At the checkout you are forced to sit down and fill out lengthy form about who you are and pick passwords and usernames. Once completed you hand over your card to pay only to be told that the store does not accept American Express. As you have no other way of paying at the time you are forced to leave the store and abandon your purchase feeling angry and disappointed.

Whaddya mean you don’t take magic beans!

This happens every day online. The abandonment rate for online shopping carts can be 50% and the same is true of in-game purchases for video games. By limiting the number of payment options and increasing the steps a user has to take to pay you are increasing unnecessary friction. This will lead to users dropping out of making purchases, lowering your conversions and increasing player dissatisfaction.

Now ask yourself, if you were the user, would you purchase again and even worse, would you stop playing?

If you are going to operate worldwide you need to think about payments on a global scale and that means understanding local markets. For many English speaking territories this can be daunting having been used to a fairly static payments market where it is very easy to get by with Visa, Master and of late PayPal. However even here things are changing rapidly, with the market beginning to demand more frictionless options for smaller micro-transactions and more convenience from their payments.

In the UK it is estimated that 11% of all online payments are now what the industry terms “Alternative Payments” i.e. Mobile, Bank Transfer, Direct Debit, eWallets and other non-credit/debit card based payments. Globally AP account for 22% of total transactions by value.

Of these new AP eWallets are seeing the most growth with WorldPay predicting that they will account for nearly 50% of all AP by 2015. Understandably the major players are now rolling out their own versions of eWallets such as Visa’s V.me and MasterCard’s MasterPass. However many countries have been using eWallets for several years already and understanding what has happened in these markets will help you gauge the future possibilities in others.

In truth the global payments market is exceptionally fragmented and localized which makes pushing your games and their purchase or in-game commerce into new regions complicated and possibly expensive. But it has been proven time and again that customers will abandon purchases if they don’t see their preferred payment option. On top of this many will also abandon if they have to complete a transaction in a currency foreign to them or with a foreign bank or other payments mechanic.

Just to compound the issue the video games market also has a number of specific or closely associated payment methods and aggregators more widely used in this industry than say standard ecommerce. With the introduction of micro transactions to games mainly from the burgeoning F2P sector we now have more options for payments than ever before.

Payment Methods in MMO’s

At the bottom of this article you will find a good infographic (though not video game specific) that goes some way to so show the broad range of options available.

Of course offering users more choice of payments comes as a kind of double edged sword to the developer. While users have more options, you face headaches over integrations, pricing and possibly user confusion.

Depending on your platform integrating with some of these methods can be difficult and cost you man hours in building out the necessary integration. You may have to use third parties or bounce off others all of which complicates matters. If you are developing for a specific platform, i.e. iOS then you are tied directly to whatever the payouts of that particular market place might be.

Below is a video from the Casual Connect Europe Conference 2013 that has a particularly good section on the various mobile marketplaces, their payout rates and pros and cons as regards tax and legal liabilities.

Pricing also varies widely between methods and while you could typically see low costs of around 3-4% for credit card transactions something like SMS payments can be anywhere between 25-30%. This requires that you understand your user and make fundamental decisions about what you should and can afford to offer them. For a mobile game that involves micro transactions, of less than $1, where users may not have access to credit cards etc it makes sense to offer SMS billing. However for a full price product available on a store it would not. Though the % in costs would be no different between the two, store users are more likely to be happy to pay with the less expensive methods allowing you to retain margin without effecting customer satisfaction.

Many games are now incentivizing their payment methods by actively offering players greater value for money from less expensive payment types as a way to pass on the saving to users and retain greater margins. Others hide or proactively sort their payment types to sway users into choosing one over another while still retaining a large roster of options.

On the subject of customer satisfaction, while it may seem that the more options you offer the user the better it is not always translated through to the results you see. The problem being that when it comes to cart flows and payment pages, less is most definitely more. The purchase phase of any decision is always the most fragile step in the buying process. Users do not want or appreciate being confused or unsure as to what to do next and by offering too many payment options, not making payment types self-explanatory or difficult to use you are creating unnecessary friction, which will undoubtedly be represented by lower conversion rates. People want simplicity from their payments.

For any changes to your payment process including adding new payment methods I would advise that you run a simple A/B test to measure the impact. You can go more complex and even look at multi-variant testing if you have the knowledge but even simply splitting users 50/50 to hide or show a new payment method will give you good insight into any benefits. You can then either dismiss the change or perhaps weigh it up against any costs involved.

If you are going to run testing though please do ensure you have enough data to make an informed decision. Simply running a test for an hour or even a day is not enough. Ideally you need to run tests for a number of weeks, unless your traffic numbers are huge but even then you want to account for days of the week or in game sales plus other external factors like national events or competitor advertising. The goal is to get a rounded idea of impact.

The Current Market.

As mentioned earlier payment options are exceptionally diverse, especially when working at a global level and deciding on which types to adopt will largely depend on what markets are important to you. If you users are 99% North American there is no point adopting Yandex until you localize your product for Russia or are getting significant Russia users. That said in some cases it may not be as clear cut and could be a case of “chicken and egg” so you don’t see as many foreign users because you don’t have their favored payment method.

Below is a snapshot of the current payments world for some main and upcoming countries.

The Top 5 Payment Methods By Country

As you can see in these 12 countries there is already a major variance in the options and their uptake and this still does not take into account the regional versions of these payment types.

