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Develop Smart TV
docsamsung checkout this topic describes how you can develop a billing system for your tizen net tv application, to allow users to make purchases within your application related info tizen tv service billing namespace samsung checkout dpi portal guide samsung checkout for web applications samsung checkout dpi portal samples samsung checkout net application samsung checkout web application samsung checkout offers an optimized purchase experience for your users on samsung tvs the user can quickly and safely register a payment method and make frictionless payments repeatedly within the tv environment in addition, samsung checkout provides a comprehensive global monetization platform, which allows you to integrate various business models and promotional campaigns into your services the tv-optimized purchase experience provides the user a quick and simple 3-step checkout, once a payment method is registered the checkout requires only number-centric information to be entered, making it easy to use with a tv remote control users can register their payment method directly on the tv or through a mobile phone to use samsung checkout within your net application, the user needs tv samsung smart tv, 2018 or later model payment method credit or debit card, paypal, or samsung pay in korea security tizen secureime, 2nd-screen card registration mobile or pc account samsung account for sharing account and payment information with galaxy phones importanta samsung account is mandatory for using samsung checkout samsung checkout assumes that the user is logged in to samsung account at all times you can manage your product application and product sales through the dpi digital product inventory and process the actual purchase through samsung checkout importantall application data that is saved locally on a tv is deleted when the application is deleted from that tv if the user's purchase history is saved only in the tv storage and not remotely, and the user deletes and reinstalls the application, all application settings and content are removed, including purchased content if your application saves purchase information in the tv storage only, inform the user that uninstalling the application deletes their purchased content the dpi portal provides functions, such as "purchase history unapply" and "refund", to help you address situations when your customer inadvertently deletes application data before proceeding with the unapply and refund processes, you must contact a samsung representative by going to "samsung apps tv seller office > support" and creating a "1 1 q&a" support ticket samsung checkout purchase process when a user wants to purchase a product on your application, samsung checkout provides a common purchase gui, which identifies the user and confirms first the purchase and then the purchase completion after the user completes the purchase, samsung checkout returns the purchase result to your application product, purchase, and payment management the following figure illustrates how you can use samsung checkout and the information in the dpi server to manage in-app purchases and payments in your application request the purchase list retrieve the customer purchase list using a purchase list api request respond to the purchase list content if there are products in the purchase list which are not applied, verify the purchase and apply the products if there are products in the purchase list which have been refunded, retrieve the products send the application result to the server request the product list request the product information list using a products list api request the user purchases the product when the user selects “buy” in the application, provide a common purchase gui through samsung checkout the user can enter a voucher or coupon code to modify the purchase price the user confirms the purchase by entering a pin on the common purchase gui, or biometric information on samsung pay samsung checkout delivers the purchase result to your application request the purchase list update the customer purchase list verify the purchase verify the purchase using a verify purchase api request apply the product apply the product using an apply product api request, and send the application result to the server dpi service environment the dpi service provides information on buyable products in your application and the purchase history of your customers it serves the appropriate product information for the user's country, provides user-specific purchase information, and manages applying the product after purchase the dpi service also assures purchase integrity and provides security through preventing fraudulent access the dpi service environment is divided into 2 separate zones operating zone prd for live production applications when you submit your application for publishing, set it to use the operating zone notewhen a refund of a real payment is made in the operating zone, a charge is applied on you consequently, do not use the operating zone for testing staging zone dev for development and testing the purpose of the staging zone is to facilitate the billing linkage development this environment minimizes the exceptional country-specific cases that can happen when real payments are made in the operating zone the staging zone also includes a dummy payment testing option, where the user does not need to register any payment method, but can still use all the dpi services as in real payment transactions dummy payment actual payment table 1 dummy and actual payment screens the following figure illustrates the dpi service environments implementation information for each dpi service environment is described in the following table service environment details operating zone environment web portal https //dpi samsungcheckout com/ example billingrequestservertype servertype = billingrequestservertype prd; string securitykey = "*****"; // your security key issued by dpi portal // can be different from sandbox's ssecurity key staging zone environment web portal https //sbox-dpi samsungcheckout com/ example billingrequestservertype servertype = billingrequestservertype dev; string securitykey = "*****"; // your security key issued by dpi portal staging zone with dummy payment environment web portal https //sbox-dpi samsungcheckout com/ example billingrequestservertype servertype = billingrequestservertype dummy; string securitykey = "*****"; // your security key issued by dpi portal table 2 dpi service environment details when you submit your application for publishing, make sure that it has been fully integrated with the billing system ensure that the application detects the service environment and sets the server type accordingly check that the product and price information in the operating zone prd matches the tested information in the staging zone dev no data is automatically shared between the zones registering a test user payment method when the user registers their credit card as a payment method in samsung checkout, they can do it through their mobile phone or computer web site by entering the authentication code when you are creating a test user for your application, pay attention to the url you use to enter your authentication code and register a payment method each url requests a different server to handle the payment operating zone prd https //www samsungcheckout com or http //www payon tv staging zone dev https //sbox samsungcheckout com or http //sbox payon tv
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 3, episode 3 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest tobias thorsen & peter holm, biodome games, galaxy store not only do we chat about their award-winning mobile game gold digger frvr, but how being acquired by a larger game publisher has allowed them to focus more on game development, while the publisher handles the marketing aspect of producing games listen download this episode topics covered biodome games studio spelunca frvr best of galaxy store awards publishing on galaxy store marketing discoverability galaxy badge generating revenue integrating iap music diversity and inclusion helpful links gold digger frvr - golddigger frvr com facebook gold train frvr - facebook gold train frvr - goldtrain frvr com biodome games - biodome games frvr - frvr com frvr careers - careers frvr com galaxy store badges - developer samsung com/galaxy-store/gsb-promotion galaxy themes - developer samsung com/galaxy-themes samsung developer program homepage - developer samsung com samsung developer program newsletter - developer samsung com/newsletter samsung developer program blog - developer samsung com/blog samsung developer program news - developer samsung com/news samsung developer program facebook - facebook com/samsungdev samsung developer program instagram - instagram com/samsung_dev samsung developer program twitter - twitter com/samsung_dev samsung developer program youtube - youtube com/samsungdevelopers samsung developer program linkedin - linkedin com/company/samsungdevelopers transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is the samsung developers podcast, where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season three, episode three on today's show, i'm joined by the founders of biodome games to be a sourcing in peter home not only do we chat about their award-winning mobile game gold digger, but how being acquired by a larger game publisher has allowed them to focus more on game development, while the publisher handles the marketing aspect of producing games oh, yeah and we also chat about how their game studio is now called studio spelunka enjoy hey, i am excited for today's podcast to be interviewing, not just one, but the two founders of biodome games to be a source in and peter home hey, guys, welcome to the podcast thank you thank you so let me first start by asking who is to be as thorson? tobias thorsen 01 04 well, i'm 40 years old, i grew up in rural denmark far out west, i would describe myself as a programmer with somewhat of an artistic sense i like programming not because i'm particularly good at writing beautiful code, but because it gives a degree of control, and you get a final say in the product you're developing and i really like that tony morelan 01 28 that's great and now we also are joined by peter home tell me who is peter holm? peter holm 01 36 well, self-taught game design, usability, user experience, business, creative direction type of guy yeah, i enjoy making games tony morelan 01 47 wonderful so toby, let me get back to you what is your role at biodome games? tobias thorsen 01 53 i'm the lead programmer, and gameplay and vendor and then i'm a co-founder, tony morelan 01 58 wonderful and peter yourself, what is what exactly is your role? peter holm 02 04 aware of many hats i'm the ceo formula game design, producer, artist tony morelan 02 13 so let's talk about the history by a dump because i know that you guys were acquired by fr vr and actually recently changed your studio name to spell blanca but i understand that your history goes way back that you guys were actually friends in kindergarten so give me that full history of, of the two of you how you guys started working together, and how that led up to biodome games and eventually now spin like a studio peter holm 02 38 well, it all started around the lego bricks in kindergarten tobias thorsen 02 45 it's true, somewhat, peter holm 02 47 somewhat true, at least professional working together, but started animation studio and could make where we did 3d animation and space, spare time we started making a game and that spare time project kind of got out of hand and turned into a game that we actually released and that was 24 years ago or something? tobias thorsen 03 10 yeah, we released it in 2000 peter holm 03 14 no, no, no, we didn't the first one was in 98 it was really tobias thorsen 03 20 so long ago tony morelan 03 23 the internet was just, you know, starting out what was the process for releasing those games? tobias thorsen 03 29 well, the game was kind of an experiment it was called chases and i was just getting into game development while working at his animation studio, where peter also works i kind of pivoted back to programming, which i did a lot of when i was a teenager so i tried experimented with programming, a small game, which was at first only meant for our own enjoyment i wanted a top-down shooter that i could play in split screen with my friends so i made that, and it was quite fun and it just turned more and more advanced and like when you're young and new to project like this, it just takes it on its own life and you develop and develop and then at some point, we figured that, hey, this is a product, we are having so much fun playing it every weekend, we played it and so we figured that other people could enjoy this and so we decided to do it ourselves and back then it meant making our own cds and sending them by mail so there was quite a task, but there was really there was how game distribution was done back then wow and tony morelan 04 38 what was the platform that you guys built it on? that was tobias thorsen 04 40 windows and to my great regrets i programmed everything in visual basic because that was the language and you back then yeah, and visual basic was definitely not made for game development so i had to do all sorts of tricks to make it work and it just got more and more advanced and then at some point, we figured now it's enough and we made the cds we made 1000 cds and sold them one at a time from our website tony morelan 05 11 i know my brief experience with gaming back in the late 90s was using flash and i understand that you guys have some experience also, using flash back in those glorious days of the of the late 90s tobias thorsen 05 26 yeah, well, after, after our game chasers, we sold like 200 copies and we kind of realized we couldn't make a living from that so we had to get a real job so we started doing advertisement games and other flash games and that that was really the platform for gaming back then on the web was flash peter holm 05 49 and it kind of happened by accident that that what we did back then turned into becoming an actual game company because i think at that point, from my, my perspective, at least, making games was kind of a side gig, hobby, hobby thing but what i was desperately into was actually flesh and getting 3d animation onto the web using flash magic that was kind of the big thing back then tobias thorsen 06 17 yeah fancy ui designs and stuff like yeah, peter holm 06 21 fancy ui designs, and wow, transitions and whoa, what not? common colleague, and i found a company focusing on just that, and, and we kind of figured out along the way that hey, wait a minute, maybe we could just do some flash games and it seems like people want to buy those, and so on all of a sudden, we had a gaming company, with a ton of clients all over the world and tony morelan 06 45 that was fun and what was the name of that gaming company? peter holm 06 48 there was a tunic, like titanic but cartoon instead, so tony morelan 06 53 okay, yeah and the success yeah, the success of that, did that go down? peter holm 07 00 it went down? eventually yes but i will say that we left it to be as an ai, we left the company in 2007 a year after that it went down so nothing on us it was a series of unfortunate events that led to the company crashing tony morelan 07 21 so i understand that you guys built a company, cape copenhagen, correct that actually, like flourish, you had, you know, lots of employees over 30 employees you learned a lot of lessons from that company and some of the challenges that came out of that tell me tell me a little bit about cape copenhagen peter holm 07 38 yeah, so cape copenhagen came out of the out of chasis the first game we've made way back, and titanic so actually, we left that company in order to make a new version of chase as that was the big dream, we established the company that in turn turned into cape cod and that company was focused on chasis to begin with, and we worked on a demo for a long time, and we pitched it to publishers, and we didn't seem to be learning the right deal at any point so we left it and returned to flash games, tobias thorsen 08 12 i fell into the trap that many game developers to programmers, particularly that i want to make my own engine sure that was possible back in the 90s, and beginning of the 2000s, but at that point, 2008 it was the scene was so diverse with graphics cards, and sound cards and hardware all over the place and multi-platform so it really was a too big of a task again, i made a lot of programming that turned out to be dead code, because you can't maintain such a big code base for so many cases and get out into all the corners with your own tech at least not one guy peter holm 08 54 yeah, we painted ourselves into a corner with that project and tobias thorsen 09 00 share yeah, multiple times peter holm 09 03 so learning from that we return to the stuff that worked in titanic and return to making flash games for clients and then at some point later on, we finally made the jump to unity and 3d games tony morelan 09 21 and was at the beginning of biodome games no, the peter holm 09 25 beginning of biodome games is later so keepcup magnet almost existed for 10 years wow and i think we were almost 40 people at the peak and at some point we had a lot of stuff lined up but it all fell through and having a business that rely on client work and all the client work disappearing that's, that's not really healthy sure and we hadn't really managed to build a really solid foundation because i think we wanted too much on the same time really wanted to do great plant work but we also wanted to make our own games, which is by definition underfunded yeah, so that was a very difficult balance to strike tobias thorsen 10 11 for 10 years, we kind of swapped between the two, and we couldn't make a clear path we didn't really want to focus entirely on client projects and we didn't want to take too much funding and get economically dependent by taking big investments and not having our own company yeah, sure so we were kind of flip flopping around for 10 years, until we could no longer flip flop peter holm 10 38 yeah so we were stubborn, and flip flopping and refusing to take other people's money and so on so it was it was kind of yeah, maybe not that smart of a choice but anyway, it was fun tobias thorsen 10 53 it was it was a great company i really loved my colleagues, amazing company tony morelan 10 59 so it sounds like then eventually, there came a moment where you decided that it was best that you just close the company, correct? peter holm 11 07 yeah, at a at a at some point it was basically out of our hands we had, within the same week, we had three almost signed deals that disappeared and that was really enough to take us out of business so we had to close down and that was the beginning of biodome games tony morelan 11 28 so then, so then you interbase decided to still continue working together, you obviously are determined to find success, peter holm 11 37 we actually had a conversation at some point where we were looking at each other than just meeting room and things were just collapsing around us and we kind of okay, so what we're going to do get a job i don't know how to get a job we basically we were unemployable at that point, i guess we didn't have a choice tony morelan 12 01 so that was it it was just you looked at each other and said well, you've got me and i've got you so let's figure out 12 07 something like that tony morelan 12 11 so with the with the closing of cape copenhagen was that the beginning of biodome games, peter holm 12 17 at cape copenhagen we had a third partner who, brian, who we work with for many years, he had left the company i think, one and a half years before we went belly up basically, he had to he had to do something else with its life at that point he was he was kind of burned out on client work and stuff like that but around the time that we went belly up, and we had the infamous conversation and in the meeting room about having no choice but to start a new company, he had probably around that time joined, joined a little startup called frvr and we kind of followed along and looked at what they were doing while we were doing other stuff because we still wanted to do our own games we had a client project that could get biodome games running, so we didn't have to take any funding and stuff and that was basically our plan just to chug along, do a project end and then fund another game that we wanted to do tobias thorsen 13 22 yeah and i remember brian liftin, in melta, at that point, and he was back in copenhagen and he was really, really trying to sell this idea that we should work for frvr very hard we are skeptical what's, what's this? and it's hypercasual? and is that really our gig peter holm 13 43 instant games? what is this? yeah tobias thorsen 13 48 it felt like