Appcharge is the leading DTC platform for mobile game publishers to maximize profits through owning player relationships.
They are the fastest-growing all-in-one global payment solution, but Appcharge goes beyond providing a payment service; it drives revenue growth for its partners by powering up stores with unique monetization features – features that exemplify the deep roots their team has in building and scaling mobile games themselves.
Appcharge was voted the Best Payment Service Provider at the Pocketgamer.biz Mobile Game Awards at Gamescom.
Maor Sason, CEO of Appcharge, answered our questions and gave invaluable insight about the industry.
What was your primary goal when you launched Appcharge?
The need for a direct-to-consumer platform has been clear to me for years. Developers work hard to create amazing games and content, but they then have to share so much of their revenue with App Stores.
When we launched Appcharge in 2022, our goal was to bring positive change to the mobile games industry by doing things differently, and now we’re seeing that happening at scale – both with more members joining our team and top-grossing publishers whose stores we power. We help publishers sell directly to their players and form stronger connections with them which is a win-win for both players who get more value and publishers who benefit from much higher margins.
Image Credit: Appcharge
What are mobile game publishers’ most significant challenges in monetizing their games effectively?
While monetization challenges can be highly particular, tied to your studio’s market and genre, some challenges are universal like competition, engagement, and eroding profit margins.
For competition, the market is oversaturated with high-quality games. So studios need to rise above the noise and win over gamers’ attention and also constantly innovate and stay fresh to retain their players. And this is especially critical for retaining your top-spending players.
Engagement forms another challenge – driving player loyalty and repeat purchases. Studios must create daily habits and ensure both their game and buying items on the store are part of the player’s daily rituals.
Finally, surging UA costs and the hefty 30% platform rev-share fee caused a massive erosion in profit margins. Put simply, big studios that do not optimize monetization via player segmentation, personalization, and a strong data-driven approach will struggle to remain profitable.
How do payment and compliance issues impact the growth of game publishers, and what solutions have you found most effective?
Payment and compliance issues can hinder the growth of game publishers by adding complexity and risk. Non-compliance can lead to fines and reputation damage, while inadequate payment solutions can result in lost revenue.
At Appcharge, we’ve addressed these challenges by creating a versatile payment infrastructure that supports numerous methods and currencies, ensuring seamless transactions worldwide. Our platform also includes automated compliance checks and strong fraud prevention, helping partners stay ahead of regulatory changes.
By handling these complexities, we allow publishers to focus on developing great games while scaling efficiently and confidently.
Image Credit: Appcharge
What are some common obstacles game publishers encounter when setting up and managing their own web stores?
We often meet with publishers who have been trying to “crack” DTC, without much success yet. The most common issue we see in these cases is simply stores that look nothing like the game – so players dislike them. Building a template web store is easy, but crafting one that feels native to your players is hard, and it takes effort.
Aside from that, we often hear from publishers that they struggled taking their store to market and reaching scale. We publish a lot of content on our blog on how to effectively do that, but it all starts with community management. As a publisher, you must form channels where you can converse directly with your players. Think newsletters, Discord, Facebook Messenger, and even influencers or streamers.
Another common obstacle is publishers who are not aggressive enough with the value they offer players on the web store, compared to the value players can find on the in-app store. To truly form a habit, players need to feel there’s a strong reason to keep choosing the store. Here too, there’s a “right way” to go about it and we always recommend our partners keep the same price points their in-app store offers, but offer significantly more value in the same packages if they’re purchased on the web store.
Which performance metrics are the most challenging to achieve?
Frankly, there’s no real “one size fits all” to successful web stores. The service Appcharge offers tends to be very bespoke. We view ourselves as the monetization partners of the studios we work with, rather than just a payments service provider or a vendor. As such, each of our partners has different goals for their DTC efforts and metrics they’d like to improve.
