As the gaming industry expands globally, getting paid for your game or virtual goods becomes a vastly more important issue. The preferred payment methods and payment infrastructure vary wildly from country to country, not to mention the legal requirements. If your game is a hit in the U.S., making money from it in another country requires more than just getting a good translation — you’ve got to have a strategy for financial transactions in that country.
This is where a number of firms step in to provide an array of services. One of the key players in the gaming industry is Live Gamer, whose mission is (as they style it) “to stretch the boundaries of what’s possible and profitable in the ever-evolving economy for digital goods, content and services on a global basis.” Live Gamer delivers a broad set of e-commerce solutions to clients across industries including games, media and entertainment and finance and technology, all around the world.
Recently Live Gamer announced its partnership with Wargaming to handle microtransactions and payments for World of Tanks in Japan and Southeast Asia. The [a]list daily caught up with Andrew Schneider, president of Live Gamer, to talk about the company’s role in the global game industry.
Live Gamer has more than 120 enterprise clients transacting in more than 180 countries, but they handle both large and small customers. “We work with both large and small companies,” said Schneider. “We’ve worked with 2K Games, TakeTwo, EA, Facebook is a customer. We do work with large customers but also with independent developers who are just starting out and need a very robust tool set because they want to get into global self-publishing. Rumble Entertainment is a good example.”
Live Gamer president Andrew Schneider
Wargaming turned to Live Gamer in part because of the company’s expertise in Japan, which is a complex market for financial transactions. “Japan is a highly regulated market,” said Schneider. “They have specific compliance obligations around virtual currency and stored value systems. They’ve made some interesting distinctions around who’s made virtual currency and who’s selling virtual currency. Live Gamer has made its mark on solving tough problems and being aggressive on opening new markets for its customer base. We acquired a company in 2009 that was providing billing and payment services to Korea and Japan, so we’ve been focused on that market for a while.”
Along with its payment services, Live Gamer also offers GamerDNA. “GamerDNA has been the second largest advertising network in games, news and information services, according to comsvore. It reaches over 50 million 18-34 core gamers. As a stand-alone advertising business, it reaches a true gamer demographic, which is valuable to game companies and endemic advertisers, but also to other companies that have a hard time reaching core gamers,” Schneider explained. “For Live Gamer, it’s proven as a way to help our game e-commerce clients also have a way to acquire customers, to reach the right customers, advertise, promote and draw in the right type of player to their games. A full end-to-end proposition really does start with acquisition of players, , engagement, conversion from free to pay, then optimization and retention. Those are the main drivers of a developer’s free-to-play business, and we try to map our offering to those key drivers.”
While the issues around global financial transactions are complex, Schneider finds it comes down to some simple things for game publishers. “It sounds pretty basic, but when a publisher or developer is looking to drive their revenue model they have to look at whether they have a great game and an acquisition model. Those are fundamental,” said Schneider. “When it comes to global payments, it’s a simple rule: Allow people to pay in the method that is most convenient and familiar to them. A lot of game developers and publishers may take a U.S.-centric point of view because they might be located here, and it is the largest game market. But the U.S. market is 95 percent credit cards and PayPal.”
Schenider continued, “You can get away in the U.S. with that strategy, but as soon as you get into Europe, as soon as you go to Latin America, or Korea or Japan or Southeast Asia or Easter Europe or Turkey or MENA (Middle East/North Africa), you really need to be informed on what players are paying with, make sure you’re balancing your conversion rate goals with your anti-fraud and risk mitigation goals, and then you worry about your margin optimization. Not all payment methods cost the same amount of money — mobile payment methods, for instance, are usually more expensive than a bank transfer method. That’s a lot to cover, but those are the fundamentals of how to optimize your global payments business. Having trusted partners who know how to do this is ultimately why we’re here.”