A good example of this is credit cards in France. On the surface credit cards seem to be the most predominant type of payment but once you work in the country you realize that 30% of the market is the Carte Bleue card which is a local card type specific to France (although affiliated with Visa). If you offer Carte Bleue, you will need a French entity or employ a payment service provider.

Another example is bank transfers, whilst essentially the same process (though can be online or offline) each country can have its own variation. So in Brazil the most popular would be Boleto Bancarios, whereas in Germany it is Sofort (Sofortüberweisung).

These local variations can also have their own costs or risks such as ELV in Germany which requires additional levels of fraud screening as the standard setup has few real checks in place. Whilst you may lower your fraud risk by not providing ELV you then cut out a large section of your users given that ELV accounts for nearly 30% of all online transactions in Germany.

These local variations can have significant impact on your business. At the bottom of this article I will post some links to country guides by the major players in this space.

When considering payment options you need to make sure you are looking at and working with specifically video games orientated payment types and payment providers. On top of this you need to understand your own demographic and how this will also impact payment types.

If your game has a very young demographic like a pet management game then its likely prepaid cards and cash options will be highly valuable to your business. However if you have created a train simulator with a much older demographic they may want credit cards and bank transfers.

The Payments of Tomorrow?

The world of payments is seemingly getting more diverse but this is mainly due to the fact that more markets are now accessible and have their own requirements. However the big players are now pushing into new areas and it’s likely that eWallets will become the payment method of choice for online in the future. How long they will hold sway though is anyone’s guess and there are plenty of other systems out there to choose from.

The payment methods in any given region are normally a product of the maturity of the market and the specific tendencies of users. Russia was predominantly a cash based society with many people choosing to pay cash at ATM style terminals for bills and products, but this is changing. Credit cards are becoming popular again as old security fears and market penetration is pushed aside by an expanding economy. China has far more debit cards that credit and cash on delivery is still widely used but again as the economy grows more options are taking over as operators work at a larger scale and foreign businesses look to break into the market.

Perhaps the biggest unknowable change to the market will come from the mobile sector as the line between mobile phone operators and banks become blurred and innovations like NFC and contactless payments become widely used. Companies like Zong are driving this market in the online space replacing older SMS style payments for micro transactions but the technology is being used by other payment providers and mixed with eWallets to create something between the two.

Other options to look out for are:

Alipay the favored PM in China, with over 700 million registered accounts I think it’s highly unlikely their ambitions remain with one country.

Klarna a Swedish payment method that allows users to pay after receiving the goods but takes on all financial risk for the merchant. Currently only in 7 countries and mainly still Nordic based they are expending rapidly and venture backed by the same people that though Google might be a pretty neat idea. They currently have their sights set on the US market (I once very nearly got a job there myself, but that’s a story for another day).

In closing, payments are complex and for the majority of cases its best to work with payment providers and aggregators to get the required options in a package. Understand your markets and push your provider to give you the coverage you need at a reasonable cost to your business. Don’t be afraid to mix and match and make sure you test, test, test.

Sources:

DRWP – The Gamer is always right report

WorldPay - Alternative Payments Report.

GlobalCollect Quarterly International Video Gaming Payments Intelligence Report

The Payments Lanscape

Free to play is just one of many video games business models and the basic premise is that whilst the game itself is free to play or download, certain elements of the game are monetized to create revenue. This can be items, characters, time savers etc. that create the revenue that pays for the development and subsequent profitability of the game.

As the use of Free to Play expands amongst game makers so does the interest in maximizing revenue, which itself is not a bad thing, everyone want their business to be as profitable as possible. What I believe would be a dangerous trend would be to target solely, what for the purposes of this article I will call, “monetizable gamers”. If you are going straight after this demographic at the expense of a wider audience you will struggle if you want to be a worldwide success, especially if you want to be seen as real AAA title rather than say a casual game. This is due to the fundamental fact that Free to play works best at scale. You need lots of players to make free to play work, and a $0 price point is not enough anymore to bring in the crowds in an ever more competitive market. You need a good product, which is at its core fun to play. If you over-monetize your game and only go after the “whales” you ostracize your normal players and remove the whole purpose of the game, namely the fun.

It is for this reason that you need to be very careful with how you measure success. If you are chasing higher and higher LTV from gameplay changes you may actually be harming your overall profitability.

Just to be clear though, the people that pay to enjoy your game more are essential and you need them otherwise F2P just doesn’t work as a business. As with anything it’s about balance and while allowing and encouraging high value users to spend what they want, you really do need your non-paying players too, which seems to be a message that is getting lost in the frantic fishing for monetizable gamers. This creates the dangerous concept that non-paying users are worthless. I also believe that increasing your average order values and generally increasing the profitability of your game is best achieved via marketing and merchandising rather than solely gameplay tweaks.

What I really want to point out though is that just because nonpaying players don’t and maybe never will create in game revenue, you can to a certain extent give them a $ value. I am going to call this Social Value.

So how do non paying players generate revenue?

1. They bring new users

People who like your game, talk about it. So if you have 100 players and only 5 pay that leaves 95 players who don’t pay anything. However if your game is fun and enjoyable it stands to reason that all of your users may talk about your game and pass it on to their friends as a personal recommendation. Statistics show that there is no better source for qualified new users than someone referred by a friend.

Study on what influences gamers to make a purchase.