a return to something that we left many years ago in titanic and flash games sure so we weren't, we were not really convinced in the beginning and we had some other projects and very artsy projects lined up for ourselves and i remember we made this calculation at some point, if we're going to succeed with our own game and distributing it and making a steam version of that game and becoming a hit it was it was really unlikely and the numbers just told us well, we really just have so much better chance of succeeding if we go with prime and this tony morelan 14 26 is because i mean, it's really was just the two of you still, i mean, it's not like you had employees it was the tobias thorsen 14 31 two of us yeah, yeah peter holm 14 33 yeah and then we really tried to stick to gut feeling about making our own game and realizing our artistic ambition through that game, but as at the same time, we really wanted to achieve that commercial success and i think the message that that brian came with, why don't you shove your artistic ambition and allow yourself just to be commercial for once, sir and i think, as you said, to be as that it would be a marathon to maybe get the game finished and maybe get it shipped and so on but because the scope was smaller, and the tech was more accessible and they had good channel relationships and could get our game out there, i mean, that would just make a lot of sense and it played to all our strengths and so on tobias thorsen 15 23 it turned out to be a no brainer, because what we lacked they had, we didn't have any connections in the industry to publishers, and we didn't know how to put a game on facebook instant or steam and let alone peter holm 15 38 samsung galaxy store yeah tobias thorsen 15 43 so we kind of saw well, maybe we don't have to sacrifice our artistic integrity just because it's an instant game or just because it's a small casual game, who still make something that that would be ours and feels like something we want to work on so tony morelan 16 01 sure so then you decided to work closer with frvr and they acquired biodome games? tobias thorsen 16 08 no, not at this point okay, peter holm 16 11 actually, we decided to enter a publishing agreement with them so we basically made an exclusivity deal with them we got to use their tech and in return, they promised to try to publish our games if we made something good, of course and that was just a huge relief to take that step and start making small games and then yeah, fast forward two years and four games, and they acquired us because we had proven that that we have something that actually worked tony morelan 16 48 and just so i have a good understanding frvr is basically handing like the publishing and the marketing but that you guys are still pretty much a standalone team, your own your own studio, correct? peter holm 17 00 yeah, the new setup is, is 100% frvr own studio, but we have full autonomy we can do what we want basically, as long as we try to make long term business sense of course, in our industry, it's a first party studio, meaning that the publisher owns the studio and we keep working on our games on the games from biodome games that would transfer to this new entity, it feels like our studio and be treated like our studio tony morelan 17 30 now now recently, you decided to change the name from biodome games to spelunka correct? peter holm 17 37 yeah, that was that was part of the of the setting up a new studio so biodome games guild formerly exists now it's basically a holding company okay but, but yeah, so the new studio is called frvr studios belong? tony morelan 17 53 and what is the what is the meaning? what is the thought behind spelunka? tobias thorsen 17 58 spelunka means cave exploration and if you go spelunking you explore caves no, it's quite suiting for gold digger tony morelan 18 08 yeah, is very appropriate i myself actually have spent a very little time but did one day of spelunking definitely was during my, my youth when i didn't have a fear of small spaces and claustrophobia i can't imagine getting back down into the earth like i did when i was younger and climbing around those caves is exhilarating peter holm 18 31 i wouldn't last a second environment; it would be so horrible tobias thorsen 18 38 it's good thing we can do it in a games and tony morelan 18 41 yeah, wonderful so tell me now about spelunka how many employees are you guys? peter holm 18 48 for? so us and two other guys and we were still looking to hire more people with can still kind of figuring out what kind of people we need but more developers needed? yes yeah, we tobias thorsen 19 02 are three programmers now and then peter so we are going to need some more assistance with the graphics and game design and these parts tony morelan 19 13 wonderful well, i know a lot of people who listen to the podcasts are always looking for opportunities for work so i'll make sure to include links in the in the show notes are there any links that we'll be able to share related to maybe applying for a job at splunk and studious? peter holm 19 28 yeah, i think we have one opening now on the fob career side but i think we'll add some more in the near future tony morelan 19 37 so let's talk about the relationship with samsung how did that actually come about? peter holm 19 41 again, we have to point to two ffvi they seem to be really amazing with the challenge relationships and that's, i mean, that's a huge win for us because we can really focus on game development that that relationship with samsung that ffvs been able to build them? in part on our behalf? is it something that we're really grateful about? tobias thorsen 20 06 yeah, i think at first our games were mostly published on facebook and then when they were kind of proven that they worked and the generator revenue they expanded to the newly formed channel on bixby i think back then it's a couple years ago tony morelan 20 25 so i wasn't familiar with that so bixby, our voice assistant, is that what you're referring to? peter holm 20 29 yeah, i think there's still on older devices that hadn't received updates, you would still be able to swipe right and then you would open a discovery surface called bixby as well, where the games will be featured and that was the first appearance on samsung devices to my knowledge, so yeah, it seems to be a lot of samsung channels that the game is feature tony morelan 20 58 so last year, you guys were the winner for the 2021 best of galaxy store award best instant play game tell me tell me what did it mean to win that award? peter holm 21 11 that was pretty special i'd say we had not seen that common i mean, we hadn't imagined in a million years that we made an award-winning game i mean, we knew we made a great game and a fun game, but we haven't seen it as a as a game that would win an award so it was super happy about it tobias thorsen 21 32 in retrospect, i could see that the game stands out a bit it's a combination of gameplay and, and style that's that i haven't seen many places tony morelan 21 44 so let's talk about gold digger i mean, i played it because i was part of the team that was going through all the nominations and selecting who was going to be a winner it was a very addicting game to play but tell the folks out there what actually is gold digger tobias thorsen 22 00 i remember when we when we came up with the idea, because we were i think we were talking about digging game peter holm 22 08 yeah you mentioned you mentioned boulder dash as i remember it, you look over your screen and say, you remember the tony morelan 22 15 boulder dash? i love that game peter holm 22 17 as a yeah oh, yeah yeah, that was that was a great game maybe we should do something like that use it and i said, oh, yeah and we can that match three elements so you match the gems and i think that was the conclusion of our game design and brainstorming session, as i remember it it was tobias thorsen 22 37 very, very brief and which, which is, i guess, a good thing that you could describe a full gameplay with the one minute of talk hey, let's try that that could work and i peter holm 22 48 think it was only a couple of days later, you had the first prototype running us, i remember it at least and then of course, a few months until we had tobias thorsen 22 57 playable in the frvr bible when they recommend gameplay ideas to pursue one of the key points is mashups of, of different genres so not don't make a clone but try to mix and match different areas and see what that leads to tony morelan 23 18 so the gameplay there's this little there's like this old man miner who's going around smashing rocks looking for gems correct? peter holm 23 27 actually, when you play this kind of a fast-paced mining game, which is kind of a maybe because mining is, is in real life, it would be really slow pace but i guess that was the inspiration we took from balderdash that we wanted it to be speedier and like an explorer it's so it's i think it's as much an exploration game as its mining game, taking game but yeah, you view push rocks around and match them up and when you align three or more rocks, they explode and, and help you excavate and then there's a lot of stuff to discover and pick up, buy and sell tony morelan 24 07 so i remember seeing at the time when you win the award, you guys produced a meme a great photo graphic of your first dollar that you earned on gold digger side by side with winning the samsung award tell me about that peter holm 24 23 yeah, it was quite a revelation for us to allow ourselves to be focusing totally on making something that made money so making our actual first dollar was quite an event so we made ourselves an award to celebrate the moment and we awarded it to us so thanking us for the award so yeah, that was that was how it started making our own awards and how it's going winning actual awards from samsung that was that was quite a tobias thorsen 24 58 in many ways goes to go has become the game that we dreamed of making for many, many years all the time in cape, we were talking about how it would be so great to have just a small game that would make a little bit of money to support one guy who could work on this and it took the end of cape copenhagen and the rise of a new company before it actually happened for us peter holm 25 20 in a way you could say we've been working on this game for 22 years tony morelan 25 28 so i understand that gold digger is not the only gold game in your in your franchise that you have another game called gold train, frvr tell me tell me about gold train? tobias thorsen 25 39 yeah, that was the first we made it was it's a more traditional, proven gameplay in many ways it's a based-on pipe mania, also a very old game where you match train tracks to make the train run okay and since we kind of knew what kind of game we were doing with, we chose that game for just getting to know the tech from frvr so it was kind of a training game training train game tony morelan 26 10 that's great peter holm 26 11 at that point, we had decided, of course that we wanted to make a game that would make us money so in order to cast the rights bill over the game, we needed something with gold and it seemed to work okay, tony morelan 26 25 so tell me what is the platform that you're building your games on tobias thorsen 26 30 html5, and built on the engine that frvr provided it's all javascript, very old-style javascript, so no modern shenanigans it's, you have a script as it looks 1015 years ago so it's in many ways, it's, it's very easy and very simple to get started with but when a project gets really complex, it's it has its own challenges as well tony morelan 26 57 yeah, i think there'll be a lot of limitations with it but you guys have found a way to work within those limitations to create something that's that successful tobias thorsen 27 05 yeah, i'd say some of the bigger challenges has come now that we've hired new programmers who has to take this two-year-old code base that i've been working on exclusively, and try to figure out what's going on our first-time employee, he was really, for a month, and he was so confused so we decided to make a major cleanup of the code and we've been working on that for a couple of months now, tony morelan 27 32 how funny i can take that as like, you know, you take this really top-level auto mechanic, and then you throw an old ferrari at them and say, alright, yeah, get this going here peter holm 27 45 but about the limitations, i think part of the charm of working with this is actually the limitations that you have to impose on yourself and your ambition and that's, i think, part of the reason that we can make it work tony morelan 28 00 it's interesting, because, you know, my, my background truly is in graphic design and i often teach the opposite of that, in the sense that, you know, when you're creating a logo, you don't want to limit yourself by diving right into a program, like adobe illustrator to start designing your logo that really, you should grab pencil and paper and start sketching so that you don't have any limitations but it sounds like you know, your approach having to work with him in this javascript, you've got some limitations but i would think that, you know, that that must trigger certain parts of your brain where you really have to think like, how are you going to get this done? peter holm 28 39 yeah, i think i think would you say about logo design is totally true, i would definitely go for a pencil first but again, that's the pencil is a conceptual limitation that you put into the process at that point true so i totally agree with that one but in this case, i think one of one of the great benefits about the limitations we have on the platform is that there's a lot of stuff we just can't do period so we don't have to get distracted by ambient occlusion or real time shadows, or hdr lighting or stuff like that that's completely irrelevant to the gameplay but if we had every single tool, we could so easily get distracted by stuff that's not super essential to get right tobias thorsen 29 27 yeah but essentially is it's a sprite engine, you can display sprites, and you can display a lot of them but that's it there's no spinning stuff, and no 3d had hardly any animation system we had to make that ourselves also tony morelan 29 45 oh, wow so i would think that the process i mean, tell me is it would you say it's quicker i mean, i know that some of these game developers that i've that i've chatted with, it takes them years to go to market on a design that they're working on those limitations actually help speed the process could you can't go down all these different avenues and work on things such as 3d and lighting yeah, definitely tobias thorsen 30 06 in the beginning, it's a, it's very, very fast to make a prototype and try something out and i think the challenge really comes when you're when you're continuously working on a project, and it gets more and more complex, because then yeah, this group really has its limitations sure peter holm 30 25 yeah and i think the platform's says a lot about your shadow choice as well, you wouldn't, you wouldn't go ahead and make a first-person shooter and that wouldn't make sense i mean, you wouldn't have you would pick another tool for it from the first prototype until gold digger went live i think that was about three or four months or something tony morelan 30 44 like that it's so quick peter holm 30 47 yeah, and it's a great joy to work with that quick turnaround, because you get something done, right? tony morelan 30 54 yeah and you get the feedback so quick, because as soon as you put it out there, you start i mean, you had mentioned that you would first release like on facebook instant i mean, you almost using that as your testing platform so you release it quickly like this, you get that feedback and now you can get back into the studio and start finding ways to really improve on it before it gets out to the to the larger audience peter holm 31 13 exactly exactly and you have actual people playing it and having opinions about it and telling you what, what they think about it that that's just so much more fun than sitting deep in the trench working on the same project for two or three years without it seeing any type of reality tobias thorsen 31 35 and a lot less risky, of course, saves a lot of money, too i peter holm 31 39 would say yeah oh, yeah, definitely tony morelan 31 43 so i'd like to talk a bit about the marketing i know that frvr is handling all of this for you what were some of the tools that work because i've seen some banners that you guys have done on galaxy store peter holm 31 54 yeah, for us at least privileged situation that that frvr handles most of that and we basically just supply them with, with assets that they can they can build banners and stuff from tony morelan 32 07 the end if some of these banners were related to different seasons, whether it's halloween or valentine's peter holm 32 13 oh, yeah, yeah yeah so what we did recently was, was some seasonal updates for the game we had a super nice christmas update for it with a snowy landscape and you could explore the mine and find christmas decorations and stuff and i think you could even get a santa hat and yeah, i think we had a very nice feature from samsung on that and of course, that's so nice to see that they will yeah, spend some nice storefront for the game tony morelan 32 58 so tell me, are there other games that you guys have produced outside of gold digger and gold train? peter holm 33 04 yeah, we have we have two other games we have the pot rush, cool rush mini golfing game and a pool game tobias thorsen 33 13 it's a very casual approach to pool and a very casual approach to mini golf it's a sure something that a hardcore pool player woods would find appalling because you just you just sit there and you shoot balls, if the balls and get them in that into the hole it's very simple and it's not even on a pool table it's an endless trek tony morelan 33 40 lsa check that out tell me so where are you guys getting your ideas for games? peter holm 33 45 i don't know i mean, sometimes it's just like what we talked about with gold, they got this two reference points, and then they have a weird connection other times it's, it's more like, what type of interaction would be fun? what would feel good? okay, and then in turn, how could we turn that into a game? i think that the pool russian portrush games kind of grew out of that approach we kind of wanted a very simple interaction that would be fun and quick to repeat i think we had a few iterations of that before it kind of gelled into a pool game and a mini golf game tobias thorsen 34 28 and it was very much inspired also by one of our vrs biggest hits, which is a basketball game, where the only thing you do is to flip basketballs, okay, and have to hit the hoop so the gameplay style is quite similar you just shoot balls again and again and again you can get really good at it and you can suck at it tony morelan 34 52 i remember there was a game a long time ago, very similar where you would just throwing trash into a little trash bin peter holm 34 57 yes yeah i think that that's that, for me at least that's been that's been kind of a fascination all the way back from the first flash games that how much can you boil down the experience? how small can we make it and still make it enjoyable? i still think that's very much motivation for me at least two or a driver for me at least to see how, how tiny can you make it? how much of a great experience can you make with the smallest mechanic possible, basically? tony morelan 35 28 so tell me what is your process for designing, developing in and then publishing a game, if ar tobias thorsen 35 35 vr has a set of goalposts, you have to reach first you make a prototype that the guys there review their game designers, and they look at the game and try to give their input on whether or not it would succeed, or if it has potential than if, if they approve it, and think we might be able to do something with that we make a prototype, and it's been put out on a very limited market so there's a small subset of players who get to play it and then during this process, the retention is measured and you see how many people are actually returning to it and these are paid users, they are advertising, and people come and play and then there are a set amount of iterations where you try to improve in each iteration to see if you can get the game sticky enough and this process is, in large part to avoid working a lot on a game that doesn't have potential that's not going to work in the real world so if you pass through these goalposts, you, it's published to a wider audience worldwide peter holm 36 41 okay and i think and i think if we should just talk a bit about our internal process as well, it would be more something along the lines of running with a gut feel, up until the point where we felt we have something that would show some kind of potential