gift card or something like that why? they've gone into install and sort of funded a wallet, right but the fact of the matter is, what essentially ends up happening is you have you have an experience in your game that the user feels is worth the value of paying for and again, you know, like, like, like talking about engagement in games, right? why would a user be willing to, to sort of exchange money for something in a game? and that's typically related to the user's expectation of also playing this game two weeks from now? right? yes, they're investing yeah, you're investing in your future experience in this game? right? you know, so so it's another place where this this long-term engagement becomes very important, right? but a lot of times what people are buying are like, simple things, like more lives, or an item, or whatever it is that sort of, and in some of our games that are multiplayer, we even have people playing for things that are purely sort of cosmetic, buying a different hat, because then other people can see the hat that hat, but the hat, the hat has no function, right? sure tony morelan 20 57 so it's just being able to create their own identity, you know, within that game, chris benjaminsen 21 02 it's no different than people buying clothes in the real world, you know? tony morelan 21 05 sure, sure so how do you look at your player demographics for getting the best returns on iap? chris benjaminsen 21 10 i? well, first of all, that's a per game thing right? you know, we have, we have games that appeal to 50 plus women and we have games that appeal to like, like, a young male audience right so that's, that's very individualized per game fundamentally, though, there are some there are some core mechanics that always worked really well, if you can proposition a user to, to exchange money for time yeah so something where they can progress faster if they if they put money in is typically a very strong mechanic, regardless of who the consumer is and then, like we do the thing that successful game developers, do, we spend a lot of time looking at data and looking at, you know, what are the flows that leads to a conversion? so somebody's actually putting money into the system? how do we how do we balance those metrics such that we sort of get the most statistical value of, and we use, we use tools such as ad split testing, okay, where you run, run two versions of the game at the same time, and then you measure which one performs better? and then you make that diversion that everybody plays? tony morelan 22 16 yeah, yeah, no, that's great i've heard that that is a pretty important aspect, not just in the gaming industry, but just with, you know, ads and marketing to do a b testing chris benjaminsen 22 26 yeah, we even do something it's called multi variant testing, right and we should not go into the details, but it becomes very complex very quickly tony morelan 22 33 sure, sure so what other mobile game monetization models do you consider like, you know, premium paid apps or paid user acquisitions, you had mentioned that chris benjaminsen 22 43 we did experiment a little bit with premium paid apps, but it's a very, it's a very tough market and, and it's not, it's not something where we found a lot of a lot of success, like we generally see more successful, and we can just sort of allow anyone to play the games, and not without having that limitation, right and we do both interstitial based advertisement, which is unprompted and then rewarded video type advertisement, where the user gets a reward for watching an advertisement but when a user sort of opts to watch an ad, right, you know, so you could imagine that, so this tony morelan 23 14 is during gameplay, there would be a moment where then a video would play, and they would watch that chris benjaminsen 23 18 yeah so a simple example could be you know, that you have just died yeah and you can revive by watching an advertisement and not paying a coin okay right so giving the user the choice between, say, watching an advertisement and spending a bit of time versus spending a bit of their money, right, you know, so and it's a very high value format because the user has elected to watch an advertisement so you know, the users there, yes, you know, they're engaged and they're just sitting there waiting, right? so advertisements are typically willing to pay a high price for that type of advertising tony morelan 23 54 and you'd mentioned interstitial ads so explain what that is for someone who's new to game development? chris benjaminsen 24 00 yeah so it's a bit like to have to get on television so something is happening on your screen, and then suddenly does an advertisement and something else is happening, right? you know, so it's an ad that is that is shown to the user, like interstitial technically means an advertisement that runs before something starts, right but it's used interchangeably in the games industry to mean like an ad before something starts on ad in the middle of something on that after something happened okay, we try to be cautious of using those type of advertisements sort of out of order like we don't want to interrupt a user while they're playing yeah so we will typically only put those in so like, for whatever reason, your game session has ended, and you have just elected to press play again and that's where we would put in those type of advertisements you do have games out there, which are you can imagine you're playing a solitaire game and then put an ad pops up in the middle of it right and you have to sit down wait till you can continue your game and we try