So let’s say that your 95 non-paying users on average convert a new user 50% of the time for the duration they play your game (47.5 new users). If we assume your average conversion rate is constant then 5% of these new users (which you acquired for free) will upgrade to paying players (2.4 new paying users). If your LTV of a paying player is $20, that’s $48 you would never have accounted for in your initial calculations. Now scale the numbers up to 1M users……

Of course due to the nature of personal recommendations it is exceptionally fuzzy to put an accurate number on how many people you could expect to have brought in. But given that 95% of you user base (or whatever the figure is in your game) do not pay, surely it makes sense to make everyone happy and passing on the word. What you can do to help this process is arm your users in every possible way to spread your game, via tools such as refer a friend offers, Social Media, Community projects and maybe even affiliate schemes.

So if you have no marketing budget and are seeing your number of users still increasing, this is happening via word of mouth, this is your nonpaying community hard at work getting more people to play your game. Now work out what it would have cost you to pay a marketing provider to get the same number of people to join your game, divide this by your current user base and that is the incremental marketing value your users are generating.

2. Players can show their appreciation in other ways.

Cross Promotion – If you have more than one title you have the perfect opportunity to cross promote you games between the two groups of players. In fact many companies employ a tactic whereby if a user is not converting in one game they will attempt to flip them into another. I would not condone forcing players out of one game into another, especially if they are an active player, but introducing them to you other products should be something you do as a matter of course.

Community Content – Some of the most interesting content you can have for your game and your website is fan produced. Given that the internet is alive with chatter about the benefits of content marketing surely harnessing your fan base to produce, artwork, fiction, forum and blog posts as well as video makes sense rather than trying to produce it yourself. On the question of video this can also be monetized via advertising if you retain the rights. Video usage is exploding at the moment with things like Twitch TV seeing exponential growth.

If your game is particularly in depth then you may find your community is likely to build a wiki which will also send you traffic and new users.

Events – Increasingly players are showing their appreciation of games by attending events. This can be seen with explosion of eSports over the last few years but also the many consumer events that now exists such as Blizcon

Merchandise – Once your franchise truly becomes a brand it starts to exist as something other than just a game. When this happens it opens up the door to merchandising and proliferating your brand even further. Many big games have numerous license agreements with manufacturers as well as their own merchandise stores which can generate huge revenues.

3. Advertising

Advertisers are looking for demographically targeted users and video games offer one of the best opportunities to reach and engage with them on a deep level. Whilst we traditionally think of TV as being the best way to reach the mass market, gaming is rapidly taking over. Gamers now account for huge segments of the population in the western world to one extent or another, though many people would not actually count themselves as a gamer. And whilst you can never be accurate about who saw your half time Super Bowl advert you know down to the unique user ID who saw an advert in a game. Advertising can be a key revenue driver for a game though it needs to be handled correctly. We have yet to get to a point where users feel comfortable with adverts in games in the same way we are with TV. Many use the removal of adverts as a perk for paying users in their game which can be interesting mechanic.

If you want to explore advertising product placement and 3^rd party partnerships in more detail see my post on The Benefits and Pitfalls of Strategic Partnerships.

So before we move on to how you actually measure your metrics I think it’s important to state you need to understand all of your users, not just the paying ones if you are going to have a truly successful F2P game.

Beginners Metric Definitions

Note to any developers yet to launch their first title and therefore don’t have the data yet to make these calculations. Don’t try to guess these numbers! If you are guessing what your LTV or CAC might be without experience you are likely to end up in trouble. Better to look at some industry standards or ask other developers with similar product. For real disaster management then always expect to pay more for your marketing and earn less from your users. Normally with forecasting its best to have 3 forecasts for poor, average and excellent performance.

CAC = Customer Acquisition Cost

This is how much it costs you to get a new user. Depending on your company setup there may be a couple of ways to work this out. If you want to be absolutely scrupulous and include everything you can even factor in the wages of any staff who work on marketing. So take the cost of marketing over a given period including any other monies spent on salaries, revenue share, fees etc and divide it by the number of customers that the business acquired in that period.

ARPU = Average Revenue Per User

ARPU is simply the average amount of money generated per user, normally for the period of 1 month but you could use any time period you wanted. Many companies use ARPDU for daily check on what is going on. You can also segment this to ARPPU Average Revenue Per Paying User.

LTV = Lifetime Value

This is a fairly simple calculation, however there are quite a number of ways that you can work this out. As a rough starting point LTV is calculated by multiplying ARPU by the average player lifespan (which you can work out from churn rates). So if your ARPU (over a month) is $5 and your player lifecycle is 5 months then LTV = $25.

At the bottom of this post your will find an excellent infographic I found by kissmetrics which covers all the different ways you can work out LTV which you can then use to create an average LTV. The example they use is Starbucks but these calculations work for any business so long as you have data.

Use of Metrics

So to roughly gauge if what you are doing is making money you should now compare the CAC figure against the LTV figure. If your CAC figure is lower that means it is costing you less to acquire your users than you are making back from the game. This is a good thing! Ideally what you want to see however is that the LTV figure is several times the number of your CAC to start to cover everyone’s wages and pay the rent.

Note: Never rely solely on LTV and ARPU to make business decisions, you need to also be looking at your total revenue and user numbers for the period. As I mentioned at the beginning of the article these metrics do not tell the whole story.

If your numbers here are healthy it may be that you can afford to spend more money on marketing, though it would be wise to further analyze the data to decide where to focus this spend rather than diving straight in. By segmenting your data or even employing predictive modeling (something for another post) you can create super targeted marketing that works on a player by player basis.