yeah, and then trying to find the smallest subset of that, that we could take to a level where it could actually be tested in in live circumstances tony morelan 37 11 so we've seen a lot of success around gold digger, can you tell me like how many active users do you guys have playing the game? peter holm 37 19 across samsung channels? i think we're seeing about of course; it goes up and down with stole features and stuff, but an average about 100,000 active users a day wow so that's, that's pretty neat tony morelan 37 33 yeah, that's, that's crazy to guys just creating a game like that and you've got over 100,000 people playing it daily tobias thorsen 37 40 it feels really weird in the beginning, when it started to take off and i remember, at the start, we were extremely popular in vietnam, and poland tony morelan 37 51 really, yeah, tobias thorsen 37 52 there was some strange demographic that we never fully discovered why, but yeah, peter holm 37 58 yes, sometimes like that, you suddenly get a spike in in a market that you didn't expect at all tony morelan 38 03 so obviously, revenue needs to play a part somewhere when it comes to the success of a game so tell me what is it that you guys are doing to help generate revenue while playing gold digger? peter holm 38 15 well, the very basic stuff is, of course, that the main revenue is coming in from ads, we try to find convenient, or you could say, quote, unquote, natural places to show ads and hopefully, some players would click those ads and when they do that, that generates some revenue back to us also on platforms that support it we have in game purchases, so you could actually pay real money to buy stuff tony morelan 38 46 so what are your what are your key learnings? when it comes to iap? peter holm 38 49 the key learning i think, is that people actually want to pay for stuff when they enjoy the game so if you make a great game, people will definitely pay for stuff in the game tobias thorsen 39 00 i remember in the beginning when these in app purchase issues came up with some smurf game where people bought smith berries, and i was very skeptical of them, but who's paying for this? but again, it's uh, if you make something that's actually fun, and people want to play, then they'll pay tony morelan 39 19 yeah, i was listening to a podcast once different market that they were talking about ip in a sense that, you know, they could have hundreds of 1000s of people interacting with this, but all it takes is a small percentage that are willing to pay and that truthfully can generate a decent amount of revenue that because the reach is so big, and it's a global audience, that it just takes a few people you know, interested in actually paying the they can really help bring some money your way? peter holm 39 46 yeah, yeah yeah it is it is a game of volume, because you need a lot of ads to be shown and you need a lot of players to have enough players that would actually want to spend money on it as well tony morelan 40 03 so one of the things that really stood out for me when i was playing gold digger was the music so let's talk a bit about the music of gold digger peter holm 40 11 we're fortunate to work with a really great composer that is also happens to be a friend and former colleague, his name is rasmus hdmi, and if anyone is out there listening and wants to music, you should definitely know because this is so great actually, we work with him in our past company and, and he's, he's working with the fob as well tony morelan 40 34 yeah, so the song that we just heard leading up to this question that was from gold digger, and a few of the other songs that one that we started the podcast off with, and one that we'll be closing with those were from gold train so yeah, absolutely beautiful music that you guys are creating there and frvr it's tobias thorsen 40 52 actually something that people come and done we get a lot of feedback where people say, hey, what's up music? peter holm 40 59 actually, there's a funny story about that composer back in the day, we made a game for lego and it was for a disney themed ip and we needed some music for that game and our composer was patmos, who made the music for these games as well he made some disney inspired music that was completely original he made it all from scratch and once disney had to approve the game, they were kind of going out okay, where's that music from? what movie? did you rap? tony morelan 41 35 really? peter holm 41 36 oh, it's totally original music it's so they were they were kind of impressed with him so tony morelan 41 44 wow so he does music for not just you guys, but for many of the other franchises underneath fr vr, correct? yeah peter holm 41 52 yeah he said, i think he's the closest thing they get to a house composer tony morelan 41 57 so what advice would you give developers looking to bring their games to galaxy store? tobias thorsen 42 02 work with a great publisher? peter holm 42 05 yeah, the advice we took was, was work with frvr yeah, tony morelan 42 10 that's great and i love hearing about that because i know a lot of indie developers, their challenges, they've come up with a great game but these are not marketing people these are not publishing people i mean, these really are great game designers and then where do they go? how do they take their game out to the public? so it's wonderful to hear that there is a resource with a company like frvr that these indie developers can turn to, they can actually bring their game to market tobias thorsen 42 35 yeah and it's hard work doing publishing and it's hard work to maintain the relations with different outlets like the galaxy store, it's not something that you just walk in from the street and say, hey, can you put our game on the store and featured? i think a lot of game developers forget about it i did for many years, i thought it would just make a great game, then it'll all come by itself that's not true peter holm 43 03 selling is hard, right? it's not something you want to do next to you making the game job you want dedicated people to take care of that tony morelan 43 12 yeah and i would think that really game developers they've got that their brain is wired for being creative in wanting to code or, you know, figure out the technology behind it the last thing i want to do is like get on a phone and try and start doing the marketing yeah, making those phone calls to try and you know, get their game out there to be seen peter holm 43 32 yeah, exactly it's, it's liberating to hand it off to someone who knows what they're doing tony morelan 43 38 so what is in the future for spelunka? peter holm 43 41 well, the near future is way more gold digger and i think we have a lot of fun ideas for making the game even more fun for players and yeah, and we're just looking forward to dive deeper into it tony morelan 43 57 and i know you guys are a small company, you just are a few people what are in your future plans related to diversity and inclusion? peter holm 44 06 well, right now we have to be totally honest, which is for white dudes all the same age, all sporting the same beer guard and stuff like that so it's kind of i mean, it's not really diverse, but, but we really want to change that up we strongly believe that diverse teams make better decisions and better games sure and we're super happy to first experience when the game kind of came out that it is a very even 5050 split male female really, okay yeah and it's a rare thing to get something like that yeah so we really want to emphasize that and i think the age wise the audience is extremely wide as well we have young kids playing it and we recently had a very nice letter from 70 something year old gentleman who we enjoyed playing it with his wife wow so i mean, it's a, it's a very, very wide audience and we want to cater to that tony morelan 45 08 yeah yeah, that is that is very unique now and the game is very new i mean, it is it is a young game, do you have plans of maybe like offering the ability to skin your character to be able to create something that maybe somebody relates to a little bit more? peter holm 45 21 yeah, i don't think everyone wants to be that red bearded, grumpy old minus i think it would only be fair to enable people to make their own characters and so on that's, that's part of it of the scope as well as some points yeah, definitely tony morelan 45 38 so to me, it's tell me what is it that you do for fun outside of work, i understand that you actually are a pretty artsy person tobias thorsen 45 47 well, when you sit all day and program and stare into a screen, it's quite nice to do something physical so i've been doing lots of stuff over the years with the painting and arts and lately i've been doing a lot of comics, so it's quite new hobby for me tony morelan 46 04 ceramics really? so pottery yeah, pottery tobias thorsen 46 07 and modeling and doing crazy sculptures i've never thought much about these things until i really tried it and when i when i held an item that i made, which was all glossy and looks totally finished, yeah but it was quite a nice experience so i dove more into it it's very rewarding to have to eat out of a plate that you made yourself tony morelan 46 40 that is wonderful so and peter, let me ask you what is it that you do for fun outside of work? i understand that you actually like to pretend to be a lumberjack peter holm 46 50 yeah, i do i do i have a big, big, badly maintained garden and a small strip of forest that that i can joyfully call my own and once in a while we have a storm that that troubles a tree and i get to cut it up and chop it for firewood and stuff like that so i really enjoy you could say rough gardening like that also woodworking, artsy, artsy, do it yourself projects with all the kids, which of which have four tony morelan 47 26 wow, that's excellent so i have one more question for you since you guys became friends you said back when you started kindergarten tell me who is better at sharing to be or peter tobias thorsen 47 40 sharing tony morelan 47 42 yes peter holm 47 44 that's definitely to be as to be as a very, very generous soul that shares all these good ideas tony morelan 47 55 that's great you guys, it has been absolutely wonderful to chat with the two of you you guys are doing great work at splunk and i'm looking forward to seeing much more down the road on galaxy store tobias thorsen 48 06 thank you very much thank you peter holm 48 07 it was a it was a pleasure to talk to you closing 48 09 looking to start creating for samsung download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at 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 48 26 the samsung developers podcast is hosted by tony morelan and produced by jeanne hsu
Develop Samsung IAP
docmanage subscription price change after your app and subscription are for sale in galaxy store, if you have a manager account with the "applications manager" authority or are the owner of the seller portal account where the app is registered, you can increase or decrease the regular subscription price the subscription price can be updated by country, for one or more countries for example, if the exchange rate for a currency changes, you can update the price of a subscription for each country that uses that currency the subscription price can be set in usd and each country’s currency topics covered in this page include how to change a subscription price subsequent price changes how to view subscription price changes how to adjust an existing subscription price change how to cancel a subscription price change how to change a subscription price for information on how to change a price for a non-subscription product, refer to management of in-app products log in to seller portal, go to the apps page, and select the app which has the subscription for which you want to update the price from the app details page, click the in app purchase tab select the subscription whose price you want to update from the item details page, click the price click set new price or change one of the standard prices to set the price for all countries, select the all countries checkbox, enter a new price to change the price for all countries, and click apply or, to set a new price for individual countries, select the countries and enter a new price click next and confirm that you want to update the prices verify the countries for which you are updating the price if you are increasing the subscription price, select the checkbox if you want to apply the price increase to new subscribers only or unselect the checkbox if you want to apply the price increase to new subscribers and existing subscribers then, click save click save at the bottom of the item details page after you save your updates, there is a seven 7 day waiting period before the new price is applied during this 7-day waiting period, you can adjust or cancel these updates subsequent price changes after the 7-day waiting period, when the price update is applied in galaxy store, you cannot change the price of the subscription in the same country again until a specific amount of time after the pre-notification period has ended for all existing subscribers that is, the updated price must have been applied to all existing subscribers in all countries the amount of time to wait after the pre-notification period has ended for all existing subscribers is based on the length of the subscription period the end of the pre-notification period for an existing subscriber is defined in one of two ways the pre-notification period ends when the existing subscriber has acknowledged the price increase notification the existing subscriber must have consented to or rejected the price change from the consent page or, if the existing subscriber ignores the notifications they neither consent to nor reject the price increase from the consent page , the pre-notification period ends when the existing subscriber's subscription ends the following table describes the amount of time you must wait before you can update the price of a subscription again the minimum pre-notification period is listed for your convenience, but the actual wait time is likely to be longer see pre-notification period for more information subscription period minimumpre-notification period before renewal date wait time to update price again weekly 2 weeks end of 7-day waiting period + minimum pre-notification period + 7 days monthly 1 month end of 7-day waiting period + minimum pre-notification period + 1 month 3 months 2 months end of 7-day waiting period + minimum pre-notification period + 3 months 6 months 2 months end of 7-day waiting period + minimum pre-notification period + 3 months annual 2 months end of 7-day waiting period + minimum pre-notification period + 3 months if a country is not selectable, it means that the pre-notification period has not ended for all existing subscribers in that country when the pre-notification period has ended for all existing subscribers, the country can be selected for another price increase how to view subscription price changes if you need to review previous prices changes or determine the next step after making an accidental price change, you can view when a price was updated, when the price change was applied to the subscription, and the region in which the price change was made to view price change information for a subscription log in to seller portal, go to the apps page, and select the app which has the subscription for which you want to view price changes from the app details page, click the in app purchase tab select the subscription for which you want to view all price updates from the item details page, click here the price change history page displays all price updates by date you can specify a date range to filter the dates that are displayed when a specific date is expanded, the countries that were updated are displayed, along with the old and new subscription price, and if consent is required you can filter this list by region and consent requirement click back to exit this page how to adjust an existing subscription price change if it has been less than seven days after you have initially updated the price of a subscription in seller portal if you have updated the price more than once, this is the first time you updated the price in seller portal , you can edit the price changes after seven days after you have initially updated a subscription in seller portal , you cannot make any additional changes to adjust an existing subscription price change log in to seller portal, go to the apps page, and select the app which has the subscription for which you want to update the price from the app details page, click the in app purchase tab select the subscription for which you want to view all price updates from the item details page, click here from the price change history page, if not already expanded, click on the date to view the list of countries whose price has been updated and for which you want to change the price updates click edit update the list and click next verify the countries for which you are updating the price if you are increasing the subscription price, select the checkbox if you want to apply the price increase to new subscribers only or unselect the checkbox if you want to apply the price increase to new subscribers and existing subscribers then, click save click save at the bottom of the item details page notethe window of time for adjusting the subscription price change is not changed if you make edits to an existing set of price changes, the window of time to be able to make adjustments is not reset for example, if there are three days left in the 7-day waiting period, after you make your adjustments, the waiting period remains at three days it does not reset to seven days how to cancel a subscription price change if it has been less than seven days after you have initially updated the subscription prices in seller portal if you have updated the price more than once, this is the first time you updated the price in seller portal , you can cancel the update after seven days after you have initially updated a subscription in seller portal , you cannot cancel the update log in to seller portal, go to the apps page, and select the app which has the subscription for which you want to cancel the updated the price from the app details page, click the in app purchase tab select the subscription for which you want to view all price updates from the item details page, click here from the price change history page, if not already expanded, click on the date to view the list of countries whose price has been updated and for which you want to cancel the price updates click cancel settings click yes to cancel this set of subscription price updates if you cancel a subscription price increase but a subscription was purchased by a new subscriber at the increased price, the new subscriber continues to pay the increased price until they cancel the subscription
Learn Developers Podcast
