you're converting things from free players to paying players, etc. One-time purchasers to multi-time purchasers, all of those things. And this is data is precisely why we partnered with Appsflyer to help enable better decision-m through data. Okay. Nice. Okay. So, any message for for our audience besides, well, you have to build the web shop because obviously like that's that's a no-brainer and we need to have a an actionable data so companies can can make more money. Where

can they approach you or how they can reach you out like where like what are the the best places to to do it, David? Yeah, I mean we we are here at that stage within your game where you're thinking about wrapping up the game, getting ready to take it to market. Uh if you go to exola.com, xsol.com, uh you can find information about our products and services and there's there's a contact us piece there that will get your information directly to one of our business development folks. They work by region. Wherever you're at in the world, we've got somebody to take care of you there. Nice. Yeah, I'm going to I'm going to post um a summary of the the Excel report for Q1 there below be in the in the link is going to be in the description. I'm going to uh add this podcast episode as well and all your uh uh information where people can find you. David, thank you very much for coming. Yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah, it's finally good to be here.

Yeah, nice. Thank you for coming. Thank you much. Cheers. Have a good day. Bye, gentlemen. [Music] Hey, hey, hey. [Music]