to stay away from that tony morelan 24 55 i see i see what about subscriptions have you guys read any subscription models on your games? so, yeah, we've chris benjaminsen 25 00 run a, we run a few experiments here and it's a relatively new area of monetization for us but we have run experiments where our games have been sort of presented as a games club so rather than having advertisement or having, you know, purchases in the game, you can just play them completely for free if you had a subscription through a third party, right and some of our debug games to the kind of stuff we're building now definitely lends itself well towards being able to support subscriptions subscriptions to free to play games these days, mostly expresses themselves as season passes so you like buy a season pass subscription, and then you get like, extra rewards while you play for a period of time and then that time period is up and then you know, you can buy the next season pass as well, or continue your subscription or whatever it is, right you know, that's, that's the model of like, a, like a fortnight or those type of games tony morelan 25 52 got it so we've talked about in app purchase, aap, you know, there's another category to monetization called ia, which is in app advertising and i think, under that falls, the, you know, the rewarded videos, these interstitial ads have also heard of something called offer walls can you explain what is an offer wall? chris benjaminsen 26 11 yeah, we actually don't think we have any games library or footballs anywhere but it's, it's basically, you know, you can get a reward in your game for doing another action right? so again, it's user opt in the use of one something and find alpha wallets typically, like extra coins, or whatever in the game and to get a get sort of a list of different options for things they could be doing right now to have some level of value and that can go all the way from, you know, signing up to a website, all the way up to you know, committing yourself to four years of sirius xm radio in the us, oh, really, you know, or whatever right? you know, and as there's different types of reward levels of that, right so but they can be significant, right so like that it's, it's sort of a way for other companies to interact with that consumer and get them to do something that has value to them and date and pay you for that service so it's a bit sort of a direct affiliate program or something like okay, okay yeah okay tony morelan 27 11 interesting so, you know, a lot of what we talked about now have been in game, you know, advertising for monetization so what about paid user acquisition? so actually going out there and advertising for your game? so you guys are active in that area? chris benjaminsen 27 23 not particularly, it's something we are exploring, and it is something that i believe it's going to be very important for the future of frp yeah but historically, it's not something that we done to a huge extent however, it is an area where we actually partner with the samsung galaxy appstore team, where we were looking at what is the best path for somebody who is publishing on the samsung galaxy app store to find sort of pockets of uses that can be that can be purchased right? tony morelan 27 51 okay okay so of all these different ways that we've talked about when it comes to monetization, what would you say is the most effective way in why? chris benjaminsen 28 00 and so there's many answers to that what has been the most successful for frvr suffice advertisement, that has mostly down to the kind of games that we have been building historically and the kind of games we've been building historically has mostly been the result of the capabilities for the platforms, our games has been available on, which, by and large, have not supported in app purchases however, if you were to look at where is the most potential value, it's most definitely in the in-app purchase space, right? like the potential value that you can derive from a single user is larger in app purchases than any other way you can monetize that user, even with subscriptions, right? make some simple math, you know, rewarded video is considered valuable, right but if you have a player, sort of watching 1000 ads a month, that might sort of in the united states be worth $20, or thereabouts, where $20 is not an uncommon average transactions for a central user to spending in app purchases, right and people typically buy more than once sort of the opportunity to create a great business around in app purchases is much higher, and opportunity to create a great business purely from advertisement tony morelan 29 08 got it? what would you say would be some advice that you can give for a developer looking to integrate iap? chris benjaminsen 29 15 like, like, it goes back to what we talked about earlier right? you know, build deep experiences, right? sure for like engagements, yeah, long engagements, and then then allow people to buy something that they, you know, feel like they're going to get value from a long period of time right and i think an important thing there is you must be trustworthy as a developer yeah right you know, like, like, like, the player must trust you to not to screw them over so if you have all kinds of other stuff into games, where they feel cheated, they're not going to give you their money or if you cheat them, they're only going to do it once right? yeah you know, so you actually have to provide something that brings real value to the user otherwise, they're, they're not going to engage with that thing right like they're not, they're