(upbeat music)
(air whooshing)
Hi folks. It’s great to be with you today
although of course, I’m looking forward to when we can all meet in person again.
Thanks for joining me for our session on Bringing New Value to Stadia Partners.
My name is Alan Joyce,
and I’m a Product Management lead on Team Stadia.
That means that my team and I are responsible
for many of the features and tools that both players
and developers see across our platform.
Today, I’m gonna be covering a range of topics,
all centered around delivering the most value possible to partners.
I'll give an overview of the technology and tools
that Stadia offers to promote your games.
We’ll discuss our new revenue share changes
that will increase the return on your development investment.
I’ll provide more details on our new affiliate marketing program,
and we’ll talk about how to best utilize all of this
to enhance the success of your games on Stadia.
To kick things off, it’s always good to reacquaint everyone with some Stadia basics.
Our platform is built on this foundation: Games should be accessible
to all who want to play them.
In turn, this creates a unique opportunity for publishers and developers.
So how do Stadia do this? First is reach.
Stadia is currently available in 22 countries and nearly anyone in those countries
can play a Stadia game across millions of supported devices.
This significantly expands the ability of high-end games
to reach users who don’t have high-end hardware.
Second is access.
With just the click of a link on any compatible device,
users can try a new game or pick up where they left off.
Third is convenience.
Many Stadia games, including every Stadia Pro game,
are playable for free for new players
without waiting for a single install or download.
Our user research tells us this convenience is really valuable to players,
but it can also have huge benefits to publishers,
improving the effectiveness of your promotion by removing some of the major barriers
for gamers to start playing.
Okay, let's dive in a bit deeper.
Today, Stadia is available across a huge range of screens.
Hundreds of millions of individual devices across the world can play Stadia games.
With Cloud game streaming, the addressable market
for your games on Stadia is pretty mind blowing and ever expanding.
For example, we recently launched Stadia on Android TV devices,
as well as Chromecast with Google TV, and fully launched Stadia on our iOS web app.
There’s more on the way this year and next,
such as a partnership we recently announced to bring Stadia to LG smart TVs.
Last year, we debuted a technology that we call Click to Play.
It enables exactly that. A player can click a link and play a game.
But for developers, it means something more,
that you can use your existing communities or the far reaches of the internet
to post a link and bring people seamlessly into your game.
And click-to-play also shows you which marketing channel brings in the most players.
Post a click-to-play link on social media and you’ll see exactly which channels
bring the most people into your game.
And it’s when you couple click-to-play with Stadia Pro,
which is free for new users for the first month,
that things can get really interesting.
Users get to play dozens of games
with one monthly subscription while you get a low friction way
to introduce your games to new players.
Stadia Pro is a big focus for us on the Stadia team this year as well.
We’re investing in third-party partnerships with folks like OnePlus, Lenovo, AT&T,
ASUS, and others.
As an example in June, we launched a program with AT&T
where millions of their fiber and 5G subscribers
were offered six free months of Stadia Pro to play on their devices.
We’re also continuing to work closely with our internal partners.
We worked with YouTube last year to offer Stadia Pro
to YouTube Premium subscribers,
and we'll be continuing that partnership later this year.
This is in addition to making extended Stadia Pro trials
available to all Chromebook users, as well as all Google One subscribers.
And perhaps best of all is what we announced in our keynote session today.
For the very first time, we are now giving back
a chunk of Stadia Pro revenue to partners.
An industry leading 70% of monthly Pro subscription revenue
will be going directly back to partners
that have claimable games in Stadia Pro starting this month.
We’re basing this monthly payment on session days.
For example, if a player came back to play your game once per day for five days,
this would be five session days.
Coming back and playing twice per day for five days
still counts as five session days.
We did this to keep it as fair as possible, across different types of game genres.
If you, as game developers and publishers, have ways like email or other CRM mechanics
to bring your community of players back to your game
on a recurring basis in a given month,
click-to-play links can help make that journey seamless
for players while increasing revenue for you.
