Increasing Conversion Using In Game Upsell - Discussion Casuality 06

[arcadetown]

Mike/Retro64, Malcolm/Intermix (tc_bobo), Ross/XBox, and myself/ArcadeTown did a panel discussion at Casuality on increasing conversion rates by using in game upsell techniques. Here is the power point presentation as some asked.

I've definitely seen games using these techniques sell a good 20% - 50%+ stronger than similar titles here. Mike demonstrated some excellent A/B tests showing up to 50% improvements.

Hope this industry wakes up and stops throwing sales out the door! Why aren't you doing it in your game?!

[zoombapup]

need to finish games before you can upsell em?

[Sirrus]

I think the biggest reason this doesn't happen is because of most portal's flat purchasing system. For the most part, we can't code in special purchase buttons or disable in-game 'buy me' ads if they have already purchased the game since we can't interact with the encryption code.

Sure for our own site sales and a few select others this could work, but until we get clearance across the board, most titles won't have that.

EDIT: Sorry if this was already a point in the presentation...reading over the powerpoint now.

[arcadetown]

Note you can code for the most common DRM wrappers such as Trymedia, Armadillo, and Reflexive. Those get you supported on about 80% of potential partners such as Yahoo, AOL, BigFish, ArcadeTown, and a bunch of others. My understanding is Real, Oberon, etc also have apis that could gain access to if really wanted.

Depending on the wrapper used your game calls the appropriate simple api call to determine if trial or full version, and turns off nagging as appropriate. Bezerker did this with Jewel Of Atlantis for example. Perhaps one reason why top 10 seller all over and he's driving an S600?

Suggest have a config file saying type of wrapper and url to of the purchase web page so the portal partner can configure those simple settings for their build. For example an ini config file with a section like this...

[upsell]
drm=trymedia|armadillo|reflexive|none
purchaseurl=http://www.somesite.com/yourgame/orderform.asp

[berserker]

Yup, Brian is right. Almost all of our partner builds have in-game upsell. We battled it hard and only few outlets resisted. Unfortunately those ones were among the biggest - Real (incl. GameHouse, Zylom) and Shockwave.

All other partners have in-game upsell integrated. Where there's a will there's a way

[berserker]

BTW, is there a voice recording of Casuality sessions available to stream or download?

[arcadetown]

@Bezerker, could you perhaps post something on how you handled nagging for the different versions? How did you figure out the different wrappers and purchase urls, I'm guessing a compile time flag?

Don't think there's any voice recordings, but could be wrong.

[Chris Evans]

Well... I went to berserker's site to check out the upsell techniques as Brian suggested. However while I was downloading one of the games I noticed some awfully familiar ad copy for their newsletter...

You can see for yourself:

My site's Newsletter copy
http://www.outsidetheboxsoftware.com...etter_copy.jpg

Enkord's Newsletter copy
http://www.outsidetheboxsoftware.com...etter_copy.jpg


Now I'm not claiming what I wrote was great ad copy. Also most newsletter copy pretty much all say the same thing. However it did take me time to figure out what things I wanted highlighted in a clear and concise way. I use that copy throughout my site. So it's a little annoying to see it practically copied verbatim on another site. Also, it's not unrealistic to think that it's possible for someone else to notice the similarities and maybe even accuse me of plagiarism!

So I ask that whoever is responsible for the copy on your website to at least change the things I marked in yellow in the above image. No hard feelings and I understand we all borrow different elements from each other and that's perfectly fine. But when we borrow things it should be used as a start point or template, which we add to and modify or even improve upon. It shouldn't be used to simply piggy-back someone else's work so you don't have to do it.

Sorry to hijack this thread and make it public but I want to make sure these type of things don't happen especially within the community.

[Roman Budzowski]

Originally Posted by Chris Evans

So I ask that whoever is responsible for the copy on your website to at least change the things I marked in yellow in the above image.

Oh, come on Chris. You are overreacting Even if they copied your text the page looks so much different - no one will think that it is plagiarism.


Anyway, back to the thread. In our next game we are going to combine time limit with content limit giving customer just a taste of things to come. I plan to limit content to 10 selected levels (and not just the first 10).

all the best
Roman

[sillytuna]

Wouldn't worry about it Chris. I'd be happy for people to copy something like that. It's really very minor.

[berserker]

Originally Posted by Chris Evans

Now I'm not claiming what I wrote was great ad copy. Also most newsletter copy pretty much all say the same thing. However it did take me time to figure out what things I wanted highlighted in a clear and concise way. I use that copy throughout my site. So it's a little annoying to see it practically copied verbatim on another site. Also, it's not unrealistic to think that it's possible for someone else to notice the similarities and maybe even accuse me of plagiarism!

Since you've participated in this thread and shared your experience: How I increased newsletter signups I had no idea that your intention of showing newsletter upsell was to prohibit someone of doing the same.

