Square Enix is a gaming company headquartered in Japan.
Hiroki Fujimoto is the producer of WAR OF THE VISIONS FINAL FANTASY BRAVE EXVIUS Global version at Square Enix. Read on to hear how he and his team use the ironSource offerwall to double revenue for their game.
Adding a new revenue stream
Our team at Square Enix has been using ironSource’s mediation platform to manage our ad monetization strategy for nearly 2 years - mostly for rewarded videos. In March, we released our latest title WAR OF THE VISIONS FINAL FANTASY BRAVE EXVIUS, and as usual, went live with rewarded videos right away. Though we were seeing decent monetization results, we wanted to see if there was a way to increase ad revenue even further.
We heard through the industry that the ironSource offerwall was a strong ad unit for generating incremental revenue, and so we reached out to them about integrating the ironSource offerwall into our game and running a performance test for a limited period of time.
Working with the product team
Going into the test, we were slightly concerned about how our users would react if they were halfway through an offer at the same time we decided to end the offerwall test.
"It was an incredible amount of teamwork and dedication from the ironSource team to go to such lengths for us."
- Hiroki Fujimoto, Producer at Square Enix
Hearing our concerns, ironSource’s product team suggested a solution, and built a framework so that users could see the traffic driver to the offerwall even after the test ends - there’d just be no new offers available. This way, no new offerwall users could get started, but previous offerwall users can complete their tasks and get rewarded. It was an incredible amount of teamwork and dedication from the ironSource team to go to such lengths for us.
© 2019, 2020 SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD. All Rights Reserved. Co-Developed by gumi Inc. LOGO ILLUSTRATION: © 2018 YOSHITAKA AMANO
Offerwall’s effect on in-app purchases
Since the majority of our revenue is driven by in-app purchases, we also weren’t sure how the offerwall, which is essentially an alternative in-game store, would affect in-app purchase revenue.
Around the same time we launched the offerwall, ironSource had just hosted a webinar with Kongregate about the impact of offerwall monetization on in-game metrics. Kongregate noted that in all the tests they ran, they found there was no need to segment users on the offerwall and instead it was more lucrative to show the offerwall to as many users as possible. Taking their insights into account, we decided to do the same in War of the Visions.
Ultimately, we found that adding the offerwall didn't affect our in-app purchase rate, and only drove high incremental ad revenue for our game.
Doubling our ad revenue and increasing ARPDAU 5x
Specifically, our revenue doubled across the board. In the US, our maximum eCPM was more than twice the benchmark for our category, while our ARPDAU in the US on Android grew 5x.
Clearly, the offerwall test was a massive success. We were only able to achieve this excellent performance because of ironSource's amazing support - we are truly thankful to the team.