In closing, what you need to remember about the above definitions is that they are metrics i.e. measurements of things that have already happened, they are not predictive. These are good indications that what you are doing is making you money but they cannot tell you if you will continue to do so or how to make more. They also are based entirely on the revenue you have seen during the period in question and nothing else. To re-iterate my earlier point if you now make fundamental gameplay changes based on chasing higher LTV and ARPU you could inadvertently alter your wider appeal and lose the ability to scale by not seeing the benefit of your nonpaying users. One final note is that these metrics are also averages and in a world of detail an average can be a dangerous thing to bet the farm on. The more detail you can get the better, so once you have got these basics the next steps would be to look at ARPU and LTV by user segments, either demographically or by play type or both. But that’s a story for another day.

Hopefully you found it useful and informative but one thing I believe is that you can always know more about Marketing and one of the best ways is to look at what others are doing. Whilst researching another subject I came across these two excellent presentations on PR and Marketing for Indies written from completely different marketing standpoints.

The first presentation is a little old now, originally presented at GDC in 2009 by Wolfire’s John Graham, but I think it is still full of great advice, especially for Indie developers working on a shoestring budget. What I like most about this presentation is the enthusiasm that comes across as well as the ingenuity of communicating with your community through whatever mediums you have available whilst being completely transparent with you fans. An accompanying write-up of the talk can be found on Gamasutra.

Wolfire On Making Indie Marketing Buzz 

The second presentation as I said comes from the entirely different end of the games food chain, Ubisoft, specifically Julien Wera the PR & Marketing Manager for Massive Entertainment. Once again however this is a presentation for Indies. Speaking at the Icelandic Games Industry organization in March 2012 Julien imparts his extensive knowledge from working on some of the biggest game brands on how to employ PR, Marketing and Community Management to reach new and existing fans. Interestingly he also give out some info normally missing from most presentations, prices for PR agencies. With a touch of Sun Tzu about it this presentation gives a solid guide on the main principles of modern games marketing.

PR & Marketing for Small Game Studios

Great, why didn’t we think of this sooner!

Well now you are dealing directly with your end user in a retail sense and that is a very different proposition to being a brand. I won’t get into the business models here and if you are working in this space you already know the basic mechanics of how to operate as a B2C business and make money from your game. However, whatever you might think about online retail they do have something that nearly every video game lacks, 20 years experience at perfecting online sales. If we then start to talk about retail in general, well add a couple of thousand years of getting people to buy stuff.

1995 and I am getting to grips with Donkey Kong Country 2 while Jeff Bezos starts an empire.

If you visit Amazon or Gamestop for a more demographically accurate option, you are looking at years and millions of dollars of innovation, testing and technology at work. They do what they do amazingly well. Now visit any game that includes a store of some kind, for virtual goods, game currency or boosts etc. Do you see the same level of attention to detail and care?

Given that these sections of your game are the ones that make you the money it’s amazing how many are slapdash basic additions with no merchandising, poor cart functionality and total disregard for what is major lament for most mobile developers with the iTunes or Android store, discoverability.

If you have made an amazing game with user friendly controls, outstanding visuals, that’s great to play why would you do it the disservice of having a terrible monetization process.

So let’s explore what we can do to improve in game stores and commerce. Just a quick note though, what I won’t cover here are in game monetization mechanics by which I mean pop-up offers, timed incentives or other prompts that happen during gameplay. That to me is a separate discussion topic, though the data driving these offers is relevant to stores and goods.

Learn from Retail

Below is a slide from a retail presentation on merchandising but every one of the three pillars is still relevant to items available within a video game.

Easy To Find

If you have hundreds of items available you need to be thinking about not only how you categorize these various goods but how you position them to your users and even which users see which items.

There is a great quote by Kim Soares the CEO of Kukouri Mobile Entertainment on discoverability.

Imagine walking up to an ice cream truck where they sell 500 000 different flavors. Maybe 100 flavors are mentioned in the window. Other 499 900 are just stuffed inside the van. It can very well be that the flavor you would like the most is one of the 499 900 at the back, but you have practically no way of picking that one. So you look at the ones in the window and pick one of those.

The entry point to your virtual goods or currency store should be optimized and make effective use of every space available. This is your chance to showcase what you have, push special offers or targeted goods based on user behavior. However it must remain obvious to the user how to drill down into categories or find other products.

Aside from discoverability which may or may not be an issue for your game depending on the numbers of items to be considered you should also be thinking about their relevancy.

A core player that already has most of your inventory does not want to see the same products every time they visit your store. This only starts to build the feeling that they have seen and done everything when in reality perhaps they have just been shielded or ill informed of the possibilities and products. The reverse is also true though. Does a new player really need to see high level items or be offered relatively expensive goods when they first start to play? Do they instead need tailored beginner items to help them on their tentative first steps. All your players are different, have different needs and responses to offers and items. If you are offering the same goods in the same way to everyone you are not treating your players as individuals.

It is standard retail practice to monitor customer’s behavior and then provide relevant product options. This could be with retargeting and showing them items they have previously considered or by providing alternative product suggestions. The more data that you have on your player the better you can provide what they need to get more out of your game.

Try to keep adding and retiring items if possible this will also help to keep the game and store environment fresh. If users feel there is a chance that an item may go permanently ”out of stock” they may be more willing to purchase it.

Easy to Evaluate

The amount of items I see in free to play (and other) games that have no description other than a title and a price is astounding. Would you feel comfortable buying a product online that you had no real knowledge of what it was, especially if the title is ambiguous? Almost as poor are item names and descriptions that require the player to have previous knowledge of the games mechanics or lore. This sends the message out that you either think they are stupid or just not good enough to own the item. People need to understand what they are buying and what seems obvious to you might be incomprehensible to another.