not stupid they are very clever tony morelan 29 57 yeah so let's talk about a how you guys go about acquiring games for frvr? what do you look for? chris benjaminsen 30 03 like we look for, for great teams and i think it's important here that we are publisher, right? so we work with developers who take a fair amount of that total risk of building a game sometimes you find the games, right but predominantly, we work with great teams that is passionate about the game that they're working on and that's, that's mostly what we look for okay and then we help though, those developers to go and, and build fantastic games, right but due to the nature of our platform, at least how its structured right? now, you must basically build the game from scratch on top of stuff so so we're not a publisher that can sort of accept a game that somebody's already built, and say, yeah, we'll publish that it's more sort of a cool collaborative co development process, where we work together with developers to create fantastic things that work on top of our platform tony morelan 30 51 you know, i heard somewhere that between 50 to 1000 games are added to the app store's every day so i know it's a huge competition when it comes to games what's your strategy for discoverability? chris benjaminsen 31 03 i like as we talked about, go to the user where they are, rather than trying to drag them to the app store where it's very competitive, right and, like we use, we use all the tricks including branding, like we now have significant volume of people just searching for our games every day, both in app stores and on google, right and i truly did that basic strategy of saying let's bring our games to where the users are, has been very, very successful for us, and allowed us to sort of get in front of all of these consumers without diving deep into cost positive user acquisition and things like that and dental labs though, say they're hyper competitive, it gets very, very hard to get your game there, right and people talk about all of these things like influencer, marketing, and whatever and they don't call it user acquisition, but that's just what it is right? you know, it's just a different way of doing it right you know, it's all of these hacks to try to get in front of the user tony morelan 31 54 so are you using tools like creating promotional trailer videos and posting them on youtube? chris benjaminsen 32 00 we do we do that for some of our debug games, like a game like wells frvr yeah there's like there's a content team that creates content for social media that being you know; youtube and facebook and i think we even have posts on tik tok okay, tony morelan 32 14 so you guys have a ton of experience now, when it when it comes to publishing games? i'm sure you faced a few challenges can you share some stories and how you overcame those challenges? chris benjaminsen 32 24 a lot of our challenges is around scale right? you know, so we have 70 games on 39 platforms right wow and that didn't that in itself is a big number, right? to sort of, sort of manage this, like, that's more than 2000 combinations, almost 3000 combinations, right? we also have all of those games in 20 languages so when you when you sort of factor in those combinations, that's 50,000 combinations, right? and if you want localize screenshots, yeah, that's no way you could do that with humans, right and a lot of ways we try to solve with technology, right? that's what the what the frvr platform does, okay, encapsulate just the complexity of trying to do all of these things into sort of a unified platform and that goes for what is a good experience on the samsung galaxy appstore, like the samsung galaxy appstore has specific capabilities and specific api's and specific sort of things that work particularly well on a platform and if every developer had to consider that for all the platforms we were on, they would be spending none of their time making great games so we encapsulate that complexity into our platform and that's sort of the recipe that makes frvr work that's sort of removing humans from the equation, basically, tony morelan 33 42 that's interesting i mean, i can totally see how you guys are able to scale your reach with having so many games, but you've got quite a team behind so it's not all automated, you still do need to have those employees to support that chris benjaminsen 33 56 yeah, but like, 95% of those people work on the platform, right? to build the to build the infrastructure, right and frvr is also a company that's been growing quite a lot, i think, okay, two years ago, we were we were fewer than 20 people right? so a lot of the people who actually worked at frvr now people who joined us in the last year tony morelan 34 15 so what are some of the trends that you've seen in the in the gaming industry chris benjaminsen 34 19 or hotels that there's a lot of them right you know, there's a like i think the status trend i see is when you have say and among us or a fall guys or a flappy birds come out and be successful, like, like older people who try to get success by just following that recipe right? not realizing that the reasons those game were successful originally were sort of a bit of luck and timing and typically some external factors, like among us grew with discord and discord grew it among us yeah, right and that was sort of sort of the game to play on that platform, right and all the other games in that in that category by and large failed because it was just like it and not again but that right and, and a thing i think a lot of people have forgotten is that the game industry