Using TrialPay to Monetize Your Games

Will from Trial Pay talks about using Trial Pay to Make More Money From Your Games

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/cc-trial-pay-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]3ybX_3WwTKM[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at Casual Connect and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Will: Hi, my name is Will O’Brien. I am the Director of Product Marketing at TrialPay, and I run our social games and casual games business.

Interviewer: What is TrialPay about?

Will: TrialPay monetizes users on social apps and casual games as well as other merchants like traditional software developers. We offer both direct payments and offer base monetization.

Interviewer: How would a developer use your service then to improve monetization of their games?

Will: What a game developer is looking to do is build a very addictive, very fun game. When that player is trying to push through the game at advanced levels, sometimes they need to use virtual currency or upgrade the game in some way. So, we enable the game developer to embed monetization solutions, both offer-based and direct payment, in order to get that player to pay and get that player to pay for virtual currency or game upgrades or other kind of premium subscriptions.

Interviewer: Have you studied or found any mechanics that game developers can use to enhance their monetization, not just have the offers there? How can they integrate it into their game play to make it more compelling and to actually drive more revenue?

Will: We feel that it’s really important to align game design with monetization. We see a trend in the industry of kind of conforming to this, this off the wall long list of offers. We don’t think that is necessarily the best user experience. We have developed a number of opportunities, integration points and high quality touch points that developers can plug right into their game.

In some cases in the game, you might want just to place an advertising opportunity right in the game play. Maybe, in a game around pets, the pets are walking through a certain town. They might see an advertisement that says, “Hey, sign up for Blockbuster today and get virtual currency”. When you integrate that tightly into the game, you have a lot better conversion opportunity.

Interviewer: Aside from that integration point, do you know of any other integration points that you’ve seen that have worked really well?

Will: Yes, absolutely. One of the things that we’ve done is put some featured offers in games around specific seasonal occasions, for example, Mothers Day, Valentine’s Day. We work directly with FTD and other flower providers, and we and other flower advertisers put in offers specific around that campaign. We said, “Buy flowers for Mothers Day and get virtual currency”. That was great because it’s seasonal, it’s timely. It makes a lot of sense.

One other integration point I talk about is just not taking over the full page. We actually have iFrame solutions that can pop up overlay, both for a direct payment and offer-based monetization that don’t take over the game, don’t leave the page. Facebook developers don’t want their users leaving the page, and so we don’t take over the whole screen and insert integrations, we just embed.

Interviewer: Can you talk about some of the games that you are currently working with in the social gaming space?

Will: Yeah, sure. We work with both casual game and social app developers. In social apps we work with players like PlayFish, LilGreenPatch, and in casual games we work with PlayFirst and PopCap.

We look at a number of different monetization options. First of all, virtual currency is very important. Virtual currency drives the game forward, and it’s very flexible. It can be used to buy a number of things.

We also work with game upgrades. If you look at “Who Has the Biggest Brain”, it’s a game where there is a pro version. When you go pro, you can buy that pro version or you can use TrialPay to get that pro version for free.

We also look at game downloads, like a $19.99 game download of a casual game. You can monetize that and enable users to get that game for free if they complete an offer with an advertiser.

Interviewer: What about Flash integration? I know that recently now there’s a lot more Flash going around in these social apps. Are you offering any kind of service that allows developers who have Flash games to monetize?

Will: Yeah, absolutely. The challenging thing with Flash is that you can’t put a full page offer while up in Flash. We’ve developed specific touch points that take over about a 500 x 500 pixel overlay and will show high quality offers in there, allow the user to paginate through offers and also access direct payment options right in that overlay. For Flash developers, what we suggest is pop up a small overlay, and it doesn’t take over the full screen, but it integrates that same kind of touch point.

Interviewer: How long does it take then to integrate that into Flash for a developer?