Use pictures extensively but make sure they are relevant and explanatory. Logos and in game reference images should be only additional to more obvious pictures in the store for explaining things. If possible also have video of the item being used, that way there can be no misunderstanding.

A player that spends their money, real or virtual on a useless or irrelevant item is a player that probably won’t trust your store ever again.

Sims product page for a delightful Renaissance bookcase. Note the Rococo features…

Easy to Buy

This is the Holy Grail for retail and the one process that all retailers will attempt to optimize first. If you go onto any accomplished retail site you will notice that getting from product to checkout is achieved in no more than 3 or 4 steps and increasingly with transparent commerce in just one step e.g. Amazons patented 1-Click purchase (which incidentally is easier to do within a game rather than retail due to its enclosed nature).

The reason for this fastracking of customers through checkout is that for every additional step you are losing significant percentages of customers. In fact basket abandonment rates in general can be around 70% and other than homepages are the biggest source of site dropouts as people change their mind or get distracted.

If you run a free to play game you also need to add on top of this that players just don’t really need to buy anything, they can play for free, so by paying they are doing something out of the ordinary.

Even if you have a wallet system and your entire store is one click purchases at some point that wallet will need to get replenished. If the user is then subjected to jump through 10 hoops, leaving the game environment and put through their paces by your payment solution provider of choice and then have to return back to game, possibly having to log back in or having lost their cart/item, the more and more likely it becomes that they abandon the purchase and possibly your game.

The more store and payment barriers you put in place the more likely, irrespective of how wonderful your game is, that people will give up and move on to the next title.

A Fourth Pillar?

I would add another pillar to the above diagram, Social. You should also make your goods and store as social as possible. This means allowing direct feedback on your goods and services, linking in social tools to allow commentary and sharing and even opening up you store via API’s to allow people to view, use and manipulate it outside of the game environment.

This gives your community much more involvement and insight into this aspect of your game but could also lead you down really exciting avenues of user generated goods and user curated stores. For example would you like to buy all the perfect items to make you the ultimate Bad Ass for your specific, Guild, Character, Class, Champion etc and wouldn’t you trust a player who already was the incarnation of this to provide the right goods over the game maker, who let’s face it might just want to make more cash out of you?

Valve and Steam have shown that whole cottage industries can spring up around games if the right tools and environment are provided. Even if you don’t fully open up your game to the possibilities of user generated content and items you should be allowing your players chance to share every aspect of their experience with your game and that includes the store and its goods.

Turns out the Mad Hatter was actually a business genius making 150K a year

Virtual Item and Store Optimization

Here is my list of Quick Wins for in-game commerce.

• Optimize your storefront real-estate.
• Make navigation simple.
• Make products easy to understand and evaluate.
• Employ Badging e.g. “Best Value”, “On Sale”.
• Create a product checklist: Images, Video, Description (long and short), Uses, Related products, Related Offers, Price etc.
• Make purchasing items and virtual currency as easy as possible.
• Don’t use tricks or hard sells.
• Do use offers and incentives.
• Cross promote wherever possible.
• Analyze behavior.
• Segment players.
• Use marketing to drive interest in items.
• Test, Test, Test!

Josh Burns from 6waves gives examples for maximizing revenue in Free-to-Play games. Originally presented at a game monetization event in May 2012. The presentation shares his learning’s from working on the Facebook games Kingdoms of Camelot and Ravenwood Faire. The title is best practice but it should be noted that these are practices that have worked in Facebook games rather than say downloadable client games. The advice is clear and very revenue focused. However for this reason it may not suit all projects due to its aggressive monetization stance. If your aims are more player centric some of the suggestions may be at odds with that or not fit with the flow of your game.

Mobile Social Gaming Market Guide

This is actually a PDF converted to a slides so it may be easier to download it for ease of reading. Created by Moby Affiliates it covers; promote your mobile game, generating downloads and loyal users, increasing your appstore ranking via optimization and using mobile app cross promotion networks. It’s a good overview of the mobile space as fairly up to date as it cover the fact that incentivized downloads are no longer relevant, something you may be aware of if you work in this space. If you want to know more about mobile acquisition strategies I can also really recommend this video from the recent casual connect conference.

It’s an A.R.M.’s Race (Acquisition, Retention and Monetization in Mobile Gaming)

A presentation by Tapjoy’s Brian Sapp, again it’s from the Game Monetization conference of last year. It covers tactics for mobile user acquisition, retention and monetization along with a launch checklist for new games. It also includes a list of important metrics you should be tracking. If you are unsure of the numerous acronyms used in the gaming and specifically free to play market Nick Lovell’s site gamesbrief has collated an excellent Glossary.

Global Domination for Your Social and Mobile Games

Another presentation from 6waves this time from Stephen Lee their Business Development Director. I really enjoyed this presentation because it covers one of my personal key best practice drivers, localization. If you truly want to be a global player you need to localize your product and marketing strategy not just translate it. The presentation is Asia based, specifically cracking the Japanese and Chinese markets but the overall guidelines can be used for any region.

Hopefully you have found these presentations as useful as I did. In parting I would add that these are guidelines and only the experience of these people and companies. What worked for them may not work for you and it comes down to what type of game, business and strategy you follow. My advice is to cherry pick ideas that fit with your goals and then test them extensively. However some rules are universal though, have a good product, engage your users and localize wherever possible. If you are following these three principles then you already have a solid base from which to expand.