docpay as you go yeah, format dan appelquist 29 38 yeah yeah you know, i don't work for coyle, right but one of the things i think is interesting about it is that those transactions are anonymous so it's very privacy preserving, and it fits together with our philosophy of trying to enhance and protect user privacy tony morelan 29 53 yeah, no, i know privacy is a big thing for you guys over samsung internet yeah, definitely so are there any other sessions at sdc21, that developers should be sure to check out dan appelquist 30 03 well, i would suggest checking out the session called what's new and foldables first of all, which is a kind of highlight session, give it gives a high-level overview and gives a lot of really good context about flex mode, what flex mode is, or what we're referring to as flex mode, which is, again, adapting the user experience of any application to the conditions of the folding device and how that's so important from a user experience standpoint and my colleague dongbu actually gives a brief intro in that session to the device postures api, which leads into laura's longer, more detailed talk got it, and he gives a demo a little demo of how that works as well, which is, which is very cool tony morelan 30 49 yeah, i love learning about all the multitasking capabilities with foldables that was that was great to hear yeah so if developers want to learn more about samsung internet, what is the best way? dan appelquist 31 00 well, you can visit our page on developer samsung com/internet that's got links to our blog, and we blog on medium as well but really, if you go to developer samsung com/internet you can find links there to all the places on the web where, we're present you can also follow us at samsung internet on twitter excellent, where you can always find out what we're doing and you know, we try to keep that up to date with news about samsung internet, but also just the developer activities that we're participating in the standards activities that we're participating in our team manages that twitter handle directly so it's a direct line to our team and our dms are open so if you do have questions about samsung internet, you can feel free to dm us they're tony morelan 31 50 awesome awesome hey, dan, thanks very much for being on the podcast and giving us an insight into the highlights with samsung internet and sdc21 dan appelquist 31 59 thank you, tony it's always a pleasure awesome thanks, tony morelan 32 01 dan there were some great tech talks at sdc related to smart things and lots of great new innovations for shared i'm excited to have aaron swift on the podcast director of customer and partner strategy at smart thanks hey, aaron aaron swift 32 16 hey, tony, how are you doing? tony morelan 32 18 doing just fine, lots of tech talks and even a highlight session for smart things so let's start with the session smart things find from lost to found what were some of the key points with this session aaron swift 32 28 smartthings find launched last year as a service to enable customers to locate galaxy devices such as phones, watches earbuds, your s pen pro, like whatever you might leave on the bus or the train accidentally it comprises more than 100 million find nodes and over 230,000 devices are located every day tony morelan 32 49 so a find no just to clarify, find note is that like another device that's this part of this network, aaron swift 32 55 yeah, like a phone or a tablet, a galaxy phone or a galaxy tablet, running the smartthings app with smartthings fine and as you saw, philip and moon did a great presentation talking about other hardware oems can now integrate their products with smart things fine so we have today our first smart tag device which you could attach to your keys that's available on the market now for everyone but anyone who wants to can start building their own tag devices or integrating their hardware products into the final tony morelan 33 29 yeah, i think that opening up the smartthings five network to the outside hardware oems is going to be huge and will absolutely expand the network tremendously aaron swift 33 39 yeah and they made a set of tools there's this fine device sdk and the test suites they make it really easy for any device manufacturer, whether it's ble, or ultra-wideband, to start integrating their devices if you're using the nordic dialogue or nxp chipset yeah, it's really easy to add the fine sdk into your device for certification tony morelan 34 01 that's going to be that's going to be great there was a session called smart things build and tell me what were some of the highlights for you in that session aaron swift 34 09 that session was led by jenny brand meyer and andy sayer are director of product management and director of engineering okay, and they talked about extending our platform, which historically has been very end user focus, you are buying samsung tvs and appliances for your home and now we're extending the platform for multifamily builders and apartment managers to put in the new apartment buildings okay, there's a new toolset with that, that will allow an installer to go set up hundreds of apartments and hundreds of refrigerators and dishwashers and washing machines and apartments really tony morelan 34 46 quickly so this is giving them the ability to sort of monitor the like what's happening with the with these devices if there's you know, you've got some sort of fault that happens within the system, they can detect that aaron swift 34 58 yeah, so property managers we'll be able to integrate your monitor their fleet of samsung appliances from their property management tool are there any tony morelan 35 08 apis or sdks? related to this? aaron swift 35 12 yeah, so one of the cool things about this new offering is there's a dedicated set of tools and api and sdk set to make it easy for property management software companies, like in trata, to come integrate and provide fleet management for all of the appliances tony morelan 35 28 the one thing that comes to mind, though, when you mentioned something about, you know, giving property managers, the ability to sort of monitor all these devices that are in these homes, comes down to privacy, what's in place related to privacy, when you're talking about something like this aaron swift 35 43 user privacy is front of mind to us, whether you are a home owner or a renter and so what we've done is we put together a new set of permissions on the platform, so that property managers only have the minimum access to data coming off of the appliance is needed to troubleshoot for failures got it if there happens to be something wrong, the property managers will be able to pull some information off of the appliances to troubleshoot the air, but they cannot tell that you're getting your 11pm glass of milk before you go to bed tony morelan 36 18 yeah, the last thing i need is my property manager knowing that i was in my freezer last night going for little ice cream bins aaron swift 36 24 right, right and so we've made sure that users are front of mind in this, that's, that's great, and that their privacy is protected tony morelan 36 31 yeah, that's super important there was also a session called smartthings edge and i thought this was really interesting this is where the execution is done locally without reliance on the cloud tell me more about that session aaron swift 36 44 in summer 2020, we announced major changes coming to our platform, this session ended up being such a long session with so many great speakers, because we are really excited to be talking about those changes sure a couple of my favorite ones are from zack and vlad talking about smart things edge before, when you use smart things to turn on a light with a motion sensor, your motion sensor would detect motion in your home, it would send that motion event to your hub up to the cloud, the cloud would tell you to run that automation, send the event back down to the hub to tell the light ball to turn on sure and that happened quickly but it's not quite as natural as still being able to go turn on the light or the local motion sensor in your home yeah so what smartthings edge does is it took the device events and the automation event and was able to start processing them locally yeah so now when you use that motion sensor to turn on a light motion is detected that goes to the hub, the automation is processed on the hub, and sent back over to the light to turn off without ever having to reach out to the cloud to confirm that event tony morelan 37 56 like what would be a device where you needed like instant, instant, you know, reaction time between the hub and the and the device aaron swift 38 05 so all zigbee and z wave and wi fi devices have the ability to run locally on the hub now with automations okay, so one of the most natural feeling ones is that example i gave with the light you want light to turn on right away? yeah similarly, if you want to be walking into a room and having the temperatures change, or having the vents open and close, the thermostat adjusts those are great use cases for local automations as well okay, what we're doing now is we're investing more features into the rules api to make more automations run locally got it so over time, you'll see more and more complex automations be able to run locally on your hub tony morelan 38 43 for edge devices is it a closed ecosystem? or is it can anyone build for edge? aaron swift 38 49 great question so we've released a collection of edge devices on our smartthings developers github repository that anyone can reference and then any hardware oem can add their fingerprint or their devices to that repository anyone can build their own edge devices if they want to tony morelan 39 10 wow, that's, that's, that's great so i saw there was a highlight session building the future smart home today that talked about the new matter standard can you tell me what was shared in that in that session? aaron swift 39 21 matter is the foundation for smart homes of the future? over 200 companies have come together to develop a standard that is going to be the basis for smart home devices to integrate in the future tony morelan 39 34 would you say that like today the is the ecosystem? is it pretty fragmented? aaron swift 39 39 correct there are all sorts of different smart home standards from all sorts of different companies out there, and each one operates just a little bit different from each other, which makes it hard for device manufacturers to integrate with each platform mater is going to take that fragmentation and create a common application language and data model that will apply across all the data from smartphone platforms, regardless of tony morelan 40 02 yeah, i think that's going to be great, especially for consumers so that they don't have to like decide between which technologies they want to, to purchase that it's all going to kind of seamlessly work together aaron swift 40 12 correct and if you buy a light bulb with the with the matter logo on it, you will know that it'll work with smart things, or any other matters supported ecosystem tony morelan 40 21 that's awesome that is super, super great to hear so you've talked a lot about all these different technologies related to smart things what's the best way for developers to learn even more about smart things? aaron swift 40 34 the best place to go for more information is developer samsung com/smartthings from there you can learn more about building edge devices or cloud devices or stay tuned for future updates on our investment in matter you know all of the sdc sessions on smartthings were great are there any other sessions that you would recommend developers checkout i'm personally a bit of a tv nerd so i'm really excited for redefining the experience of watching tv and what's new in samsung smart tv services tony morelan 41 04 yeah, no, i know, a bunch of the people over the tv plus and it's a great group and doing a lot of amazing things over there a lot of great content coming out that's exciting excellent hey, aaron, i really appreciate you coming on the podcast it was great chatting with you and learning a bit more about smart things and looking forward to chatting with you again in the in the near future aaron swift 41 22 great thanks, tony tony morelan 41 26 so next, i'd like to welcome roger kibbe to the podcast senior developer evangelist for bixby samsung's intelligent assistant technology welcome, roger roger kibbe 41 35 well, thanks you and i talked gosh, was probably over a year ago yeah, actually on the podcast so i'm excited to be back and talk to you about what's new and what we just saw at sdc yeah tony morelan 41 47 so it was i think about a year and a half ago safe to say that a lots happened since then so tell me what is the latest with bixby developers? roger kibbe 41 55 yeah, so we just announced several things that sdc are highlighted some things that changed first thing i want to talk about is some of the ways we've made it easier to develop for bixby and these weren't new announcements, but kind of highlighting some of the changes we've made over the past year or so and so a lot of these are focusing on improving the developer experience, one of the things we did is we created a new training ui so use the training ui to create natural language training and one of the great challenges and voice experiences is to get your natural language training, working well after all, it's the way users interact with all the business logic that you've written so that's a great challenge and so we built a new ui to make that more intuitive and hopefully easier and simpler to build great experiences we also built something we call the component gallery because bixby is on multimodal devices, there is a ui for bixby experience and the component gallery is a wysiwyg component editor so i'm writing some code for what we call bixby views, i can pop up the component gallery, configure something graphically, and it just dumps the code right in so it just makes it easier and then finally, we made it super simple to load a capsule directly from github so we have a bunch of sample code on github and now directly in the studio you can load that sample code from github without having to go and clone it or download it and go through all the previous hassles he had to do so just an example of some of the improvements we made to make it frankly, just easier if your day to day life as a developer developing something for bixby tony morelan 43 32 awesome so let me ask on the end, that component gallery actually was watching one of the sdc sessions on that is pretty cool so just to clarify, this is where like on the device when you give a voice prompt, and the device bixby reacts to that you can then have graphic images appearing on the device is that correct? roger kibbe 43 50 yeah, yeah so you can either when you're basically whenever bixby is communicating with the user, you can actually have a graphical ui on there that's complimentary and it also could have things like buttons on it, or sliders or controls, because one of the things is all these samsung devices so you know, the phone, the watch the television, the tv, all have a ui on there so bixby is not just a voice experience, but it's really a multimodal experience so you need to build graphical ui, we built a tool to make it pretty darn easy to do so tony morelan 44 26 so i heard a bit about bixby on windows tell me tell me about this new announcement roger kibbe 44 30 yeah, so brand new so bixby is available on the galaxy book notebooks so there's the samsung's newest notebooks so bixby is right there is a command key to launch bixby can turn on hi bixby so you can talk to your windows notebook you can ask questions and you can have it control smartthings home automation, you can ask it to find files you can ask them to change windows settings so right now, you know it's focused on a fairly narrow set of things but i'm super excited about we have this brand-new device, a windows laptop, what can you do with a voice front end in front of that? and what are ways where we can make it simpler and easier for a user to use their laptop? by talking to it? to my mind? there's a lot to be discovered there yeah, what we created is kind of step one in a journey toward, you know, making voice a modality that makes it easier for us to interact with our technology, which is what it's all about yeah, exactly tony morelan 45 31 and you had mentioned smart things there was a session at sdc titled enabling intelligent voice control on your iot devices and i know in that they talked about smart things and a lot about bixby tell me, what were some of the key takeaways for you from that session? roger kibbe 45 45 yeah so we introduced something called the bixby home platform, and it's a way of interfacing what you've done a big sweet voice with some of the smart things capabilities and the best way to explain it is for me to give some examples of what you can do and so first example is i might say hi, bixby turn on the dining room lights now if i'd set up dining room lights in smart things, boom, work great today but if i hadn't set up something called dining room lights, today, bixby re prompt you? or say, i can't find dining room lights, that's not a really good user experience sure so what you can set up with the bixby home platform is a lot more smarter logics so hi, bixby turn on the dining room lights, because we can say sorry, i can't find dining room lights, but you have kitchen lights, your bedroom lights, you have den lights? which one would you like to turn on? and so then you kind of the user asked for something that it didn't understand but at a set of airing out? it's like, well, i know you wanted to turn a light on yeah, here's the lights i can turn on and so i kind of prompted the user to, you know, what's the right can you want, much like we would do, frankly, a natural conversation tony morelan 47 00 exactly if roger kibbe 47 01 you ask me something that i didn't understand, i'd probably go can you clarify that? right yeah and so and this is a little bit of adding that kind of logic there so i think that's one great example of just a quote unquote, air becoming a success sure the other thing i want to highlight, and i think this is where it gets really interesting, and frankly, pretty sexy, to me, is where you're actually taking the voice input and you're taking what the iot device, its state and what it's sensing and combining them for some intelligent response okay, so let me let me give you an example so i could say hi bixby, turn on my air purifier, yeah, buy an air purifier, boom, today would turn it on all good but now with the bixby home platform, i can set it up so when i say hi bixby turn on the air purifier, instead of instantly turning on, i can go query the air purifier and say, hey, you know, what's, what's the air quality? okay, and if air quality was moderate, or acceptable, boom, i just turn it on and the default fan speed, maybe medium is on but let's say the air quality is poor well, then when i query it back and says, oh, air quality is poor now i can say, well, you want to turn it on and the air quality is poor i'll turn it on but i'm actually going to turn on and turn the fan to high so you're getting this this feedback loop? it's really, you're getting the user what they asked for, you're getting the state of an iot device you're combining those together? yeah and then the action is just smarter to my mind, this is pretty, i say, sexy and exciting because if you think about this, this is getting into much more intelligence sure the devices know, i know what you asked for, i know the state, i'm going to take the most intelligent action based upon those two inputs and that's what bixby home platform is all about it's really a development tool that lets you build experiences, like what i was just talking about tony morelan 48 59 yeah, i absolutely love that and i loved when he said in the session, that there's they're planning to open this up to partners and also to third party devices yeah, reach is going to be huge roger kibbe 49 10 absolutely well, i mean, i think that's one of the big things with a smartthings ecosystem, right is it's not just for samsung devices, but it's for, you know, devices from dozens or hundreds of manufacturers so if i can read some information on the device, i can get that information and i can do something very logical and just make things work more intelligently isn't that what we all want from our technology? tony morelan 49 32 exactly, yeah so on that note, you know, something i saw also very interesting in that session was the bixby home studio i absolutely love the whole idea of, you know, with your mouse, you can just drag and drop it and build out, you know, these experiences, all without coding yeah, that's on bixby home studio so like that is roger kibbe 49 50 the tooling behind what the experiences that i just talked about, so that you could intuitively built out, i use that air purifier example because actually, if you look at the session, they built out that exact experience and i think except i encourage people to go take a look at that because that is a really good way to kind of understand what i'm talking about, and hopefully get you excited about, huh, wow, there's something cool that i could build as an end user experience tony morelan 50 22 yeah and the demo they gave was pretty in depth i mean, this is not just a you know, they didn't just skim over the, you know, the concept of bixby home studio, they actually went through and built it out yes, it was pretty nice so that was an awesome session but i know there were a bunch of other sessions all kind of related to, you know, smart things in bixby what were some of the other sessions that you would suggest developers to check out? roger kibbe 50 44 yeah, so i would definitely check out the two bixby sessions that we that we mentioned and as you can see, a lot of the focus is on bixby and smart things yeah so if you're a bixby developer, i would suggest you check out some of the spark thing sessions and understand that, because i think a lot of the focus of what we're looking at is, hey, how do we get home controller devices to work super, super well with voice so that and that really is a dance between what bixby is doing and what smartthings is doing, and building that together and that's what the bixby home studio is all about so understand the two sides of the equation and then you'll understand and hopefully can build some really cool tony morelan 51 27 stuff yeah, i love the collaboration that's happening between smartthings and bixby so if developers want to learn more about bixby what's the what's the best way? roger kibbe 51 37 i yeah, so first thing would be go to bixbydevelopers com and that's a homepage for everything bixby that's download the studio, where we have our documentation, and just a bunch of information the other thing is we have a pretty active youtube channel so just look for bixby