We are also introducing a brand new incentive program
that cuts Google's revenue share to 15% for the first $3 million.
Partners will get 85% of revenue up to that $3 million threshold,
after which point we'll revert to our current split.
This improved revenue share will be in place starting in October this year, or earlier,
and will run through at least 2023.
It will apply to the life of the title for every new game that accepts our new terms
and launches in that timeframe.
That goes for full games, micro-transactions, pre-orders, and add-on content.
So there are multiple paths to revenue on Stadia,
multiple ways users can access your games, and of course, the more users the better.
We’re also building tools to make it easy for Stadia partners to create their own success.
What does that mean?
Well, for the first time we’re going to pay developers
for using the unique benefits and power of click-to-play links
to bring users into Stadia Pro.
Specifically, we'll pay you $10 or local currency equivalent
for every new user that follows your click-to-play link,
signs up for Stadia Pro, and converts to a paid subscriber
after their free trial ends.
This is a first-of-its-kind program
that's only possible because of the way Stadia works.
Because both promotion and playing happen with the same click-to-play link,
we can connect the dots and let you share in more of the value of your own promotion.
This affiliate marketing program will launch in the first half of next year.
You have communities of passionate fans
who want to support you on Discord, mailing lists, social media, and so on.
You can provide a direct benefit to them
simply by using click-to-play links, and everyone wins.
You can also utilize advertising,
YouTube Creator partnerships, and other marketing channels.
Because these are just links, they can be shared anywhere.
Using click-to-play links to drive users to your game is good for users,
providing a fast and easy route into the games that they want to play.
It’s also good for Stadia partners.
It increases both total session days in Stadia Pro
and your share of those days, which means a bigger revenue pot
and a bigger share of that pot accrued to your title.
And finally, it’s also good for the platform.
It increases the health of the Stadia ecosystem overall,
which is why this is worth it for us. It’s a virtuous cycle.
This is particularly powerful when you start to utilize Stadia-enhanced features as well.
We have some entirely optional APIs
that let you integrate cloud-native features into your games.
One such feature is state share.
We’ve talked about state share before, and it’s live on the platform in a few games,
including a series I have spent hundreds of hours with,
The Hitman: World of Assassination trilogy.
Effectively, these are playable captures,
deep-linked game states that users can drop right into.
Custom challenges, specific moments,
whatever you want to share, that power is in your hands.
We’ve seen state share yield an 8X increase in views on shared content.
Because viewers can easily click to play themselves,
this viral loop can be an effective way to further drive session days for a game.
For every 10 users that view a shared game state,
we see one jumping directly into the game to become a player.
So why are captures so important and such a powerful tool?
Well, we see this in action with YouTube.
YouTube is the number one discovery surface for users finding new games.
YouTube can be another launching off point for click to-play experiences.
For example, YouTube creators can help get the word out
about your game or add-on content while linking their viewers directly into it
via a click-to-play link that you provide.
However, YouTube becomes even more powerful
when it's deeply integrated with the game itself.
On Stadia, we've made this possible via Crowd Play,
a feature that lets YouTube viewers play together with a creator.
This can bring players back into your game, which can drive more session days
and help return value to you.
Of course, all of this only applies once you’re on the platform,
and we’ve made that process much easier too.
That’s really a topic for another presentation,
but fortunately we do have such a presentation.
Please view the talk from my friends, Elizabeth, Ryan, and Robert,
where they’re discussing some big improvements we’ve made to Stadia workflows,
certification, translation layers,
and all kinds of other things designed to make developers’ lives easier.
To summarize then, Stadia continues to improve
and grow as a platform in some really meaningful ways.
We are now taking the next steps, expanding gameplay to more screens,
investing in Stadia Pro, and bringing new value to Stadia partners,
all while lowering the cost to bring your games to the platform.
Speaking of which, we want you and your games on the platform.
Please get in touch directly or apply at stadia.dev to find out more.
Thank you.
(upbeat music)