Think of an API as a doorway into a vault of information, that once you have access to you can use for whatever you want (within the rules set by the API owner). The way that the API is protected is with a key, and this key only works for defined sets of information. An example of an API is the Google Maps tool. People are able to get a key to access the data that creates Google Maps and then manipulate or mashup (mix) it with their own information to produce an all new maps e.g. http://www.walkjogrun.net/

The effort that would have been required to produce map data of the standard available to Google would have taken millions of dollars. Now with an API call you can access it instantly and use it to create entirely new maps, resources and tools.

There are currently an estimated 2443 Mashups of Google Maps on the web and Google themselves have over 5 billion API calls every day, though Twitter leads the API chart with over 13 Billion calls a day.

I make games not maps…

If you have an established game or franchise chances are you already have a large group of people that like what you do. You may have big user database and strong following on Twitter, Facebook etc. Wouldn’t it be great though to give these people more, more tools and more ways to interact with your game and franchise?

You probably have lots of ideas how you might do this but just haven’t the time or resource to invest in building things like apps or game specific social tools. Well by opening up your business with (and indeed to) API’s you can outsource your ideas and literally set your fans free to create the tools they want and need to grow your community.

Let’s say you have an MMO with lots of players stats, rankings, Guilds etc. You hold all this information centrally and players have to come to the site to get their stats and manually lookup their friends info. Now imagine you allowed access to all this information via an API. This means that fans can now use that data to produce all manner of things without any input from you.

They could produce leaderboards for their guilds, track top players and how they progressed, and get instant updates on new items that were relevant to them. They could do this within web communities or even produce their own apps. Imagine letting your community be able to utilize and create brand new ways to interpret your data.

You could even take this further. Let’s say you have a store within your game, ordinarily only accessible via the game environment. With API’s you could open this up to your community or affiliates and let people create apps and curated stores relevant to them. This is something Amazon has been doing in retail for years with its affiliates.

Of course there is risk involved in opening up your business and you must always fully understand what access you are giving and to who.

However API’s don’t necessarily need to be shared with any external parties to be successful additions to your business.

Let’s imagine you have a store as part of your game or company set up, selling either your games or perhaps in game items. People wanting to buy a product have to go into the store to purchase your items. With API’s however you can effectively have that store wherever you want. If you have a franchise website you could use API’s to create a mini store on that site, still powered by the normal store but pulling product information, prices and possibly even the cart itself through to your franchise site.

It’s this flexibility that API’s create that could radically alter the way you think about how your game could and should interact with your players.

API’s could also work for you as a resource as well and chances are you are already utilizing them. If you have ‘login with Facebook’ or a twitter feed on your site you are already harnessing API’s from these social network to further enhance your offering. These are literally the tip of the iceberg as far as options go and for the marketers amongst you a really exciting prospect.

More and more marketing companies and tools are offering API’s, this gives you almost instant integrations into your own tools and platforms. This means you could plug API’s directly into your CRM or ecommerce setup to create marketing mashups of your user data and these outside tools and resources. The possibilities for these marketing setups are equally limitless giving you the ability to layer in analytics, retargeting, and paid search, social tools, testing and email directly, without having to export your user data into other systems.

API’s could be your greatest marketing and content marketing tool, empowering you and your players so don’t ignore the possibilities.

API Info Links

World of Warcraft API’s Forum + Documentation

Programmable Web – For everything API’s and Mashups

Wikipedia’s API page

Be careful how you approach this field of business. It’s very easy to get carried away with the enthusiasm for a partnership that seems on the surface to offer potentially huge rewards and an expansion of your own reach. You must always drill the details down to one single question “Cui bono” To whose benefit? And the right answers is not “yours” but “your players”.

Let’s explore a scenario: Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net want to talk to your 1 million players. They think that your users are their ideal demographic, in that the majority of them have heads.

The offer is either:

1. $1M in return for access to your users, through email or perhaps via placed ads etc.
2. Reciprocal access for you to 2 million Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net users.

Both of these may seem innocuous enough on the surface but here is the reality of what you are saying by accepting either offer.

1. For $1M I am willing to sell out my users.
2. 2 million strangers of dubious demographic quality are worth more to me than the 1 million dedicated fans I already have.

Still sound like a good idea?

Never accept a partnership that will damage your users or their perception of your company. Your players are the ones that built your company and if you treat them like a saleable asset you are sending out a clear message, that you do not care about them.

However, partnerships can bring huge rewards for you and your players if done correctly.

Sponsorship can be a good example of this. Again we are not talking about a cold exchange of access for cash but a deal that benefits your players.

Let’s imagine you want to host an event for your players to meet up. Events are hideously expensive with lots of hidden fees for stands, staff, flyers, catering, external internet access etc. Getting an outside sponsor is a way to alleviate these costs and pay for the event you want to provide to your players. People are very comfortable with sponsorship these days, but as with anything it must be in the right context and done in a way that is respectful of what the original aim was. I would take this further however and say that the sponsors need to directly benefit your users. In the case of our event that could be a goody bag for everyone who arrives filled with free, relevant and desirable items. This works for everyone. You get sponsorship, the sponsor shows that they not only care about your business but also your users and the players get real benefit rather than enforced advertising.

Now advertising is not as black and white as the examples I mentions above so you may worry about marketing to your users but again if driven from the “player benefit” mindset there is no reason to simply discount it. You can be as strict as you want with how 3^rd parties are able to interact with your players, sure you may not have advertisers lining up but in the long run you remain genuine.