At least when I share my experience on this forums I don't mind people taking my information and benefiting from it. I thought that was what these forums are all about. Silly me.

[berserker]

Originally Posted by arcadetown

@Bezerker, could you perhaps post something on how you handled nagging for the different versions? How did you figure out the different wrappers and purchase urls, I'm guessing a compile time flag?

Since our games are in C++ we have macros for upsell and DRM related things so we have saparate haders for each build. I comment/uncomment #include with appropriate header. It's like this:

// enable for custom builds
//#include "custombuild/arcadetown.h"
//#include "custombuild/bigfishgames.h"
//#include "custombuild/reflexive.h"
#include "custombuild/oberonmedia.h"
//#include "custombuild/trymedia.h"
//#include "custombuild/retro64.h"
//#include "custombuild/aol.h"
//#include "custombuild/miniclip.h"
//#include "custombuild/shockwave.h"
//#include "custombuild/realarcade.h"
//#include "custombuild/wildtangent.h"

and cuslom build header looks like this:

#ifndef PHX_NO_URLS
	#define PHX_NO_URLS
#endif

#define PHX_DISABLE_ASPROTECT

#ifdef PHX_REGISTER_ACTION
	#undef PHX_REGISTER_ACTION
#endif

#define PHX_REGISTER_ACTION(ID) \
	GCore->Shutdown();

#define PHX_TIMER_GETTIMELEFT return 360000;
#define PHX_TIMER_START
#define PHX_TIMER_STOP

#define PHX_DISABLE_ADDITIONAL_NAG

#define PHX_REGISTER_NOINFO

#define PHX_REGISTER_QUERY \
	if (getenv("TYPE")!=NULL && strcmp(getenv("TYPE"), "Purchased")==0) \
		strcpy(GUser, "registered user");

#define PHX_HAS_AFFILIATE

[Chris Evans]

Originally Posted by berserker

Since you've participated in this thread and shared your experience: How I increased newsletter signups I had no idea that your intention of showing newsletter upsell was to prohibit someone of doing the same.

At least when I share my experience on this forums I don't mind people taking my information and benefiting from it. I thought that was what these forums are all about. Silly me.

So when anyone shares their experience or techniques on this forum that gives me the right to just copy/paste anything of theirs regarding the subject matter? For example, if someone says adding a buy button underneath their screen shots increases their impulse sales, you're honestly telling me there isn't a difference between adding your own buy button to your screen shots and ripping that person's buy button image and putting it on your site? Maybe we just have different ethics then. To me the only time you should really copy/paste something is when someone explicitly posts their writings/code like you just did. Otherwise you should copy the technique but not the actual work.

But I've gotten some sleep and I'm about to watch some World Cup soccer(futbol), so I don't really care anymore what you do. If you honestly weren't intending to do anything wrong, no hard feelings. It's just a pet peeve of mine when people think it's a okay to copy/plagiarize small little things because they think no one will notice... But if that wasn't your frame of mind, then I apologize.


Anyway regarding the topic, I definitely like the running demo on exit (I played Jewel Quest). Have any of you guys thought about using Flash movies on the exit nag screen? With Flash movies you can get surprising good video quality with a fairly small file size. It might make it easier to show gameplay footage from throughout the game, especially if the levels take awhile to load. Maybe show like 10 second loop of footage? Savage: Battle of Newerth had this and it looked very impressive. Though they used bloated Quicktime files.

[James C. Smith]

You don't have to do this stuff at compile time. Run time is also an option.

Many of these DRMs have APIs that let you detect them at run time. For example, Brian’s slides show that the Reflexive Arcade has the function RW_IsWrappedWithReflexiveArcade. This mean you can make one “full version” build that you send to many different portals and publishers and it can detect at run time if a DRM is present and then query that DRM to see if the game is in trial mode and then show nag screens or disable features if appropriate.

For example, Big Kahuna Reef (BKR) has special nag screens that show up in demo builds. But I didn’t make a special build of BKR for Reflexive Arcade. Every build of BKR tried to detect if the Reflexive Wrapper is present. The version of BKR sold on MSN, Real, Big Fish, and Shock Wave are all checking to see if the Reflexive Wrapper is present. This way I only have to maintain a single build of the game.

[James C. Smith]

Another point is that when you use these APIs you don’t have to do anything special to enable time limit or mange timer or buy buttons yourself. The wrapper still does everything for you. All the API calls are optional. You can let the wrapper do all the work and just ask it if you are in demo mode to know if you should nag. Also, in the case of the Reflexive API, for C/C++ programmers there is no need to load libraries, initialize the system or anything like that. You latterly just link your project with .LIB file for the Reflexive Arcade wrapper integration and then call any function in any order. The one most people want to call is RW_HasTheProductBeenPurchased(). If you want, you can just call that one function and nothing else. We couldn’t make it any simpler than that.