is cyclical, right? so you get a new channel it comes out it's very cheap and easy to get users on it initially and then that's the value of that platform goes up, it just becomes more and more expensive, right and people have sort of forgotten that's how the games industry used to work because mobile came along yeah and stuck around for a very long time to do to sort of these stores that were tied to specific devices right which, which is something you didn't really have on a on a pc, where there was more open competition on who could sort of have an app store tony morelan 35 40 yeah, yeah, for sure so tell me what is in the future for frvr chris benjaminsen 35 45 a lot more high-quality games? like that's basically our focus right now we are very fortunate, we just closed out a round funding wonderful yeah, thank you and like, the entire theme of that funding is we need, we need games of a completely different quality, right? so we are we are looking for fantastic studios who can come in and build games with sort of that depth that can support in app purchases that's the thing that we really want to focus on we want to want to have games that can have people play for years, not just once, right? tony morelan 36 18 yeah so as far vr is seeing this growth, what are you guys doing related to diversity and inclusion? chris benjaminsen 36 26 and we do a lot of things, right, like diversity and inclusion is something that we try to sort of have both across our games and across our company culture, right? so it can be everything from i personally created the hex frvr game so yeah, i got a nice email from somebody said, i love this game, but it can they call us i can see the different things, right so making sure that you're aware of the different kinds of colorblind people can be sure, sure and it also it also means a lot for hiring, like, like, what's the best candidate for the job is not necessarily the person that fits the checklist, the best that you see that you put on your yeah, other requirements yeah, in like diverse teams perform better so diversity is a is a virtue in the hiring process and it can be advantageous to hire the more diverse candidate if you have an opportunity to hire too, and like, but it means a lot like you have to be mindful of it everywhere those like natural biases, right now, a simple example of that is that the more bullet points you put on a on a job post about specific requirements, the less likely it is that females would, will apply for a job interesting, like a male candidate would sort of look at a long bullet point and see two things that good and go, yeah, i could totally do this, right? where if fema will see a long list and sort of say, i can only do two of these things i shouldn't apply for this right so you have to be mindful of those things all the way tony morelan 37 52 interesting yeah, i think giving someone the opportunity to really talk about their personality, and their value is probably the best way to go about finding that that good candidate chris benjaminsen 38 02 yeah and it's a big part of our it's a big part of our sort of, sort of, sort of hiring flow is the values right? you know, we also a, a company in portugal, that doesn't behave like a portuguese company, this particular company, company structure in particular is very hierarchical, right you know, some people might call it a bit old fashioned that's not the company we are, that's not the company we want to be so we want people that resonates with sort of a more flat structure, modern ways of working tony morelan 38 34 wonderful so if someone is interested, either in working for frvr, or their a game studio that want to bring their games to you, what's the best way for them to reach out to frvr? chris benjaminsen 38 45 like, like, send me an email first, right? you know, and, you know, i'll redirect you to the right person, my email is chris@frvr com so it's fairly straightforward, right? like, always happy to chat with people who do fantastic things tony morelan 38 57 yeah, that's great and we'll include links in the show notes too much about what we talked about today and into frvr websites so chris, i got to say, it was great to have you on the podcast i love learning all about frvr and what you guys are doing but let me ask when you're not working for frp or what is it that you'd like to do for fun? chris benjaminsen 39 15 i find most of my spare time is taken up by you know, walking the dog, or, you know, cooking food if it's some like i'm probably not good at cooking food in the winter but you know, like i like to grill outdoors and whatever right you know, and i actually try to keep a fairly strict work life balance wonderful so you know i am one of the people who like go into the office but mostly yes a way to not work while i'm at home tony morelan 39 40 that's great well hey, we're just about to hit the springtime of the year and soon will come summer so i'm sure you're going to enjoy lots of outdoor grilling when the when the season comes chris benjaminsen 39 49 hopefully, you never know where they're somewhere in london right? you know, that might be like two days where it's impossible that's tony morelan 39 56 awesome hey, chris, really appreciate you coming on the podcast today chris benjaminsen 39 59 no, thank do so much for having me closing 40 01 looking to start creating for samsung, download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding it all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung tony morelan 40 17 the samsung developers podcast is hosted by tony morelan and produced by jeanne hsu
