The best way to pay and play: Stash’s product philosophy for D2C in games

“The total disruption of the mobile ecosystem after 15 years of total platform control.” That’s what we’re facing right now in the gaming industry, according to Eric Seufert in a recent Mobile Dev Memo Podcast episode. 

It’s in this environment that we founded Stash to help developers take advantage of direct relationships with players and maximize revenue, retention, and engagement. And we’re doing it differently than anyone else. 

Today, payment processing is more or less a solved problem - and considered table stakes across all the major providers. The real challenge for game developers going D2C is figuring out how to capture spend and traffic. The reality is, you can only get players to opt into a higher-friction, direct channel by creating an experience that’s better than Apple, Google, and Steam. So Stash’s product philosophy is built on: designing premium D2C channels that give your most valuable players better experiences than intermediated channels. 

“Design premium D2C channels that service your most valuable players with better experiences than they can get (or you can give) through intermediated channels.”

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That’s why we say: your webshop has to be the “best way to pay” for your products, and your game launcher has to be the “best way to play” your game.

Check out the four tenets that guide our product strategy to see for yourself what makes Stash a critical and unique partner to have on your side during the D2C revolution. 

1. Give players a channel experience they want to opt into

One of the best tools you can use to drive traffic to your first-party channel is exclusivity, whether that’s exclusive content that can only be bought in your web shop or exclusive access to your PC game through your launcher. In fact, this has been the main - if not only - strategy developers have used to grow their D2C experiences.

Stash believes that for long-term, scalable growth, you need to also harness positive reinforcement - offer experiences that incentivize and encourage users to choose your D2C channel over the App Store, Play Store, or Steam. Players should be choosing your web shop, game site, launcher, etc. because it’s the best way to engage with your game - not because it’s the only way. This is what will get them to keep playing well into the future. And research shows people prefer this incentivized approach. Our principle: 

“You can play this game any way you want, but if you opt into using our first party launcher, you’ll have a better experience”

To give players an unbeatable experience that encourages them to keep returning to your D2C channels, Stash builds engagement features that supplement gameplay and go beyond standard discounts and loyalty programs. The features that make up this layer usually fall into these buckets: 

1. Social systems above and beyond what you have in-game. For example, for one partner, we’re integrating a friend chat into their launcher as well as social discovery systems which enable players to make new friends while they game 
2. New content that adds to your game’s lore, universe, or strategic depth. Transmedia content like a TV/web series (Last of Us, Arcane, Castlevania), strategy guides, and lore all offer avenues for players to dive deeper into your game’s universe or IP
3. Community and competitive ecosystems that bring players together. That includes everything from forums, to ranked matchmaking, team finding, and grassroots esports

2. Maximize the medium

The web and desktop app mediums are much more flexible and open than the intermediated platforms, and the best D2C channels take advantage of everything they have to offer. Unlike mobile apps, for example, websites and desktop apps are free to offer loyalty programs, dynamic pricing, and web series. 

But you don’t (and shouldn’t need) to have all these capabilities in house. We believe that to maximize the potential of your medium - whether that’s the web or a native desktop app - you deserve access to a team made up of both gaming vets and industry outsiders. That’s why Stash unifies technical and business experience from outside games (web development, consumer tech, hospitality, payments, etc.) with deep knowledge of and passion for game design and expertise. 

Take this example that we recently did for a partner: their rolling offer worked great in the game, but it wasn’t optimized for the web medium. Looking at best practices in other industries (e.g. hotels) and exploring how these organizations structured offers without cannibalizing their economy or tacking on additional costs, helped us construct a new, web-optimized version. The solution: we simplified it into a series of 3 bundles for their web shop - users could unlock more bundles if they purchase all 3 - or wait and return the next day to see the new offers. Doesn’t that sound like a better way to pay?

3. Custom-build a better way to play and pay for every game

Game design best practices tell us that you wouldn’t apply the same design principles to every game - it depends on your genre, audience, mechanics, etc. The same rules apply to D2C channels. Sure, there are similarities and best practices that apply across genres, but we believe that only a custom solution tailored made for your game’s unique design will create the best way for users to pay and play.