Moreover, metric goals must take into account the specific game context – the currencies available in the game, the game’s economy, the player community and their likes and dislikes, and more. Some of our partners focus on increasing the repeat purchase rate of their players, others focus on increasing average transaction and ARPU, and others may focus on wider spread adoption of the store among the player base.
What are some of the best ways to keep your game relevant in the market?
Web stores are sticky when they’re integrated and promoted in a game’s community channels to raise awareness and when they deliver hyper-clear value. For example, a game’s social media channel can post that there’s a way to get double the coins for the same price at the web store. That’s valuable to the consumer. Seeing this frequently will significantly keep the web store relevant if the offers cycle with what is beneficial in-game over time.
Repeat purchases are driven in several ways. Of course, social promotion is one of them, especially if the offers pair with a limited-time window or expiration date.
Gamification can also drive repeat purchases. For example, daily bonus mechanics will compel users to return to the store to claim bonuses. Further, a web store can offer additional bonuses or benefits over time as users work through a rewards funnel, activating perks based on web store visits and spending.
What are the challenges in making stores react in real time to existing player segments and monetization rules?
Since the entire Appcharge team comes from building and scaling the world’s biggest games we understand how critical personalization is for effective monetization. On the other hand, we knew we didn’t want to force our partners to learn a new system, or to re-configure their existing monetization rules and player segments. We wanted to create a web store that acts as an extension to their existing systems and reacts in real-time to each visiting player by only displaying the best offers for him.
So we built our store system from the ground up with that goal in mind. Each Appcharge store is connected via API to the publisher’s backend and displays fully personalized offers that follow the publisher’s existing player segments and monetization.
What are some of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make regarding innovation versus stability in your platform?
You just described a classic Appcharge tradeoff dilemma we often find ourselves in – a painful dilemma! Appcharge is already powering stores for over ⅓ of top-grossing mobile games and we don’t take that responsibility lightly. We know we want to serve our partners well and match their hunger for innovation and new features, but at the same time, we know we cannot risk bad player experience or the robustness of the payment platform.
A typical tough decision in this regard is taking the time to thoroughly test each feature before we release it to a client. I know startups are supposed to be “MVP this, MVP that” but we don’t really have the luxury of releasing “half-baked” features or fixing stuff on the go. To meet both ends, our amazing tech team had to design systems and infra to ensure a high level of QA and polish in days, instead of weeks.
I’m extremely proud of the level of innovation and new features the team has been able to push out this year, while still maintaining stellar platform stability.
How has your team’s past experience working at companies like Rovio, Huge Games, Moon Active, and Play Studios influenced your approach to solving problems at Appcharge?
The needs of a top-grossing game are different from a small-scale game, not to mention a fitness or music app. So we always think through the lens of – what tools and services would we have wanted back when we worked on such massive-scale games?
Working with leading mobile game studios requires you to anticipate their needs and update the platform to provide exciting new solutions, whether it’s rewarding players with progress bars or developing new ways to tailor offerings to the most engaged players based on when and where they’re playing.
When we carefully consider what we’re building at Appcharge, how we can service our clients best, and what drives value to them and consumers. Every decision comes down to whether this is a valuable addition to our partners and their players. If it’s not, we don’t waste time on it.
Appcharge is an associate sponsor for the Mobidictum Conference 2024. Miikka Luotio, VP of Business Development at Appcharge, will be a speaker at the conference, which will take place on October 15-16 in İstanbul. Book your ticket now to meet this amazing team and other industry professionals!
About Appcharge
Appcharge is the leading direct-to-consumer platform for game publishers to maximize profits through relationships with players. The company is the fastest-growing all-in-one global payment solution, enabling game studios to scale paying user growth, customize webstores, optimize player retention, and gamify offerings. One-third of the top-grossing mobile games choose Appcharge as their preferred partner.
Appcharge supports 500 payment methods and 80 currencies, making partners financially compliant worldwide in minutes. Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Appcharge is funded by Gillot Capital Partners and Play Ventures and is led by veterans from Rovio, Huge Games, Moon Active, and Play Studios.