developers on youtube, youtube slash bixby developers, loads and then pretty much everything we do that's new, or we introduce a new youtube video, we would definitely post that to twitter okay, so that's twitter and that's bixby developers and then i do a weekly like tech tip of the week, like a two-minute video tutorial, and that's posted to twitter as well or also facebook so you can find that on facebook and then finally, i am the host of a podcast yeah, i guess focuses on all things voice not just bixby it is called bixby developers chat you can find it in your favorite podcast player or you should be able to ask your voice assistant hi bixby play bixby developers chat, podcast or another voice assistant and all of them should be able to play it so that is another resource tony morelan 52 45 that's awesome and it's a great podcast i have listened to your to your work you do you do an excellent job from one podcaster to another roger kibbe 52 52 well, thank you that's the kind of compliment you'd like to hear because we all understand the challenges and what you need to do to make a great podcast tony morelan 53 01 guests and let me remind everyone go check out that episode we did it was in the first season with roger, you can learn a bunch more about bixby and how to get started creating voice assisted capsules roger kibbe 53 11 well, thanks, tony really appreciate it and go check out those sdc videos to get a really more in depth understanding of the things we've talked about today tony morelan 53 19 thanks, roger banks one of the biggest announcements we made this past year is our latest watches now run on a new operating system called wear os powered by samsung and joining me on the podcast today is su yong kim, one of the software engineers here at samsung that has worked closely on our new watch ecosystem hey, sam thanks for joining me on the podcast today sooyeon kim 53 38 hi, tony thanks for having me today my name is yan qin and i'm a software engineer at samsung i'm very excited today to briefly recap our sdc sessions on samsung galaxy watch and where it was powered by samsung, which we jointly built with google tony morelan 53 55 yeah so there were several sessions related to the new watch ecosystem in the unified platform what would you say are the benefits of the new wear os powered by samsung? rooyen kim 54 04 so there are many, many benefits but first, we have created a seamless and deeply connected experience across not only samsung galaxy devices, but also for wear smartwatches and android smartphones with this new unified platform, we want to expand our ecosystem bring greater scale to our developer community, and at the same time, delight consumers with a variety of choices from watches to watch faces and apps tony morelan 54 33 yeah, it's true not only this, the developer community going to expand it but also the consumer reach is going to grow even wider can you talk about the growth of the smartwatch market over the past several years? sooyeon kim 54 44 well, the smartwatch market is continuously growing and in fact, according to counterpoint research shipments grew by 35% for the first quarter of 2021 compared to last year and after samsung galaxy watch for launch before august, we once again recognize this explosive growth and will continue to work hard to meet the demands of this growing market tony morelan 55 08 yeah, i agree as smartwatches get smarter than market demand is only going to increase can you tell me what are some of the new and exciting apps available for the new wear os powered by samsung? sooyeon kim 55 19 so users can enjoy familiar samsung apps like samsung pay smartthings and bixby but now google apps are also available like google maps, and youtube music we are also partnering with a wide variety of partners and developers on apps that are available for download from the play store on your watch on your phone there is also a dedicated category for watch apps, so you can easily browse and download them directly to your watch tony morelan 55 46 yeah, i love that youtube music is now available on galaxy watch for many people are buying the watch because they like to track workouts and have an active lifestyle and listening to music has always been a key component to working out can you tell me how is the new samsung galaxy watch for taking advantage of the health and wellness market? sooyeon kim 56 03 so we want to help users keep track of their health status and fitness activities so we brought groundbreaking health features and sophisticated sensors to our new samsung galaxy watch four in selected markets users can check body composition, blood pressure, electrocardiogram skeletal muscle mass based on the tablet grade water, fat percentage, and so on tony morelan 56 26 yeah, it's absolutely amazing that with this little device on your wrist, you can now check things like skeletal muscle mass and fat percentage and can conduct an ekg test can current android developers build watch apps for the new wireless powered by samsung and publish just as they've done before sooyeon kim 56 41 so we aim to make every step of watch app development from ease of bill to market launch as simple as possible with this new unified platform so yes, android developers, you can continue to build your apps within this familiar environment using android studio with watch emulators and existing and new wear os specific api's developers can also deploy and increase exposure for their apps with the watch apps category on the google play store tony morelan 57 11 yeah, so my background is in graphic design and for me, my biggest question was, were we going to build a new tool that would allow designers to create watch faces for the new unified platform? and when they learned the answer was yes, i was really excited so what are some of the new exciting features with the new west powered by samsung watch base design tool, watch face studio, sooyeon kim 57 31 anyone can download, design and publish watch faces for whereas on the play store, you don't have to learn how to code and just need to explore the new design tool watch face studio for more details there is a separate tech talk session on this tony morelan 57 45 yeah, so that session was called introducing the new watch face studio, it was a great overview of the new tool that showed just how easy it is for someone to create a watch face without any coding what are some of the other sessions from sdc21 that watch face developers should check out? sooyeon kim 57 59 oh, first there is the highlight session watch ecosystem or new era where we cover the new samsung galaxy watch ecosystem at a high level then there are tick tock sessions, build your app and the new watch ecosystem is where we specifically talk about watch app development and run through a range of api's by inviting a special guest from google and there is also a session on a new health platform that runs on where was powered by samsung tony morelan 58 27 yeah, there were a lot of great sessions all related to wearables, and lots of new opportunities for developers what is the best way for developers to learn more about the new watch ecosystem? sooyeon kim 58 36 for developers, i encourage visiting the samsung developers and the android developer sites, you can go to developer samsung com/galaxy-watch and also developer android com/where i really appreciate you coming on to the podcast today and giving your insight in to the new watch ecosystem super exciting times thanks tony thanks for inviting me so tony morelan 58 51 i'd like to welcome back to the podcast, eric clung injure, who leads developer relations at samsung eric and i did a pre sdc podcast where we gave a little preview on what to expect it sdc21, and highlights from some of our past developer conferences if you haven't checked out that episode yet, be sure to go back in and give it a listen eric, welcome back to the podcast eric cloninger 59 22 hey, tony, that was a lot of fun you know, we've been doing conferences for years and even though sdc21 was a virtual conference, it was a lot of work and a lot of work by a lot of people at samsung, yourself included and you know, i'd like to really give a shout out to everybody who put in a lot of effort a lot of late nights and all on it so i hope that the people who listened to the keynote and the spotlight session and all the technical sessions got something out of it yeah and hopefully next year, we can do this live yeah, tony morelan 59 54 no, i'm looking forward to that but yes, it was it was a great virtual conference so i've asked eric to join me on this episode to chat about the sdc session that i gave called grow your podcast audience with samsung eric cloninger 1 00 06 earlier this year, samsung made it really easy for device users to listen to podcasts can you share? what is the new podcast platform? tony morelan 1 00 14 yeah, so the new podcast platform, it's super easy to access from your device on the home screen, all you do is swipe left, which is our minus one screen that is samsung free, which is basically free entertainment from samsung all in one place there's four tabs there so there's the watch tab, which is if you wanted to stream tv, there's the read tab, if you want it to read news, there's the play tab, which is playing games and then of course, there is the listen tab, which is all about listening to podcasts eric cloninger 1 00 47 so who can access all of that content with samsung free? yeah, so tony morelan 1 00 50 samsung free is available on all of our latest devices so this is basically the note devices and s series going all the way back to s nine plus all the versions of z fold in z flip right now samsung free is only available in the us but we are expanding to europe soon i've been told that by the end of the year, we will be hitting some european countries eric cloninger 1 01 12 that's great so why did we launch a new podcast service? tony morelan 1 01 15 samsung's podcast strategy is to make it easy for the millions of samsung device users to listen to their favorite podcast shows and discover new episodes quickly and easily and also it gives publishers an impactful way to reach new listeners and really expand their audience eric cloninger 1 01 31 so how do those publishers bring their shows to samsung so grab tony morelan 1 01 34 your url from your podcast rss feed, and you can find that from your podcast hosting provider, take that rss feed in go to samsung podcast com sign up for a free samsung account and all you do is fill out a short form that allows you to import your rss feed url typically, it takes less than five minutes for you to fill out that form and that quickly, your show is now available on all of the samsung free devices eric cloninger 1 02 00 so what samsung free and the podcast platform doing to help publishers get their shows discovered tony morelan 1 02 05 so our editorial team is always looking for new and exciting shows to promote every week, we feature about seven new shows on our homepage and these promotional features have been extremely valuable for publishers in fact, there was one publisher in mind recently, marty ray project chats he saw a 2,000% increase in downloads just after being featured on our homepage so that was really great to see the value in that promotion for him eric cloninger 1 02 29 yeah, that's incredible numbers there so you're the host of our podcast, the samsung developer podcast is that how you got involved with the podcast platform team? tony morelan 1 02 39 exactly they reached out to me when they were first building the service and eventually asked if i would help promote it i said, absolutely that's when they asked me to present an sdc so you can check out my session and learn much more about the new podcast platform eric cloninger 1 02 53 right so the sdc content that is on the website is available for anyone to see at any time so are there any other sessions on the sdc21 website that potential podcasters and developers should check out? tony morelan 1 03 10 yeah, well, i would say what really got me excited was seeing all of the game focus sessions that we had up there so there's one session called galaxy store games focused developer friendly that was a great session on all the new game focused improvements for both gamers and developers and there was another session called games for everyone that samsung instant plays it's another great session for game developers to learn how to bring their html5 games directly to galaxy store, making it easy for users to play games without having to download and install anything eric cloninger 1 03 42 that is an exciting new way for people who are interested in playing casual games to get into something new without having to download hundreds of megabytes of content so i think that's going to be a game changer for all of us yeah, definitely so tony, thank you for giving us some insight on the new podcast platform and also for sitting down with different people associated with sdc21 it was a fantastic virtual conference and it was great to hear about the sessions on one ui, the incubation program smart things in bixby tony morelan 1 04 11 yeah and i also like the interviews that we did on our new watch ecosystem, you know, chatting with dan again on samsung internet that was great and, of course, our new podcast platform i'd like to thank all of my guests today and to you, eric for taking a moment to chat about sdc21 eric cloninger 1 04 27 thank you very much, tony closing 1 04 30 looking to start creating for samsung download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at 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 1 04 46 the pow! podcast is brought to you by samsung developers and produced us by tony morelan
success story game, mobile, marketplace
blogtoday, we're talking with ed mills, co-founder of hitcents, and alfred nguyen, creative director and producer of forgotton anne for throughline games. hitcents is a full-service video game publisher and developer, focused on bringing to market high-quality, indie-developed titles. founded in 1999 as a software company, hitcents’ passion for games slowly took over and pivoted the company. by 2012, the company was full steam ahead in the gaming industry as a developer and publisher. to date, it has worked with notable and well-recognized brands and celebrities, such as the godfather, nba, tom hanks, adam levine, one direction, and floyd mayweather. one of its most celebrated franchises is draw a stickman, which has been played more than one hundred million times and has global success on the nintendo switch, xbox one, steam, and mobile. tell us about hitcents. ed: hitcents is a full-service video game publisher and developer, but that is not where we started. our journey is part of what makes us such a unique company. hitcents was basically started as a software company on the carpet floors of our home in kentucky when my twins clinton and chris mills were 16-years-old. over the last 20 years our focus has changed, but the core of everything we do is still software. bootstrapped, with no outside investments for 20+ years, gaming has been a key driver of our success for more than a decade. we’ve had success across the gaming spectrum, from pc to console games to mobile apps. our most successful titles are: draw a stickman - the franchise has been played more than 100m+ times. draw a stickman: epic 2 - has seen 18 million purchases and installs across multiple platforms. the godfather: family dynasty - we were the first company to bring don corleone to mobile. currently, we work with a wide range of indie games and developers, and are always open to good gaming content. we publish games created by one-person developer shops, like get to the orange door, a retro futuristic rogue-lite fps releasing in 2020, to games created in other countries that have more of an edge and statement, like the cinematic platformer ministry of broadcast, which also launched in early 2020 and deals with concepts such as big brother, fake tv and a satirical look at politics, plus many more. can you share how you started as a game developer and ultimately became a game publisher? ed: it’s kind of crazy how we got started in games. hitcents was more of a complex ecommerce web agency and our creative director had an idea to draw a stickman and bring it to life on a browser. the weekend we launched draw a stickman we had millions of visitors, which ended up crashing our servers for all our clients. needless to say, it seemed tragic at the time, but the brand draw a stickman emerged as a successful, long-standing ip for hitcents. the brand has won 5 webby awards and made both hollywood and the game industry take note of us. as a result, a-list clients started to come on board with new content and connections, bringing us early success in games. this led to our partnering with caa for ip-related games. hitcents has many popular titles. we want to focus on forgotton anne. can you tell us about this game, available now on galaxy store? ed: forgotton anne is a seamless cinematic adventure with meaningful storytelling and a light puzzle platform. you play anne, the enforcer, who keeps order in the forgotten lands as she sets out to squash a rebellion that might prevent her master, bonku, and herself from returning to the human world. in the game, you step into a hand-animated realm of wonder in which everyday objects take on a life of their own. imagine a place where all that is lost and forgotten goes -- old toys, letters, socks. forgotten lands is this magical world inhabited by forgotlings; living mislaid objects longing to be remembered. in my opinion, and i’m sure the readers will think i’m biased, but the opening sequence in forgotton anne is so much fun to watch. i now know where all my lost socks go. forgotton anne has a stunning visual style and interactive game experience. what systems do you use to create game concepts and story characters? alfred: to create anne and forgotten lands, our artists use adobe products, as well as clip studio paint and tv paint to design, paint, and animate most of the sprites you see in the game, as well as the detailed environmental assets. with the protagonist anne alone more than 5000 frames were drawn! for story overview and testing, we used a lot of documents, spreadsheets, and a free software called twine that is great to test branching dialogues. how important is user experience when designing your games? alfred: the user experience is very important when designing a game. it is always a delicate balance between taking the player into consideration and staying true to a specific intention. knowing that sometimes a player might not immediately like a specific design, even though it adds a dimension that contributes positively to the game experience as a whole. this was the case when it came to prioritizing fluid animation over some degree of the controls’ responsiveness, or when we decided not to include game over, as it would negatively affect the pacing of the game. forgotton anne features light puzzles and platforming sections. however, it is very much a story about anne and letting the player make choices in her stead, to see how the consequences play out. how will the player use anne’s authority and deal with conflicts? alfred: when designing we let storytelling and emotions come first. then we discuss how we can make things the most intuitive for the largest target audience. however, as developers we have to accept that different players like different things. in the end, we are just happy that as many people as possible love the game! what are some of the challenges you face while developing your games? alfred: one challenge was to create a seamless cinematic experience where the player doesn’t feel a traditional cut between storytelling cutscenes and gameplay. the way we managed this was to ensure that there were no loading screens while playing and that all cutscenes were rendered in-game so the player was not presented with a different aesthetic when a longer story scene played out. the whole game is voice-acted and we created a ‘talk animation system’ to make it feel like the words were acted out. this really adds to the immersion. artwise we aimed for an incredibly rich and detailed painted environment. this presented its own challenge, as we had to make sure the player could discern how to navigate the 2.5d world, allowing for some travel in the z-depth axis at certain intersections. which objects would the player be able to interact with or bump into and which were decorative elements? something that sounds very trivial, like walking up and down stairs, was actually also a challenge as we wanted anne to feel real with her animations, unlike many other 2d games. if you pay attention, you will notice her feet place themselves correctly on the steps, as do her hands when she is climbing ladders. the tone of the game was also a challenge we wanted to get right. the premise of the game is very outlandish and