As Brian shows, Armadillo basically just as simple. And TryMedia has an API that isn’t too complicated.

[berserker]

James, AFAIK TryMedia requires some static library to be linked to .exe
Ofcourse there may exist some ways to do that run-time but I felt like compile-time switches provide me more flexibility in terms of differentiantion between separate builds.

[James C. Smith]

Reflexive also requires a static library to be linked in at 'compile time'. But this is not a problem. There is no harm in linking in that library even for builds that will not be wrapped with that DRM. By linking in the static library it gives you the ability to query for the presence of the DRM at run time.

There is no problem with using compile time setting to make separate builds. If that is what you are more comfortable with then go for it. But I just wanted to let everyone consider other possibilities. For me, the simplicity of one build for EVERYONE is worth linking in a few k of dead code that many build will never use.

[berserker]

Originally Posted by James C. Smith

Reflexive also requires a static library to be linked in at 'compile time'. But this is not a problem. There is no harm in linking in that library even for builds that will not be wrapped with that DRM. By linking in the static library it gives you the ability to query for the presence of the DRM at run time.

Reflexive might do OK with dynamic linking but I am not sure about TryMedia. See, you have to static link with amsdk.dll but after you wrap with their DRM all references to that dll is removed and amsdk.dll is not required for use. I assume they are not just loading that dll but scan and alter binary .exe code. That is why I am not sure if dynamic linking to that library will do the trick.

But yeah, one build for all is nice. Too bad I haven't considered it seriously back in the days as I wasn't very familiar with variety of DRM solutions so had no idea of what to expect.

[arcadetown]

One thing that's great about my armadillo example is to check if registered or not there's no api, just an environment variable that you check. If you want to use more advanced api calls yes you'd have to link in and provide armacess.dll. Think you have same issue with Trymedia. Seems Reflexive api is a static library so no dll but a small drawback could be increase download size for every build.

Another way around dll dependencies is to link in dlls dynamically using LoadLibrary / ReleaseLibrary. Then you could just have a config file flag and not have to do custom builds. The game dynamically loads the appropriate dll library and calls appropriate functions depending on that config flag.

[arcadetown]

Originally Posted by berserker

// enable for custom builds
//#include "custombuild/arcadetown.h"
//#include "custombuild/bigfishgames.h"
//#include "custombuild/reflexive.h"
#include "custombuild/oberonmedia.h"
//#include "custombuild/trymedia.h"
//#include "custombuild/retro64.h"
//#include "custombuild/aol.h"
//#include "custombuild/miniclip.h"
//#include "custombuild/shockwave.h"
//#include "custombuild/realarcade.h"
//#include "custombuild/wildtangent.h"

Is one approach but perhaps a little more complex than guys looking for here.

I suspect most can simplify by just having an armadillo, trymedia, reflexive, and separate build configs. For example, on arcadetown, retro64, miniclip, and some others believe you made separate demo and full version builds with the buy urls and splash screens hard coded into the game. Instead could have had your game read a config file and using a single build your portal partner then configures their buy url and splash screen into your provided config file.

Going a step further, using my above mentioned approach of dynamically loading libraries could actually do it all via a single build.

[Dennis - Isioux]

Hey,

First of all thanks for using "World Domination" as an example in the presentation .. it's an oldy from us, but still fun to see

As we are still developing in Flash.. i was wondering if there is any info about checking the DRM information within flash.. and if not possible.. if this is possible with 3th party software like Mdm's Zinc.

Our games are already beeing used in the DRM of several (big) sites. But we are interested in securing the games more by communication with the DRM. And offcourse Upsell options.

With kind regards,

Dennis
Isioux
Youdagames.com

[AlexWeldon]

Oh, come on Chris. You are overreacting Even if they copied your text the page looks so much different - no one will think that it is plagiarism.

Wouldn't worry about it Chris. I'd be happy for people to copy something like that. It's really very minor.

At least when I share my experience on this forums I don't mind people taking my information and benefiting from it. I thought that was what these forums are all about. Silly me.

I'm shocked at these reactions. This is the kind of attitude I'm used to seeing on the Internet on other kinds of forums, by the kind of people who think that piracy is a victimless crime, or that using someone else's photos without permission is okay. However, it's extremely hypocritical here, where people seem to be, for the most part, extremely anti-piracy and anti-copyright infringement. What's the logic? Art and code are intellectual property, but words want to be free?

Admittedly, Chris' links didn't work for me, so I can't see how much was actually copied and and much was changed, but if you're going to use someone else's words to make your point, you must at least attribute the quotation.

[Borundin]

Originally Posted by AlexWeldon

I'm shocked at these reactions.

Agreed, but those comments are two years old.
Let this thread rest in peace

[akash_9105]

Suggest have a config file saying type of wrapper and url to of the purchase web page so the portal partner can configure those simple settings for their build. For example an ini config file with a section like this...