Will: Integration is less than a day, and more likely than not it’s less than an hour. When you sign up as a merchant at trialpay.com you will get a welcome email. You create a product, either a product where you are trying to sell a virtual good or a download for free, or a product for virtual currency. When you create that product, you will get a snippet of code, an iFrame code or Javascript code, and you drop that into your game and it works out of the box.

We also provide services, like services around marketing and graphics, services around integration specialists. We have dedicated partners, success managers, who will come and make sure that your integration works smoothly and quickly. We provide all sorts of encryption capabilities and very transparent reporting around every offer that is completed. I encourage any developers who are interested to contact TrialPay and find out about this service. I think they will be very pleased with the opportunity there.

Interviewer: There are a lot of other competitors in this space. What would you say is the differentiating factor for you guys compared to them?

Will: It’s a good question. It’s a very exciting space. We’re investing very heavily in it, and we’re really a big believer in the social game space. I think a big differentiator for us goes back to where we came from as a company. TrialPay has been around for three years. We started in the traditional kind of software space and then monetized merchants like McAfee and WinZip and software developers.

When we brought our solution over to the social game space, we brought with us a ton of direct relationships with advertisers. So, as we work with Gap or FTD or Discover or a number of other advertisers, Netflix and Blockbuster, we bring those direct relationships to bear. What does that mean? That means we can have higher payouts, and that means that we can also do some really unique offerings, like I described before about putting those advertisers in games. For a game publisher who is looking for a real high quality experience, I would suggest to contact us at TrialPay.

Interviewer: Do you know of social app developers? Can you talk about potential monetization? What are the CPMs? Are they above average for the industry? What’s the potential? Is it better for a developer to even use this monetization technique, or should they just use the traditional payment technique of just pay $20?

Will: That’s a great question. We definitely see and we’ve seen over years that putting offers into games and putting offers into monetization touch points increases conversion. It doesn’t gambolize sales. So, you can have both direct payment and offer-based monetization in the same place.

We’re really good at monetizing users that don’t want to pay. The reality is that some of the users are just not going to pull out their credit card or mobile phone to pay for something. So, that’s where an offer works. We see conversion boosting in the order of double or more for a lot of our merchant partners. The CPMs are on the order of several hundred dollars or more when putting the right touch point.

We’ve seen that it’s a very proven opportunity, more effective than just typical CPM banner ads and more effective than just direct pay on itself.

Interviewer: Some app developers have said that actually their players just directly pay them and that it’s very little trial offers, just take PayPal directly. Do you think that that is the way to go? They are saying that it’s just easier and it’s more lucrative for them to just take direct payments from players.

Will: I think that’s a great point. Actually, that would be the goal of any game to in the end have players that are paying you on a monthly basis for coins or for some kind of subscription. That’s great.

Now, what does the game development cycle look like? Well, first you’ve got to hook the user, hook the player and then get them to start paying you. That first payment type is typically a lot more effective as an offer, but over time direct payment makes a lot of sense. That is why we have an extensive platform that offers both credit card, PayPal, mobile payments as well as the offer-based monetization because, yes in the end with a player that loves your game, you want them paying you $10 or $20 a month. That’s fantastic. That’s an ideal state.

Interviewer: What about surveys? Is that something you guys offer, or is it mainly just offers?

Will: We do offer a lot of surveys. We have direct relationships with all the top survey providers, and so surveys are a great opportunity for players who value time over money. Surveys don’t necessarily need to take a long time, but it is a significant investment for a low payout. Surveys might pay off a buck or a couple bucks. It’s a great way to get a few coins rather than a few hundred coins.

We work with, like I said, all the top survey providers, and we see that’s very successful; a lot of volume and a lot of interest by the players there.

Interviewer: Great. How would a developer get started then with your service?

Will: To get started then, just go to trialpay.com and sign up as a merchant. You’ll get started right away. You can build a design with your products, what you want to sell whether it’s virtual currency or a game download or virtual goods. Right away, you will get someone who is your partner development manager and will make sure that you get through the integration process which should take less than a day. And you’ll be off and running and monetizing your user base.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.