Production verifying Unity IAP

Check out our interview with Unity’s Rambod Kermanizadeh, where he outlines the strategic advantages and expansion of Unity IAP, emphasizing how it provides studios with greater control over their in-game economies and revenue streams. He also discusses production verifying the tech and working with SciPlay.

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.

PRODUCTION VERIFYING UNITY IAP

RAMBOD KERMANIZADEH: When it comes to production verifying Unity IAP, we're in close partnership with our Unity Studio Productions team, as well as our internal publisher with Supersonic. This is where we're going live across the Supersonic portfolio with Unity IAP to actually really battle test the service and the offering to ensure that we're meeting the needs of our customers.

SciPlay is going to 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 going to enable us to really get our hands on the ground with them and really figure out what makes sense for their business. Because we feel that, alongside the effort with Supersonic, this will really make sure that this meets the needs of the most serious and most ambitious developers.

FORREST STOWE: The team decided to take part in that production verification process, largely because, you know, when you go through how the company makes money, but specifically how the companies sometimes fails to make money, bad builds, bad releases cost us incredible amounts of, you know, potential revenue that gets lost.

Players have a negative experience and they churn from the game, and so we try really hard to do as much verification of our own games as we can. But we have always wanted to be able to have Unity take the stance they’re taking now on making sure that stability is the primary thing that they're driving for, that they are releasing rock solid LTS versions, that they are going through all these steps and we want to be as big a part of that as we can be.

LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE OF UNITY IAP

TIMOTHY MOORE: What is next for SciPlay and Unity IAP is the evaluation of what we have versus what it's going to take for us to onboard. We have a lot of infrastructure already devoted to this, and so we're going to start by evaluating what we have and then, brick by brick, looking at what we can move over so that we can get out of the IAP business. We want to be a great games company, so everything that allows us to focus on the thing that we care about the most is pretty exciting.

RAMBOD KERMANIZADEH: We're really looking forward to helping studios better operate their in-game economies and live service. So, that means things like understanding, am I flooding too much currency in the economy right now with my new event? Do I have enough syncs and sources? And really just powering them with the data that they need to go to make more informed decisions. As well as things like cross-platform inventory management and in-game catalog management as well.

Check out more stories from Unity developers on the Unity Blog and Resource Hub.