quirky, with echoes of fairy tales like beauty and the beast, but at the same time we wanted to create a very realistic world. we were trying to strike a tone that could easily go from emotional and serious when dealing with themes of consumerism and authoritarianism to funny and endearing using the diverse cast of forgotling characters. are there common errors made by developers while programming games? alfred: scoping a game is always really hard. in early development you tend to be overambitious, and rightly so, as you need to explore the best version possible of the game you are making. however, it is important to constantly update plans and make the necessary cuts when necessary, as most developers don’t have the luxury of working without deadlines. these cuts tend to be a good thing, as it sharpens the concept and forces the developer to prioritize what is really important to the game and player’s experience, instead of falling into the typical pitfall of feature-creeping, i.e. adding features to the game due to the worry that it is not fun enough for players. forgotton anne boasts a number of awards. what is the basic structure for developing a successful game? ed: we don’t think there is a secret formula to creating hit games, or the market would be flooded with them. but, there are some universal truths one can rely on for added probability. one of them is knowing your intentions and having a capable team that has the necessary competences to execute. communication is key, as it does not matter how skilled each individual is on the team if there is a lack of understanding between the people. i also strongly believe in an organic approach to development, where you need to accept changing circumstances and adapt quickly to them. we rarely set out knowing exactly every little detail of the finished game. if we did, it would prove to be detrimental to the creative process, as half the fun is coming up with solutions and discovering great ideas over the course of realizing the initial vision. while iterating on gameplay mechanics, we might discover a great opportunity to emphasize a storytelling aspect, or perhaps a piece of composed music could inspire how a sequence could play out. there is still so much to explore with the medium of games and its storytelling potential. that is really our aim and we hope that it translates to some originality that resonates with players. how do you stay up to date with the latest game and software trends? ed: there are a couple of ways. every major platform on mobile and console has a developer conference and these shows offer the best avenue to listen and learn. another popular option is to go with an established publisher that often has early access to beta programs and has boots on the ground looking for the latest changes and opportunities to use tools that make a better product and potentially make work quicker. as a publisher, we are always playing and researching as many games as we can; reading up on trends in the industry -- who’s hot, what’s not; and researching new technologies and marketing techniques. what advice do you have for indie developers attempting to develop a successful game business? ed: start with a team, even if it's just 2 people. to make a game it requires many skill sets. i like to see experts, or someone that desires to be an expert, at each position or task. for example, you can have one team member specializing in art design plus knowledge of ui (user interface) and ux (user experience), who can complement a programmer. the more well-rounded each team member is the more fun the project and the less time wasted searching for answers to complex development problems. create a gdd (game design document) that maps out the major aspects of the game. this will save countless hours of unneeded art and programming. it's ok to iterate upon your gdd, but do start with a solid foundation. choose the best language/engine to make your game. though unity is great for 3d games and can port over to android with relative ease, sometimes it can lose the true feel of doing the code in its native environment if you are producing a 2d game or an app. the best advice i can give is to find a team member with the skill set that complements your game or app idea. if you are a programmer, stay with what you know and get better at it. decide what your time commitment is to making your game, i.e. months? years? paid games are easier to go to market than free-to-try, but free-to-try will get you more downloads over time. this question can be a blog all on its own, so again having a good publisher can help more than almost anything. with all of your current success, what is next for hitcents? ed: the godfather:family dynasty game has become over the past 3 years one of, if not the most, successful mobile paramount game. hitcents is planning the next big game with a known brand on par to the success and magnitude of the godfather. the biggest thing for our future is knowing the words cross platform means playing across your mobile device, pc, and console, not just across mobile platforms. our future is about consumer choice, bringing all the options to our players and letting them choose what they want to play, where they want to play it, and what device they want to play it on. ideally, your samsung galaxy phone can play and progress while you are on the go, and then you can pick up on your console at home where you left off. it's an exciting time for gamers! what motivated hitcents to bring your games to galaxy store? ed: galaxy store provides hitcents with the opportunity to diversify our sales, by opening a new revenue stream. it allows us to widen our customer base and gain access to samsung device owners globally. what samsung developer program services did you take advantage of when publishing forgotton anne to galaxy store? ed: we integrated samsung in-app purchase payment service, which is used to make a one-off payment for goods or to pay for a regular subscription. it allows hitcents to sell premium content and virtual goods, including in-game items available for purchase during game play. did you use any marketing services to support driving both awareness and downloads for your game on galaxy store? ed: marketing and monetization is another key component of every developer’s journey. we found the galaxy store badge can be used as a resource on our website and media to support marketing our game on galaxy store. adding galaxy store badge has put users one click away from downloading our game on galaxy store. the guides and downloadable content provided easy-to-follow instructions. thanks to ed mills and alfred nguyen for sharing how they create and distribute successful game titles. follow us on twitter @samsung_dev for more developer interviews and tips for building games, apps, and more for the galaxy store.
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 3, episode 4 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest chris benjaminsen, frvr games, galaxy store chris benjaminsen, founder of frvr, the super successful game publisher with over 70 titles on samsung services not only do we chat about monetization and game revenue strategies, but how the frvr platform has allowed them to scale their global reach all music from today's show is from frvr games, composed by rasmus hartvig listen download this episode topics covered frvr publishing on galaxy store marketing discoverability monetization generating revenue in-app purchase iap in-app advertising iaa interstitial ads galaxy badge best of galaxy store awards acquiring games/studios diversity and inclusion helpful links frvr - frvr com frvr careers - careers frvr com frvr linkedin - linkedin com/company/frvr frvr youtube - youtube com/c/frvrgames gold train frvr - goldtrain frvr com chris benjaminsen linkedin - linkedin com/in/chrisbenjaminsen/ chris benjaminsen twitter - twitter com/benjaminsen galaxy badges - developer samsung com/galaxy-store/gsb-promotion samsung iap - developer samsung com/iap samsung developer program homepage - developer samsung com samsung developer program newsletter - developer samsung com/newsletter samsung developer program blog - developer samsung com/blog samsung developer program news - developer samsung com/news samsung developer program facebook - facebook com/samsungdev samsung developer program instagram - instagram com/samsung_dev samsung developer program twitter - twitter com/samsung_dev samsung developer program youtube - youtube com/samsungdevelopers samsung developer program linkedin - linkedin com/company/samsungdevelopers transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is the samsung developers podcast, where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season three, episode four on today's show, i'm joined by chris benjaminsen, founder of frvr, the super successful game publisher with over 70 titles on samsung services not only do we chat about monetization and game revenue strategies, but how the frvr platform has allowed them to scale their global reach and the music from today's show is from frvr games, all composed by rasmus hartvig, enjoy hey, chris, welcome to the podcast chris benjaminsen 00 50 hey, tony thanks for having me yeah, so tony morelan 00 52 so i'm excited to chat with you because, you know, we've had game developers on the podcast, but never a game publisher let me first ask you though, who is chris benjaminsen? chris benjaminsen 01 02 like? that's a good question like, if i were to define myself, i think there's like two defining characteristics, like one is i must make things and the second one is, i detest repetition so if you come to my place, it's not unlikely i will cook but it's very unlikely i'm cooking something i made before so you know, it might be good might not be good, right? but you know, that, that drives and making things like it, it can be origami, it can be computer games that can be like, doesn't really matter, as long as i'm sort of producing something, and then i really don't like doing things twice right you know, like, anything that's routine is just boring tony morelan 01 41 so you're an explorer, then? chris benjaminsen 01 43 i guess so i guess so yeah tony morelan 01 47 so you're with frvr? what exactly is your role? and what is frvr? chris benjaminsen 01 53 like, like, i'm the i'm the original founder, the company, right? you know, and my role today is mostly around working together with massive companies such as samsung, i lead a team at frvr that does that and if you're, if you were to describe frvr, as a company, we're a platform and a publisher okay, so we have a platform that allows game developers to make fantastic games and with all the services that they need to do to do so basically, anything in between a, a game developer and a consumer, and then we also the publisher, we actually make sure that the games get in front of the right user, and they have an opportunity to play those games tony morelan 02 29 okay, what does frvr stand for? it's an acronym, does it have a deep meaning? chris benjaminsen 02 35 no, it's not like, like, a lot of people are sort of asking us if we have french vr company, which we're not yeah, but, but like, like, if rbis is technically forever, without the vowels okay, you can trademark frvr you can trademark forever, at least, not unless you have apple liberal money, right? so so if we say if i'm yeah, because if you could locally use you sort of the full pronunciation you can actually use the trademark so there's a bunch of stupid rules there tony morelan 03 07 interesting interesting so before we dive into frvr, tell me about your journey what led you into the mobile gaming area, and then specifically into creating frvr, chris benjaminsen 03 17 i've been in the, in the games industry for like, more than 20 years, my first job, sort of professional job ever was to make a real time multiplayer games in javascript and if i'd be honest, my seventh startup in total and my second year, and my third platform company over also have like a long history of sort of building companies in this space and i've been very fortunate i never managed to go bankrupt but one of these companies so far, right, you know, so little bit proud about that tony morelan 03 48 oh, that's great it definitely plays into you know, when you first started, you had said that, you know, you're not going to repeat much so you said seven companies that you've started, chris benjaminsen 03 58 you had all very different companies, and some of them were like, like, like, very small and, and never got successful, anything like that right? it's just like the companies apparently gets bigger and bigger every time i try yeah, there might be there might be new startups in the future as well but for now, if rbis is a very exciting company to work at, and definitely want to want to spend my time tony morelan 04 20 so i know one of those companies you had started you actually, it was a pretty successful company that you ended up selling but you came away with that from with a lot of lessons learned, i would say is that correct? chris benjaminsen 04 33 yeah so like, like, in a previous life, build a platform company that did infrastructure for cash or mobile, social and in that company, there was a lot of people building games on top of our infrastructure and 1000s of developers right and, and there was there's a few significant learnings from that so one was that building a company that just charges other people for services is not a particularly good business, a lot of money was made by the developers on top of our platform where we are not making quite a lot of money so you know, make sure that that you actually participate where, where the value is if you want to be a publisher and then the second learning was that the successful developers were not the ones who had the best at making games, right? so there's, there's not a strong connection between sort of making games that are fun to play and the economic success that those developers were able to see so if you want to be successful in the game space, and this is particularly true in the in the mobile game space, you need to be good at a lot of other things that has nothing to do with game development, such as a user acquisition, and revenue optimization, and data and all these things and that, you know, i don't think there's anything wrong with that but if you are somebody who really loves making kickass games, you're missing the 90% if you also want to be successful at that tony morelan 05 57 it's interesting you say that, you know, i had on the podcast a few weeks ago, peter and tobias from biodome games, they have their game gold digger, frvr yeah and it was peter, who had a great quote, saying that he was chatting with one of his partners, who had said, you know, for once, can you stop trying to be so artistic in your games and just build a game that can be successful? and, you know, we all had a good laugh at that chris benjaminsen 06 23 yeah and, you know, i think all industries are like that, right you know, you probably have to be good at a multitude of different disciplines to be successful but, but the games industry, being one of the most valuable entertainment industry, two worlds is, of course, also one of the most competitive and that competitive landscape it's a very, it's a very hard place for, for most people to compete and, and the market sentiment is sort of dominated by survival bias yeah right you know, like, like, the people who won the lottery yeah you know, like, like an among us are like flappy birds so like these, these small teams that had an outsized hit, right, but that's like winning the lottery good luck with that yeah and tony morelan 07 04 i think a great example of that right now is wordle, in the phenomenon behind that chris benjaminsen 07 08 absolutely fantastic game, right you know, and i like these small puzzle games once in a while to come along i was like, 2048, as well, which was also originally made, i think, by an italian game developer, you know, just as a small example, fantastic, fantastic game as well yeah, tony morelan 07 25 definitely, in kind of going back to, you know, what i mentioned, peter, and tobias, they said that for them, you know, the key to their success was partnering with someone like frvr, so that they could just focus on creating the game and let everybody on your team handle everything that when it comes to publishing and marketing, so i think there's a huge value with where you guys are in this space chris benjaminsen 07 47 i hope so like, that's what we're trying to do we're trying to allow developers focusing on making fantastic games and then we took care of all the nitty gritty details of making those games available and i think we published the 39 platforms and then while also helping those developers make sure that the right users come into the games yeah, yeah because it's not it's not only just about the volume of people who play a game, it's more important to make sure that the right user plays the game sure, to get the kind of games that i like, it's not necessarily the kind of games that you like, right, for tony morelan 08 17 sure so let's talk a bit about the history how long has frvr been in existence? chris benjaminsen 08 22 so i think i think technically, they were written, sort of in the integration of the company was founded in must be 2016 okay and their written version of frb apps was decided to be the biggest, baddest lifestyle company you have ever heard of, and sort of sort of allowed me to go and travel the world without having to worry about expenses and it did that it did that very well like, very successfully however, like i'd had a corporate job in corporate america, i had moved to san francisco at this point in my life after having sold a previous company and i sort of managed to convince myself that everything that was wrong with my life was working it turned out everything that was wrong with my life was working for corporate america and it took me it took me like three weeks and a whole bunch of success to realize that and decide, oh, wow, there's a big opportunity here in what inevitably came if ivr that exists today yeah, i teamed up with a guy called brian meidell they joining co-founder came in and we started sort of getting serious about the company a few years after the original founding tony morelan 09 28 and it was brian actually, who had told peter, hey, for once, put artistic stuff aside and let's focus on you know, how to be successful here chris benjaminsen 09 36 yeah and like he's a fantastic executor right, you know, and that's, like, due to building big teams and sort of running productions a lot of repetition stuff i don't like right, yes really good at that tony morelan 09 48 that's great so how many employees are at frvr? chris benjaminsen 09 52 yeah, so i think we are 130 now so as of today, but yeah, like we find ourselves in a situation right now, where we are onboarding around 11 new people a month, so you're growing? yeah, every time you ask that question, the number would have changed? tony morelan 10 08 no, are these people are you focused in one headquarters? are you guys you know, all around the globe? chris benjaminsen 10 13 we have most of our people in in lisbon in portugal and that's predominantly where we are focusing on hiring okay, you know, post covid, the world has changed and, you know, we absolutely accept that some people want to be wherever it is they want to be so we also we also have offices in denmark, we have offices in united kingdom and we have a small office in malta as well, and a small office in spain so we have we have sort of different opportunities for people who wants to work in an office got it and then the majority of people are now in in disband portugal and that's also where we are mostly doing a tony morelan 10 50 hiring you yourself, though you are in the uk is that correct? yeah, i'm chris benjaminsen 10 53 in london, right? you know, i get to i get to be a special snowflake and decide where i want to live so i live in tony morelan 11 01 wonderful now under the frvr brand how many game studios do you guys have that you're working with? chris benjaminsen 11 07 we are publisher right? you know, so? we i think presently we work with around 20 okay, yeah other studios, right? so it's a non-insignificant amount but we have high aspirations, we want to get to a place where we can work with hundreds, if not 1000s of developers sure to do fantastic things tony morelan 11 28 so how many monthly players? do you get playing frvr games on all channels? chris benjaminsen 11 34 i get to it various, right like, like a lot of our success comes from viral traffic right okay so active users can range from i got a really bad month, 50 million to get month where we were we peek into, like, like 100 plus million mark wow, tony morelan 11 50 monthly active users that's crazy yeah, it's chris benjaminsen 11 53 a lot of people so far, i think like, like it's