However advertising is part of life and people are used to seeing it. So long as it remains relevant and non-intrusive it can be a part of what you do. No one stopped using Google because they have adverts in the searches or stopped playing angry birds because of a banner advert in the top corner. This works because it keeps Google and Angry birds free, it benefits the user.

Product placement is another huge area that can provide revenue or benefit though it is not without its dangers. Again it has to be done within context and sympathetically to the game or environment. Never create content that serves no purpose other than to advertise a product; it immediately cheapens what you are trying to do.

Lucky for Snake that Doritos tree was there.

That said we all live in a world where brands are everywhere, so unless your game is set in a fantasy realm why wouldn’t your character drink a certain brand of cola or eat a pizza from a chain? So long as them eating or drinking was part of the original script surely it makes no difference what is on the can or box. Just be aware that other brands will not care about your artistic and moral standpoint. They want a clear on screen brand image, be sure ahead of time that it’s clear what you are and are not willing to do.

One other way to allow advertising and benefit users is to provide something to your users for free or at a discount. It should always be relevant though. A gamer might interact and even like to get information offering them exclusive offers on gaming mice but push them life insurance and whatever relationship you had with them previously is now forever damaged.

All of the above works in reverse as well. You can get your game into many other environments and brands to increase awareness. There are plenty of graphics cards being sold that are packaged with free steam codes for games etc. In Russia antivirus company Kaspersky gives away Gold for World of Tanks with its products.

Antivirus and Tanks? Well they both offer protection!

Now its up to the other party to see the benefit in what you are offering. Many companies will see partnering with a games company as a way to increase their connection with the key 16-35 (or younger) demographic and as long as this does not impact your player base and potentially brings you more users then it may still be a good partnership.

One thing you may be tempted to do is partner with another games company, especially if you are a start-up. This could be very quick way to end a respectful business or knowledge sharing relationship you have with that company. At the end of the day you are both competing for the same thing, a gamer’s time. So whilst external non-gaming 3^rd parties may have a very different agenda, tactics and marketing viewpoint, they are rarely going to see you as a competitor.

Partnerships are not easy, many larger companies hire specialist or agencies to promote this kind of activity. That said if you have few contacts or attend any events don’t be afraid to drop possibilities into conversation. From a budget perspective a partnership is a much lower risk option to running traditional advertising.

Once you do have a partnership in place, especially if it is not only strong but player centric  make sure you do back it up with PR and marketing. A benefit is no good if no one knows about it.

In closing just remember that whatever partnership deal you strike it needs to follow the simple “who benefits” rule. If the partnership truly benefits users and your company then its a partnership worth pursuing.

UPDATE: On my web travels I found this deck that covers a pretty extensive A-Z of branded in game items. It’s quite useful to see the vast range of possibilities that can be utilized for partnering with 3rd parties and brands. A word of warning though, many examples are from Second Life which a number of non gaming companies got burned on expecting it to be the next big thing and drive huge brand exposure and revenue. As such many invested heavily never to see a return. Brands are now much more savvy when it comes to promotion in games and in these more economically stringent times will be looking for guaranteed returns, if not financially then with reach backed up from hard data.

Branded Virtual Goods Q3 2012 – By KZero Worldwide

Russia is an amazing country yet to reach its full potential but still Europe’s No1# market for video games. If you are not seriously considering marketing your product in Russia you are potentially missing out on huge revenue as well as some of the most hard core PC Gamers on the planet.

In conducting my research I found several excellent sources of information. Generally the info is not geared towards video games hence my need to create a specifically game orientated resource. Nevertheless the presentations below are a great way to find out about the wider market and online space in Russia.

The first presentation I want to share with you was given by Ignaty Dyakov of Russia Local Ltd at the Federation of Small Businesses Central London on 21st August, 2012. The slides are a great insight into how perceptions of Russian consumers need to be altered but also how very different the culture can be. It also has some hints and tips on doing business in Russia.

The second presentation is from the IAB (The Internet Advertising Bureau) on the current digital landscape in Russia: infrastructure, key players, numbers, audience and money. It also includes a comparison with Spanish and other European markets. The key takeaways are the features and differences of search and social landscapes as well as how Russian customers get online and interact with each other. I found the information on Russian video portals exceptionally interesting as this is a key social and content marketing aspect of modern Russian gaming.

The final presentation is also the largest and most detailed. At over 100 slides its not a quick read but I don’t think (apart from my own presentation!) you will find a more comprehensive free document on the digital market in Russia. Produced by faberNovel is covers in depth socioeconomic factors along with statistics on market size, top Russian players, key pitfalls and barriers to entry and the future of the market.

Hopefully these three presentations, along with my own can help you not only get excited about doing business in Russia but also succeeding.

And you have no idea how the game you are selling works.

Luckily there are a bunch of guys that do. You will be able to spot them pretty easily; they are the guys that don’t want to talk to you, maybe even don’t like you very much. You do after all work in Marketing….

By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising…kill yourself. Thank you. [Bill Hicks]

I am talking about video game designers/developers. They have spent months maybe even years carefully crafting, honing and perfecting a game that has probably occupied their every waking thought. It’s finished and now they have to hand over their baby to you to sell it and they most likely have no control how you do that.

Now maybe you know your industry and marketing, maybe you are even a hard core gamer yourself, but if you are going to market this new game the best way to do it is to know your product inside and out.

So who knows a game more than the people who built it?