When you build a custom D2C solution, what you can accomplish is twofold:

• Make the channel feel like an extension of your game environment. Web shops, for example, are a relatively recent game trend that many players aren’t familiar with (yet) - you need to introduce them to the concept in a way that feels as familiar and native as possible. So our product philosophy includes designing D2C solutions that follow the same aesthetics, UX, etc. as in-game - and that aren’t limited to a selection of templates.
• Build a premium channel for high-spenders. D2C channels are most effective when they’re built for a game’s highest spenders. Shifting just the top 1-2% of your game’s users - aka the whales - to D2C is enough to drive higher revenue overall. We’re guided by the philosophy that building D2C channels which specifically cater to the motivations and behaviors of your highest spenders will encourage them to spend and engage more - and designing these premium experiences requires a custom-made approach. 

The thing is, you’re never going to accomplish these goals with generalized templates. You need custom D2C solutions that let you tailor experiences to what makes your game unique, like its genre and economy. 

For example, when it comes to genre, each type of game should receive a different treatment:

And the economies of a game matter, too. 

That’s why for each partner, we learn their game inside and out, analyze its genre and economy, and custom design and engineer the entire D2C experience from the bottom up. 

4. Integrate seamlessly into your existing operations

Finally, the last tenet that guides us is making sure there’s zero disruption to your existing workflows, catalog, and economy. 

Our partners feel that in two ways: 

Avoid double work with a unified product catalog

Most providers require you to operate two separate catalogs at all times - one for the in-game store and one for your web shop. That means you need to manually upload to a dashboard:

• A list of your asset IDs 
• The graphics for each asset as it should appear on the web shop
• Any changes and updates - otherwise your in-game and web catalogs can fall out of sync (e.g. players see expired offers or exclusive, time-bound offers remain on web shop even after expire) 

As you can imagine, this leads to a lot of complex operational work as you’re left in charge of syncing two completely independent databases.

Stash is different: because we want to seamlessly integrate into your existing operations, we work off of a single, unified catalog - which is based on your in-game product catalog. The moment you make a change to your in-game catalog, our servers communicate with your game to automatically fetch the update to your web shop. If you want to add web-exclusive offers, do it from the same place in your backend where you push your in-game offers - it’s your UI, your controls, and backend. This keeps the control in your hands without the need to go to different dashboards or platforms. 

Operating a unified catalog is especially useful for:

1. Enhancing control: The unified catalog isn’t an additional interface you need to master - it operates off of the one you already use. This gives you greater control over your entire web shop, without any of the limits of an external dashboard or template 
2. Avoiding double the work: You don’t need to manually update a separate web shop catalog. Just keep using your in-game catalog and your web shop catalog will update automatically
3. Creating a seamless UX: Players on the web get the same aesthetics, formatting, and visualizations as in-game
4. Enforcing purchase limits: Players shouldn’t be able to redeem an offer in-game then redeem it again on the web. A unified catalog lets you enforce purchase limits across environments 
5. Offering complex deals: Because purchase limits are possible, you can serve more complex offers - like time-limited deals - on the web, rather than just resource packs. The fact is, these complex offers are the ones that drive revenue on your web shop; your highest spenders aren’t buying resource packs
6. Personalizing catalogs: Show players the same personalized offers as in-game to create a shopping experience on the web that’s unique to them

Keep your game economy intact

Think of Stash like an additional layer on top of your existing game - which doesn’t affect how your game works or how it’s played.

Since we work with virtual currencies in gaming - pretty similar to an airline loyalty program - the cost of providing these goods on a separate channel like a web shop is minimal-to-none. But even though the web economy is separate from your in-game and the goods aren’t tangible, there’s a risk of cannibalizing your in-game revenue if you don’t construct offers, discounts, and loyalty programs carefully.

We do this by keeping you in control, while handling the busywork: all of the offers and incentives you currently run in-game or want to run on the web are determined by you, including the discount amount, resources to reward, etc. You just need to tell us the total cost or value, then we’ll calculate a series of web-native offers to encourage higher spend without disrupting your economy. Let’s say you want to offer players a 20% discount on the web shop. Our team will optimize and implement this through a combination of free gifts, bonus currency incentives, loyalty tier offers, and other discount strategies - carefully constructing a system that promotes higher spend without tacking on additional costs. 

Join forces with a different kind of D2C partner

If our philosophy sounds like it aligns with your vision and you’re ready to join the D2C revolution, talk to us! We’re here to help you make the most out of these direct channels in ways that no other provider can.