a number we track we think we've had around 1 6 billion absolute unique for the lifetime of the company tony morelan 12 03 wow and that is just in you know, you said the 2016 was the start of frvr chris benjaminsen 12 09 have you? i failed to remember it might have been 15 right but yeah, like plus minus a year sure tony morelan 12 16 so now let's talk about samsung and galaxy store with frvr, what are some of the popular titles that you guys offer on galaxy store? chris benjaminsen 12 24 so particularly on the galaxy store, like we have, i think we have like 12 games live, their most notice would be it's called tigger, frvr which, which is built by peter and team and then we have sort of our higher end games like a basketball and a hex and however, we do work with samsung in other ways, as well, they have this instance type product as well, where we are also present and we have i don't know; i think we've done like seven or eight different integration with samsung along the year so we are sort of everywhere on a samsung phone, including the galaxy appstore tony morelan 12 57 okay, so not just the galaxy app store but there's other different platforms that samsung offers frvr is involved in chris benjaminsen 13 04 yeah, so we work with, we work with samsung about building an experience in our first integration with what's in the product called bixby minus one home screen so when you swipe left on your on your phone, like we will be wearing, we had a cart where there was sort of quick links to our games, okay, we build an instant games type product together with samsung, we work quite a lot of that together and we have our games live there we also have integrations with the with the browser and like we exploring, basically, a big part of what frvr is, rather than trying to drag the user to where we want them to be, say, a mobile app store, we try to take the model and turn it inside out and bring people great games wherever they have already decided to want to be because it's very costly to drag a user somewhere else, right tony morelan 13 50 i see so if they're already there, you want to make your game available to them chris benjaminsen 13 54 yeah, yeah it's like, you know, if you're, if you're starbucks, right, people won't care if you can only get it in the airport, you actually have to be on a street corner close to where people sort of walk around, otherwise nobody is ever going to drink their coffee tony morelan 14 05 yeah, that's true that's true so how did this relationship with samsung for start? chris benjaminsen 14 10 we met samsung at a at a conference and they were like, can you give us games in like, four months? i think was the was the original question and we got the games to them in two days so wow so the answer was yes yeah tony morelan 14 24 that's a great way to start the relationship oh, yeah so why would you say it's important to offer your game on galaxy store? chris benjaminsen 14 31 like, again, you know, that those users there who love the galaxy store, and we want to have our games available to those users in that space and galaxy store is actually well performing? right you know, it's a samsung product and samsung phones are very high-end devices generally it's very, not only is it it's great to meet a consumer where they are they are also very high value users when people are playing from the front of samsung galaxy app store tony morelan 14 54 yeah, in what ways would you say galaxy store has helped you promote frvr games chris benjaminsen 14 59 for is the organic installs a fairly competent product? and it has all the features you would expect as a game developer, right? you know, so, so great access to in app purchases, great access to notifications, great access to distribution, right but we've also, we also really enjoyed working together with the samsung galaxy team and we have, like, among other things, we have an frvr category in the galaxy store that sort of exclusive to us it's only our games oh, no, no and we work together on seasonal featuring and to give feedbacks to us, you know, saying, hey, we think it would be fantastic if we could do some something around easter, for instance and then we go and work on that together and sort of find a, a process that works well together for both of us tony morelan 15 42 that's great and i'm sure that banner promotions are part of that is that chris benjaminsen 15 45 yeah, banner promotion, and i can promotions and like there's a lot of tools that samsung has in the toolbox to help out right? yeah and then we also push on the galaxy team to do more like we, we've sent a lot of feedback on the on the back-end tools and things like that and fantastically, it has impact, like we get better product right so for us, that's a fantastic partnership tony morelan 16 09 yeah and that's one of the things that actually pulled me into working for samsung was how open they were to feedback in wanting to improve their platform fantastic you know, you'd mentioned gold digger, frvr those are the guys they won our 2021 best of galaxy store award for best instant play game awesome game awesome guys, we were so happy to give that award tell me what it did mean for frvr to have one of your games win a best of galaxy store award? chris benjaminsen 16 37 it's a privilege, right? you know, and the credit goes to the game developer, they made that game? yeah right you know, we supported them along the way and, and of course, came with a lot of feedback and help them with technical issues and things like that but at the end of the day, you know, we have to be honest about the fact that the great games are made by the great developers, right, and also, as a platform publisher, provide the tools to make that a possibility but games are fundamentally a creative endeavor and you need massively traded people to make to make those games sure i'm, i'm a game developer myself as well, right you know, and i'm almost more proud of some of the games i've built and, you know, the very successful company that and if rbis, right, you know, because, you know, so it's sort of like an expression of something where you sat down and said, here's the thing i want to create, and now i've gotten it out right and i think to be as impede completely deserves getting that, that recognition from galaxy tony morelan 17 35 yeah success for a game definitely revolves around revenue tell me as far as frvr, what has been your strategy for generating revenue? chris benjaminsen 17 46 like so so from a, from a technical side, right, you know, we try to we try to make all avenues of generating revenue available in our platform, right so that means interstitial-based advertisement, it means reward the best advertisement? it means in app purchases, it means subscriptions it actually does not mean, banner advertisement, we don't do that because i don't like it no, really but you know, yeah, other than that, like, like, we sort of have all the technical capabilities, and then what we find and what we try to optimize for, it's not revenue, we try to optimize for engagement okay and there's a multitude of reasons for that, like so so like, one is the fact that i can't remember the specific number, but it's more than 90% of all value that is captured in the game is made by people who play the game more than once yeah, right you really want to have these long engagements with people, right and another fairly simple reason is it's a lot easier to take a game that has huge engagement, and turn it into a good business than it is to take a game with a with a strong monetization model and turn it into a great game right? so fundamentally, everything we focus on all our kpis, all our visions, and missions are around building experiences that people want to engage with for a long time and then revenue is something that happens as a result, they're off, rather than being sort of a driving factor and because we are good at distribution it because we, we are not sort of participating in the race to the bottom that is cost positive user acquisition on app stores, we can take the privilege that it is to be less aggressively monetizing than some of our competitors tony morelan 19 22 yeah, yeah so let's talk about some of the specifics here, when it comes to, you know, different ways to generate revenue you know, there's developers out there that may just be getting started in this space and so i want to help explain what some of those are so ip is in app purchase, kind of explain, like what is in app purchase chris benjaminsen 19 39 so new in app purchases, if you can somehow convince a user to pay for something in the game, right, you know, and, and how they pay it's actually quite different across the world so northern europe or usa, right? america has a distributor for a credit card, okay but if you're talking about a consumer in india, it's typically through a 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
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blogwhat is a marketing newsletter? in business school, i learned that a business's primary objective is to generate revenue to sustain its existence. i also learned that a business can only generate revenue if it provides a service or product that consumers are willing to pay for. additionally, i gained the understanding that consumers are more willing to pay for a service or product from a company they have empathy for. a marketing newsletter is a direct engagement with consumers. newsletters provide a means to send information to a targeted group of users and potential buyers that improve brand awareness, inform them of product changes and include items of interest. a marketing newsletter has four goals. 🏎️ to increase customer loyalty which can be measured by subscribers of the newsletter 🏎️ to increase interest in a product which can be measured by open rate of the newsletter 🏎️ to generate traffic which can be measured by click-through rate to your web site from the newsletter 🏎️ to increase income which can be measured by attributed revenue of direct purchases via the newsletter a previous winner of the “best of galaxy store award,” persona, uses a marketing newsletter because they believe that “the more communication channels you have with users, the easier it is to achieve brand loyalty.” note : a newsletter is not a sales brochure; it is not meant to list your products and prices. when newsletters are of no interest or sent unrequested to recipients, the newsletter will only tarnish your customer relationship. the same due diligence used to ensure there is no intellectual property (ip) infringement in your product or store description should be used in your newsletters. samsung has created an ip infringement guide for app submission that, along with the references used for the guide, may also be a useful for your newsletter composition. start communicating to your consumers i used to go to a lot of trade shows; it is a great way to learn about your competition as well as ways to improve your product. i’ve noticed that it isn’t always the big corporate booths that have waiting lines, but the smaller companies with free swag will also draw interest. before you can publish a newsletter you need customers to send it to. smaller companies who can’t afford a marketing team still need to get information out to current users and potential customers. without big budgets to interest customers, a company can still create initial interest for a newsletter from a product web site, galaxy store product description, social media groups, as well as word of mouth from satisfied customers. a way to entice customers to sign up or continue receiving the newsletter is with coupons, giveaway contests and special discounts. sharing those in the newsletter first is an excellent way to retain your users and build brand loyalty. persona’s marketing team is using all the social media tools. their goal is to be found on every social media platform: facebook, instagram, twitter, pinterest, youtube, reddit, telegram channels, and others. however, one of the most important digital marketing tools is their well-designed website, persona-wf.com. use the right tools for the job there is an old saying that when you only have a hammer, every screw looks like a nail. while this is true, having a screwdriver available makes for a much better end product. the same should be said for a marketing newsletter. while having a word processing program and a mail account allows you to initially create and publish a newsletter, it is not as effective as using a proper emailing tool, especially as your business grows. a good customer relationship management (crm) tool will have both operational and analytical systems. this makes it easier to not only organize and send newsletters, but also analyze and create reports as well as provide information that is used to target your audience. they usually include a dedicated email service provider. a couple of methods to measure the effectiveness of your newsletter are open rate as well as clicks from the newsletter. for their mailing program, persona uses mailchimp so they have access to various reports that helps them tailor their audience. however, there are many mailing companies, such as mailer lite, sendinblue or others, who can fulfill your business needs. of course you can create your own mailing lists using basic office tools. even if the mailing list is small, keep in mind that domain accounts that include email services, both free and paid services, have limits to how many emails or recipients can be sent in a set time period. i believe an advantage of using a crm mailing program is the ability for unsubscribing. it is much better to have an unhappy reader hit the unsubscribe button than flame you on social media. trying to handle removal of readers manually can be a very time consuming operation. select the right style of newsletter annually i get a two-page recap from my aunt about her family’s prior year. i am often amazed to learn how productive my cousins are and that the new dog is such a scamp. however, i read it and toss it away. her letter is just words and there is no engagement with me. it is telling and telling, but isn’t selling. a good newsletter needs more than just words and it needs a format that engages readers. the format of the newsletter will make a difference, so tailor your newsletter to your target audience. some newsletters are a recap or summary with a links to content with more details. that format is easy to scan through and find topics of interest. it is a great format if your target is a manager or representative who is busy. the reader can skim or skip parts of no interest and deep read what they find important. other newsletters may have a story about one topic with links throughout the story to more detailed information. if your target is detail oriented, these how-to newsletters will engage the reader. if your app is a game, giving users tips and tricks while taking them on a journey through the game draws them in. another style of newsletter is mostly visual. telling a story in images is especially useful if you have an international audience as it removes translations and has visual interpretations. also if your target audience is more creative, you may want to go with a newsletter with more visuals. adobe indesign is a useful tool for creating a heavily imaged newsletter. there are many low- priced or free alternatives, such as affinity-publisher, if you are on a budget. dominus mathias, a case study watch face designers like persona or game developers with in-app purchases depend on repeat customers. i interviewed dominus mathias watch face design studio and their success story shows what you can achieve. you may find it interesting how a small designer company, dominus mathias, uses email marketing newsletters to increase their sales. dominus mathias cooperates closely with the company vienna studios for marketing and started collecting email addresses in 2019 for the purpose of sending a newsletter to subscribers. the reason was a way to alert customers to ongoing discounts with the end goal to increase repeat sales. initially they used the google groups service for their newsletter. with the increasing number of subscribers, they were forced to look for alternatives that could automate the whole process. ultimately they chose to use fluent forms, as well as the fluentcrm plugin for wordpress, in connection with their website, viennastudios.com. using fluent forms gives them the ability to send newsletters, on average, about one per week depending on planned activities. vienna studios newsletters may include coupons, giveaway contests or special discounts in their newsletter, to entice readers to purchase products or visit the web site. the use of newsletters by dominus mathias and vienna studio has increased the number of recipients who read the newsletters and fulfill the desired action of purchasing a watch face design. almost every newsletter has some success; the rate depends on various parameters such as the intensity/frequency of sending, the time of sending, the topicality and attractiveness of the promoted watch faces, etc. dominus mathias and vienna studio have continued to innovate to increase sales and downloads. in february 2023, in order to make the business more attractive for their customers, they introduced a new app called watch face arena. this app not only provides current information about products that are on sale or for free, but also enables customers to actively participate in a playful way. for example, consumers can vote for their favorite watch faces that are in competition with another one and follow the ranking of the most attractive ones. the app is available on the google play store. the time to start is now the time to start your marketing newsletter is now, because you can. you don’t need to spend a lot of money for tools to start, you can use your business email address and a word processor. starting small can be a big advantage. even if you have ten names on the mailing list, they can be your alpha group. don’t wait for a new product or updated version release. start gathering names and contact information. if you don’t do it now, when will you do it? resources persona watch faces ip infringement guide mailchimp mailer lite sendinblue fluent forms fluentcrm vienna studios
Ron Liechty
tutorials web