Spend time getting to know the game designers, artists, story boarders, QA, Music technicians, animators and everyone who is hands on making the game. These are the people that really know what makes the game tick, they have spent countless hours making the navigation panes in the options work perfectly or the sound a tin can you will never need makes when you accidently knock it off a table. Can you think of anywhere else where you will find this level of in depth knowledge on a product you want to promote?

Now for any developers feeling smug at this point the door swings both ways. If you are sat in a meeting planning how monetization will work or how log-in pages should look, go find yourself someone from Marketing.

Do you have any idea how marketing will drive users to your game? No? So grab someone from marketing and involve them in the actual building of these mechanics. They may not have any idea how to build a web page or the finer points of C++ but they should be able to tell you what kind of page layout converts users quickly or how a player might arrive at your game and in what kind of mindset.

At worst they get a heads up of what kind of experience a player will have and its damn sight easier to market a game when you know what is going to happen than try to work it out and then change things later.

So if you’re a video game marketer make sure you are following game development from the earliest point possible. It will make your marketing more targeted and successful.

If you are a game developer don’t ignore marketing. Sooner or later you need to promote your game and if no one knows about it, no one is going to play it.

If you have content that is interesting or engaging people will come to you to get it.

By content I mean anything that is not directly involved in the sale of your product (though the lines are blurred here if the act of selling your product is somehow fun or engaging). Content can be pictures, videos, magazines, blogs and articles. Your game itself can be content.

The idea of content marketing has actually been around for hundreds of years, though the term is relatively new. Many companies have provided ancillary goods or services for free in an attempt to add value and sell their core business e.g. Michelin Guides.

Sadly today many people think that content marketing is filling web page after web page with mindless banal content in a quantity over quality fashion. This harks back to poor black hat SEO techniques and other such spammery or a few years ago where sites looking to get a Google boost would create hundreds or even thousands of articles on their sites, blogs and article submission portals all based around some keywords relevant to their site.

Never create content you don’t believe in yourself or serves no purpose as either entertainment or information.

OK but I don’t have any content!

It’s always hard to start with a blank page but think about what you already have. If you have been creating a game it’s likely you already have an excess of content just lying around without realizing it.

Visual Content

• Artwork – Sketched out some early ideas? Scan then onto your site.
• Don’t be afraid to open this out to fan-art too.
• Game maps. Offer handy maps of your games for those in need.
• Screenshots – Take some hi-res shots of your game in action.
• Wallpapers – Just take some of your artwork and scale to some standard monitor sizes.
• Video. Video is your best friend and people want to see it. Thanks to YouTube you don’t need to even host it yourself.
• Make a trailer. You don’t need James Earl Jones doing the voiceovers just some licensed or public domain music over the top will do if necessary but the more time you invest here the better.
• Developer diaries. Don’t be shy; people want to know what you are doing!
• Instructional videos. Explain how to play your game. The quickest way to lose someone is to not explain how to play properly and no one wants to read endless instructions, but keep these video short and punchy, ideally segmented into different areas of gameplay.

• Anime/Live Action short. This is probably outside of the realm of smaller developers but if you are producing cut scenes for your game anyway you could also make some stand-alone pieces that complement the main game or fill in back-story.

Just on the point of using video on websites, always make sure that you are not just embedding video on its own. Always add written descriptions and if possible linked news pieces. This not only makes your content more compelling but means that search engines have something to “read” other than a YouTube link.

Video is a remarkable tool that you need to use to your advantage; nothing can convey your message quicker and more effectively

Check out this video by Introversion Software for their game Prison Architect.

It’s humorous and above all honest, which goes a long way to creating trust with your end user. They have been very clear that their game is not finished and has some gameplay quirks but turned this to their advantage to create this funny video promoting their funding program.

So what else could you use for content? 

1. Music. Did you create original music for you game? Unless you are using it as a pre-order bonus or other perk make it available on your site and let it stand alone but within the overall offering.
2. Short Stories/Novels. Turn your game into a short story or use a side quest characters to flesh out some backstory. Some of the biggest games have subsequently been turned into fully fledged novels such as Halo and Assassins Creed and you already own the idea. You could even turn this over to the community to come up with best short story.
3. Game Guides. Sometimes you just need a good old fashioned game guide, especially if you have a complex game so whilst video is quick and easy to understand its worth investing some time on these too.
4. Comics. Many games are now producing a comic or graphic novel to complement their titles. It obviously represents a significant undertaking but compared to other forms of marketing and considering your in house talent may be an interesting idea. If you created story boards for your game maybe you could rework these into a comic book?
5. News/Blogs. It might seem like a chore but just updating a news feed or blog every couple of days (ideally then linked into twitter/Facebook et al) with progress or any info goes a long way to helping you keep engagement with your user.
6. Projects list/Roadmap. Let people know what’s coming up next.
7. Forums. BEWARE before building a forum; these can end up being horrible, horrible places. Unless you have a particularly niche product, say train Sims etc. or are willing to police them be prepared for them to be the home of moaners or newbie haters.

So as you can see you already have quite a lot of content you could be working with or creating and this is far from an exhaustive list.

Many games are now relying on content marketing and in some cases such as Hawken almost completely.

Below is a presentation given by Mark Long of Meteor Entertainment at the London Games conference about how they were using content marketing and the concept of trans media (telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats) and subsequent word of mouth to promote their game.

My final piece of advice on content is be careful. Once you post something, especially video its very hard if not impossible to delete it. So just use common sense and know your audience as to what content you think they would like. A funny video can quite easily be seen as offensive to other people so monitor your output.