Presented by Xsolla
During the latest GamesBeat Live session, Dean Takahashi, lead writer for GamesBeat, sat down with Berkley Egenes, chief marketing and growth officer at Xsolla, to dig into the latest Xsolla news. They spoke about the company’s newly launched Parental Controls solution which is now certified with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) and GDPR-K and designed to keep gaming safe for young players while ensuring regulatory compliance. They also explored the latest in Xsolla’s Web Shop solutions, which have powered the successful launch of over 400 web shops. Finally, they touched on the recent expansion of payment methods in Cambodia and Indonesia.
Addressing compliance and safety challenges
Direct-to-consumer strategies like web shops are becoming more common – and so are compliance and safety challenges. Breaking free of traditional platforms brings huge opportunities, but also requires developers to handle the complexity of regulatory demands. Younger players are especially vulnerable to the temptation of easy microtransactions and excessive spending, Egenes says. To address these challenges, Xsolla partnered with PRIVO last year to develop a robust suite of Parental Control tools.
“As a parent myself, it’s a super important initiative that we all need to address together within the industry as developers shift to become more direct-to-consumer focused,” he explains. “These compliance standards don’t just help parents manage that gaming experience and ensure that the developers provide a great experience, but meet those global standards and requirements that are needed in every country, in every region, that they want to distribute and sell in, and ultimately offer a great user experience and great gameplay.”
New Xsolla Parental Controls tools include age gating to protect minors from unauthorized transactions; guardian consent and real-time notifications and approval; a comprehensive transaction history; and spending limits. These tools are seamlessly integrated into the Payments dashboard, so developers can easily manage their compliance standards along with the rest of their web shop tools and services.
The new features will be demonstrated at upcoming game conferences to showcase all the ways these features solve key challenges – especially those that are often overlooked during the course of game development. That includes the need to ensure you have compliance measures in place for all player age groups, even if your game is specifically targeted toward adults, because younger players are undoubtedly playing your game too.
Xsolla Web Shop continues to gain traction
“We’ve been doing Web Shops for over three years, and we continuously upgrade our solution, our offering because of what we hear from our developer partners,” Egenes says. “Listening, getting into the room, with a lot of whiteboard conversations, we’ve designed a solution that meets the needs of any developer, no matter how big or small, wherever they’re located, to provide that quick setup and fully customized web shop.”
With Instant Web Shop, developers can quickly set up their online one-stop-shop for players, including features like personalization, promotions to enhance user engagement and revenue, and deep linking.
With LiveOps tools, developers can dig into A/B testing, and launch player favorites like featured offers, first-purchase offers, secret-shop promotions, coupons, promo codes and both time-limited and number-limited offers to help user engagement boom, facilitate the transition of players from the game to the web and back again, all with the goal of maximizing revenue streams. To cut costs without cutting quality, the low-code Xsolla Backend is an accessible, scalable way to build multi-player, cross-platform games faster and for less.
“Many of our partners have generated significant profits for their game that they’ll be able to reinvest into the game, additional patch updates or part two of their game, but then also able to apply that to the rest of their business for their mobile games,” he adds. “We’re seeing folks like our partners over at Tilting Point say that over 50% of their business comes from their Warhammer web shop.”
Xsolla is also seeing conversion rates skyrocket for customers offering these seamless player experiences. Because it’s so easy to log in and make repeat purchases, players are motivated to keep coming back for more. It’s easy for developers to keep store offerings fresh, and in return, players keep buying.
Opening up the Southeast Asia market
To help developers expand their reach around the world, Xsolla has turned its attention to the Southeast Asia market, including Cambodia and Indonesia, adding nearly 60 new payment methods to the 700-plus already in its roster.
“Some people may call it an emerging market. We call it an important market for us in engagement from the player perspective,” Egenes says. “We’re having more developers coming to us saying they want to engage and have players purchase their games from those countries, but be able to pay in their method of choice — covering over 90% of the payments market in each country we operate in.”
In Cambodia, the company has introduced eight new payment methods, such as internet banking options and digital wallets, covering up to 90% of the payments market and enabling game developers to reach nearly 2 million gamers in Cambodia.
In Indonesia, approximately 80% of consumers are unbanked or underbanked, and alternative payment methods (APMs) are the most preferred option. By integrating these APMs, such as e-wallets, bank transfers, cards and cash, as well as popular payment platforms, Xsolla covers up to 90% of the market.
“If you simplify the transaction process, then it removes the barriers, decreases cart abandonment and allows developers to reach more of those players and drive continuous growth in many of these vibrant markets around the world,” Egenes says.
Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.