blogpush notifications have a terrible reputation but if done well can give your users a positive experience. you know that thing where you go to a web site then, before you can do anything, you have to acknowledge the push notification request. do you hate that? yeah, me too. jo franchetti even wrote an entire article about the crisis of websites bombarding people with permission requests and dialogs when they first arrive on the page. a crisis of permissions that’s just one of the many ways it’s easy to upset your users with push notifications, this article will try to detail some ways to do them better. a bad example of requesting for push notifications on first load failing before you even begin push notifications on the web are one of the most maligned apis on the web and this is one of the reasons why. it’s possible to give a bad impression before you even send a single notification. just like you wouldn’t ask to move in with someone on the first date, do not ask to send notifications on the very first user engagement. assume your users do not want push notifications. prove the worth of your web app with it’s high quality information and delightful user experience. make the users want push notification before you prompt them, the best way to do this is to have a checkbox to enable push notifications in context. this makes it clear not only what the push notification request is for but how they can turn them off when they do not want them. in this example app users can turn on notifications for particular information channels with the “notify me on updates” checkbox: if they check the checkbox then we will call pushmanager.subscribe() which will prompt the user to enable notifications. the users are more likely to enable push notifications because they chose to be prompted through their own intuition. on a related note app install banners: in some browsers, app install banners, pop up in a similar way to poorly done notification requests. it is not in response to a user action and are unrelated to your app’s content and not part of your apps user interface. it is possible to integrate this into your app interface, letting you hide this banner and letting you provide your own install button. do this in the beforeinstallprompt event: window.addeventlistener('beforeinstallprompt', handleinstallprompt); you can use this event to integrate an app install button into your app. if you get this event then you can show the button which allows the content to be installed. in the below image i put a subtle bubble at the bottom of the homepage for installing it. it’s easy to find and access but won’t intrude on the user’s app experience. the user pays the cost of notification, don’t be expensive. the user doesn’t pay a cost in money but they do in attention. each notification is a weight upon the user’s mind. a notification to a user when their attention is at their limit could be the motivation the user needs to block all notifications from the entire web browser. each notification should bring joy to the user. how do you bring joy? be timely if you could’ve given this information earlier or could show it later why bother interrupting the user right now. bad notification: ‘did you know you can send money with our app’ good notification: ‘alice has sent you $20’ be efficient opening an app or web page is comparatively slow, it can take a few seconds which is a long time to someone who is busy cooking dinner or watching netflix or at work. if you can put all the information in the notification without them opening the app then do that. if all the response you need is a simple option-a/option-b question such as yes/no then add those buttons. when the user presses the button update the notification to acknowledge the button press but don’t open the app. eve has requested $15 [send now] [decline] be clear there are many options to change the appearance of the notification use as many as possible to make it clear where the app is from, what it’s about and what action is expected from the user. use the badge and icon for your app icon. use the title to give a summary of what action the user needs to take, use the body and image to give relevant information and context. the next section describes how to customise your notificaition. do not waste the user’s time don’t push ads, don’t use them to beg users to return, don’t push boring notifications to remind the user your web app exists. i know it’s tempting and you have quotas to meet but it will only have an adverse effect on how the user views your app and notifications as a whole. the user probably does not love your app as much as you do and will be a lot less forgiving. fully customising push notifications here is an example notification where as much as possible has been configured: { body: "awkward zombie - disagree to agree", icon: "/icons/appicon.png", image: "https://example.com/previewimage.jpg", badge: "data:image/png;base64,ivborw0kggoaaa...", vibrate: [100, 50, 100], data: data, tag: data.url, actions: [ { action: "read now", title: "open" }, { action: "close", title: "close" }, ], }; self.registration.shownotification(title, options); if assets take too long to load they get ignored. the most important icon is the badge icon since it’s the one which gets put into the status. it’s also very small so is ideal to be url encoded and is kept in a constant in the service worker file, to ensure it is loaded reliably. for the icon we use the app icon so it’s extra clear where the notification is from. this is a locally loaded png to be sure it loads quickly. the image is loaded from the third party site the being loaded from the rss feed we don’t need to have it store local it’s okay for these to be from somewhere else. it adds good context but it isn’t essential so if it does not load in time then it’s not an absolute problem. these examples of action buttons i’ve done here are probably not totally necessary since notifications can be closed by some other means and we can just listen for notification clicks. better examples would be something like “open” and “remind me later”, defaulting to “open” if neither button is clicked. detailing the different parts of the notification combining notifications you can’t guarantee a user will check their device in between notifications. new notifications by default do not replace the the old ones so this can result in an overwhelming flood of notifications if they arrive in short succession. if you set the tag property then notifications which share the same tag can overwrite each other. in this example the tag is set to the rss feed’s url, so that notifications from the same rss feed overwrite each other. this is better since we don’t get flooded but now if a second notification comes through we lose the first one. it’s probably a good idea to check to see if you are replacing a notification and if you are concatenate them together. const existingnotifications = await self.registration.getnotifications({ tag: data.url, }); if (existingnotifications.length) { const oldnotification = existingnotifications[0]; options.body = oldnotification.body + '\n' + options.body; } there is a limited amount of text that can be fit into a notification body. an alternative solution would be to replace the notification with one that just says ‘you have n notificaitons’ then when the user taps on it open your web app’s notification interface. updating notifications this can also be a good way to update the user in notification only interfaces. once they have click on the notification to perform an action make, the request to the server to perform that action. once the request completes then show a new notification acknowledging it’s completion. self.addeventlistener("notificationclick", async function (e) { const notification = e.notification; const action = e.action; if (action === "close") { notification.close(); } if (action === "respond") { // close the old notification notification.close(); const response = await fetch('/api/respond.json') .then(r => r.json()); // let the user know if it succeeded or not if (response.ok) { self.registration.shownotification("success", options); } else { self.registration.shownotification(response.error, options); } } }); by having the user interact only through push notifications the user can complete their task and have a positive interaction with your app without needing to dedicate much mental energy to it giving a positive experience. together we can use push notifications to enrich people’s lives and make users have a positive association to push notifications.
Ada Rose Cannon
FAQ game, smarttv
docsamsung checkout q&a this topic solves various issues you may face while creating applications that use samsung checkout service select the applicable section to see the most common questions about a specific subject, and click the section heading to access all the available questions for that subject faq search form search application development issues q1 my application is getting the following error “[payresult] cancel” how can i send a question to samsung checkout team? below you can find a sample email that you can send to us through the samsung apps tv seller office 1 1 q&a section tv#error#tv seller office q2 i got the following error in response to the api "/billing/service/v2/paymethods/md" as { "status" "0410424", "result" "оформление покупки не поддерживается [da-0219-a7af33]", "resultlongmesg" "unavailable service support country ", "resulttitle" "недоступно" } what's wrong? the "md" at the end is the country code for "md moldova, republic of", which is not a supported country for the samsung checkout service to see all the list of country where samsung checkout is supported, go to the "country and currency codes" section in implementing the purchase process tv#error#country code q3 if a user purchases a product which has only been made available in a single country, can that purchase be returned using the "invoice/list" endpoint even if it is using a different country code than the one the user purchased the product in? yes the response for "invoice/list" does not consider the country code of the api request parameter, it returns all of the purchases what the buyer has purchased regardless of country tv#purchase#refund#country code#endpoint q4 is there a checklist that i can follow in order to check if my application is integrating with samsung checkout api properly? yes, below is the minimum checklist for integration with samsung checkout, you can test each item in the checklist to make sure your application works properly when purchasing the product when the samsung checkout client is launched, it shows the loading by itself, no graphical overlapping should exist in user experiences during the transition for example, a 3rd party application should not show loading when launching the samsung checkout client check the purchase process based on the type of product consumable/dynamic item type the user should be able to use the appropriate payment method to buy the item, and the title and price on the purchase page should be same as intended subscription/free trial item type in addition to the above, the user should be able to see the next payment date or relevant information of the subscription item check the post-purchase process in the 3rd party application does the 3rd party application reflect the result of a purchase in the application properly after completing the purchase process? both the success case for a purchase and other cases should be handled is there any overlap when screen is switched from the samsung checkout client to the 3rd party application? check the purchase history based on the type of product go to the "tv menu > samsung account > payment info" to see the subscription or purchase history the user needs to be able to check the purchase history or subscriptions of the item the user needs to be able to check subscription details check the user purchase history from the user buyer portal to make sure the history is properly updated after making a purchase, go to the samsung checkout website and check whether your status is updated properly test for exceptions turn off the tv while the purchase is in progress and checks if any inappropriate status is observed for example, go to the "tv menu > samsung account > payment info" to see the subscriptions or purchase history after completing the purchase of the item, turn the tv off and on again and run the 3rd party application to see if the previous purchase is still in active status tv#checklist#api integration dpi portal usage guide from the dpi portal, partners can register and manage products for sale and access the transaction history logs and sales reports for the applications they own q5 how do price changes work? if you want to change the price of an existing item, go to the dpi site and select "app > product list on the left side > product id" from there, you can change the product price for countries where it is necessary to select a tax category, you need permission from the samsung administrator to change the price prices you set can be changed after three months and you must notify the consumers of the new price tv#price change#dpi portal q6 can we have a unique product for each country? when a buyer purchases a specific product which is sold in multiple countries, they have the right to access any of those versions therefore, if you want to give a right for the purchase only within a single country, you need to register products separately for each country the product id needs to be different tv#product id#register q7 are security keys tied to the appid value? for example, if we have 2 applications each with their own id, will each one have its own securitykey? this is correct, security keys are bound to the appid tv#security key#application id q8 when we login on the dpi site, our application is not listed on it how can we add it? when you enroll your application on the seller site, you need to check the appropriate options for using samsung checkout refer to the picture below tv#dpi portal#unlisted application operation of your service this section explains the issues related to the operation of your service q9 can i use samsung checkout service for hotel tv applications? no, samsung checkout service is available on only samsung smart tvs htv#hotel tv application#samsung checkout q10 can i use my tv to test samsung checkout? i bought samsung smart tv around 2016 yes, samsung checkout service is available since the 2016 samsung smart tv range however, the latest features are guaranteed to function only for the last three years, and there may be a difference in the functionality of each year tv#samsung checkout testing q11 does samsung send push notifications, e-mail, or any sort of messaging to users throughout the service lifecycle free trial, subscribe, cancel ? samsung sends an e-mail to users who buy items, subscribe, cancel, and refund in addition, samsung sends a notice e-mail to users whose subscription item payment has failed tv#notice emails q12 is there any additional information you can pass along on error response codes for the billing api, such as what the response is if the checkvalue is incorrect? yes, you can find additional information at the following page dpi > support > error code tv#billing api#error code q13 what happens to current users who are in the middle of their subscription, when cp changes the price? will the user get some notification when they renew next time? no the service provider must relay this information to the buyers before the changes are made, because samsung checkout does not send price change notifications to buyers who subscribe to subscription products tv#price change#notification q14 does the samsung checkout charge users based on local currency, or based on the credit card that is used? for example, can you pay with us credit card in columbia? will the card be charged in local currency, or in usd? you will be charged in local currency tv#local currency q15 what are "customid" and "ordercustomid"? "customid" and "ordercustomid" have the same value "customid" also uses the same value as "ordercustomid" when calling buyitem if you have a unique id, use it if not, use the samsung account uid tv#customeid#ordercustomid q16 how is the provider's user account data matched with samsung checkout's transaction list? this is done using "ordercustomid" if the provider has a user account, they can put the value in the "ordercustomid" parameter when calling the buyitem api this value is mapped to the transaction list's "order custom id" column tv#ordercustomid#transaction list product type this section includes information related to product types that can be purchased using the samsung checkout service limited period q17 in the response data of the "invoice/list" api, are `period`, `appliedtime`, `limitendtime`, and `remaintime` always present for `invoicedetails` objects that have an `itemtype` of limited period? yes tv#limited period#invoice details#item type q18 in the api spec document for the response data of "invoice/list" api, `limitendtime` is listed as "limited period product end time, in 14-digit utc time" does this mean that the field is not mandatory, that it should either exist and be a 14-digit string, or that it should not exist? no, limitendtime must exist when a limited period product is applied tv#limited period#limited end time q19 from the response data of "invoice/list" api, what is the expected value of the `limitendtime` field when a purchase hasn’t been applied yet? it appears that for limited period item purchases that have not been applied `itemtype` is "3" , the `limitendtime` field is set to "" correct limitendtime is calculated based on the date and time when the purchase is applied tv#limited period#limited end time#item type subscription q20 in the response data of the "invoice/list" api, is `subscriptioninfo` ever present for `invoicedetails` objects that do not have an `itemtype` of subscription? subscriptioninfo is shown only when itemtype is subscription tv#subscription info#invoice details#item type q21 does an invoiceid ever change, or is it static? if a new purchase is made, does it always generate a new invoiceid? the invoiceid is generated when the buyer subscribes to a product for regular payment however, subscriptionid is generated only when the buyer subscribes a product for the first time samsung checkout uses the first invoiceid as the subscriptionid and it is never updated tv#invoiceid#subscriptionid q22 does subscription end date `subsendtime` get updated as soon as a user has been successfully billed for the upcoming period of the subscription? no, the subscription end date subsendtime describes the expiry time of this subscription not nextpaymenttime tv#subscription end time q23 how is a month defined in subscriptions? calendar month or 30/31 days? calendar month the next month's payment is made on the same day of the month as the day the consumer first applied for the subscription for example, if the consumer applied for a subscription on november 14th, the next payment is made on december 14th for months that don't have a day corresponding to the settlement date such as the 31st , payment is made at the end of the month tv#calendar month#subscription q24 would the canceling of a subscription/closing of the account automatically trigger a refund at samsung checkout? no even if the consumer withdraws their samsung account or cancels a subscription to the regular payment, this does not refund any payments already charged on the next settlement date, the subscription status is changed from 'active' to 'expired', and regular payment is stopped tv#subscription#samsung account#cancel#refund
events mobile, ai
blog#sdc2017 wrapped up today and it was our best conference yet. the day started off with keynote speeches from arianna huffington, stan lee and rain paris. the action continued on the floor with lots of activity at the samsung pay, galaxy apps and samsung health booths, just to name a few. however, the talk of the conference was the announcement of bixby 2.0, which introduces deep linking capabilities and enhanced natural language abilities to better recognize individual users and create a predictive, personalized experience that better anticipates needs. the bixby sdk will be available to select developers and through a private beta program, with general availability coming in 2018. this afternoon, we sat down with the samsung bixby home team to learn more about bixby home and what developers can expect from its newly launched sdk. tell us about bixby home. bixby home helps you navigate your smartphone and make your day easier. it learns and adapts to show you the content you care about. it allows for easier access to apps, important information and personalized daily content. essentially, you get what you need when you need it. when you interact with bixby home, you’ll engage with cards that contain the information you want. social media cards contain all your important social feeds news cards carry the information that you want to read media cards show you the videos you want to interact with international cards allow you to book travel it’s available on the s8, s8+ and the note 8. it will be available on all galaxy flagships devices coming out in the new year. tell us about the sdk you just launched for bixby home here at sdc. the new sdk gives developers two different ways to develop content cards for bixby home: the first way is app-based integration, which pulls content from partner mobile apps. this creates app-based cards. for this type of development, devs will need to add an api library into their mobile apps. the second way is server-based integration, which pulls content from partner servers. here, developers are required to map endpoints from their server to the bixby home server through a server api. the creation process is simple enough: first devs need to register as a developer and then they need to submit their card plan. next, they create, configure, submit the card for approval, conduct an integration test and deploy. currently, there are six different types of cards they can create: utility, multimedia, news cards, location cards, communications cards and commerce cards – more to come in the near future. what’s the value proposition for devs? why develop bixby home cards? well, there are a few reasons why devs would want to develop for not only for bixby home, but also for samsung mobile: they get access to all samsung customers, they see increased engagement with apps and services and they extend consumer reach across multiple devices. what kind of support will devs receive when developing with the new sdk? with the sdk, partners control their content. however, there are api libraries for both app-based cards and server-based cards. they receive a developer guide, a ux guide, and sample cards and apps to review. through the partner portal, devs can manage their cards. here they can propose, design and create their cards, as well as track card analytics. they’re supported every step of the way. we’re very excited about this new sdk and want to set our developer partners up for success. thanks to all the developers, designers, creators, partners, sponsors and everyone else who joined us at #sdc2017. it truly was a great event and we can wait to start working with you all this year to bring our announcements to life. follow us on @samsung_dev to keep the conversation going and keep an eye on our blog for technical content that will bring your dev game to the next level. and see you next year!
Samsung Developer Program
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