Growing global game revenue with Unity IAP
Check out our interview with Unity’s Rambod Kermanizadeh, along with SciPlay’s Forrest Stowe and Timothy Moore, who discuss how the latest advancements in Unity’s in-app purchase (IAP) product help developers reclaim their margins, navigate complex regional regulations, and streamline the player experience.
This video explores how moving beyond traditional platform walled gardens and adopting a direct-to-consumer strategy can change your game's economy.
RAMBOD KERMANIZADEH: The flexibility of using IAP effectively lets people have more leverage over their negotiations with third party payment processors. Where, now, if one becomes better than another, they can get better rates, we can enable them over time to essentially just change providers by flipping a feature flag on the backend without needing to update their game client.
You know, as the walled gardens around these platforms break down, they no longer are subjected to this 30% platform tax that they're paying. And really, you know, they can get anywhere between 20% to 25% of the margin back.
In its current iteration, Unity IAP is effectively a wrapper around the platform SDKs. So, instead of developers having to integrate the native SDKs from the mobile platform stores, they integrate our IAP product, which then gives them one C-sharp layer that they can do the purchasing through those platforms. And the benefit is for developers, they don't have to have branching code paths, messing around with these native SDKs and a bunch of different versions of their game for the different platforms. So this way they can have one version and deploy to all the platforms that we support without having to deal with all half-half.
We're really expanding the reach of the product offering where we're adding things like cross-platform entitlement management, skew management, and the things that actually help studios run their in-game economies more than just purchasing.
The thing I'm super excited about is the web shop and more direct-to-consumer space with alternative transaction processors, where we're really taking that same abstraction layer philosophy and bringing that to these third-party transaction processors. This is where they get a C-sharp API for developers to integrate that standardize across all of them, as well as web hooks on the backend. These are also going to be standardized to just make that integration easier and fundamentally let studios really just pick and choose and mix and match multiple providers all at once, really giving them choice and control.
We partner with Stripe, who's a programmable financial services company, as well Coda, that's a leading web shop partner to game publishers.
OPTIMIZING PRICING STRATEGY AND REGIONAL ROLLOUTS
RAMBOD KERMANIZADEH: When it comes to optimizing the pricing strategy and your end-game economy strategy for different local regions and laws, what it really comes down to is that legislation is fundamentally different in each region.
So, developers have to be really careful about being compliant, which means in some regions you can link out to a webshop. In some regions, you can just process transactions through an alternative method inside the app.
But even going beyond that, there's certain regions, for example, like in India, where people actually pay through their phone carrier as opposed to paying through credit cards.
So, it's really important, especially in these emerging markets, to really have a more native commerce experience that really meets those people there and the players there exactly where they are.
WORKING TOGETHER WITH SCIPLAY
RAMBOD KERMANIZADEH: SciPlay is gonna be a fantastic partner to us. They're already really deeply exploring the space and they know exactly what they're looking for. So this partnership with SciPlay is gonna enable us to really get in our hands on the ground with them and really figure out what makes sense for their business.
TIMOTHY MOORE: The ability to control rollouts in a regional way is hugely important for SciPlay. I think people tend to think of global rollouts as exactly one thing, but in reality, they're about a thousand micro-launches – Korea isn't China, and Canada isn't Germany,
and being aware of all of the nuances from one region to another, whether those be legal or regulatory, or even just behavioral nuances, is table stakes for anybody who wants to operate like that.
What Unity is offering, the ability to use existing segmentation and targeting systems without disrupting the revenue but taking advantage of these updates, is a game changer.
MINIMIZING FRICTION IN THE PLAYER EXPERIENCE
RAMBOD KERMANIZADEH: In order to simplify the purchasing experience for players, one of the things that we're really looking forward to with the new Unity IAP experience is actually enabling studios to better target their player cohorts using their own internal data.
We want to put that power in developers hands to really be able to fine-tune that without necessarily putting all of the payment options right in front of their players and really overwhelming them throughout that process.
FORREST STOWE: The Unity IAP will definitely help to minimize friction in the player experience. And first of all, that's a huge thing for our players.
Anytime you put any sort of barriers to the purchase flow in front of a player, it can really negatively impact the experience for them. It causes them to get a little squeamish about, hey, I don't remember this looking this way or whatever.
So standardization, removing friction, it's almost always top of mind for everything we build, whether it's a payment flow or not. But specifically in the case of payments, I think this really puts us in a position to have a very consistent user experience, a very consistent fulfillment experience, and a very non-invasive and non-disruptive thing for players.
So, we can take advantage of these new payment providers as they come online without actually making the players have to learn a new login system or a new payment flow.
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