G2A: "Small teams need to look at the business side of game development"

Mobio Talks within the framework of White Nights Moscow 2016, which took place on October 11-12, interviewed the speakers of the conference. Today we publish a conversation between Alexey Pisarevsky, CEO of Mobio, and Mario Mirek, Direct Partnership Manager at G2A.

Video interview (in English with subtitles)

Tell me about G2A. What is the platform?

G2A is an international gaming marketplace where users, game developers and publishers sell games to more than 10 million visitors from around the world.

What makes your platform different from others, such as Steam, or Origin?

Key Features G2A.com — G2A Pay, a payment system through which players buy and sell games. The system is adapted for each country, which facilitates the process of buying and selling. G2A Pay helps us develop the market.

Is it correct to say that users expect to buy cheap game keys from you?

The target audience of G2A is users from 16 to 28 years old. They are young, they care about the cost. They are looking for reasonable prices, and we hope that G2A.com provides them with such an opportunity.

Both developers and players sell keys directly to other players on G2A.com ?

If a user has purchased a key on another platform and decides to transfer it, then G2A.com — the right place.

How do users get keys?

The user purchases the key from the developer directly. There are websites that sell keys. As happens with any other product, you buy a product and don’t use it. So if the user bought a key and decided not to play the game, or he bought the game with the intention of playing, but changed his mind, then on G2A.com he can sell the key.

Sometimes people sell stolen keys on similar platforms, how do you solve the problem?

Theft is a common phenomenon on G2A.com , and on any platform. There are more than 700 people in our team. The IT department and the security service continuously monitor the activity on the site, track purchases and sales. With the advent of G2A Direct, a technical support service, game developers have the opportunity to monitor the market. If someone purchased a product illegally and sold it to another, who is responsible for the theft?

The one who stole.

That’s right. We use the best of the solutions available in our industry to monitor the market. We work together with developers and inform them if users sell stolen keys. We are confident that our platform is safe and secure, and with the direct support of developers, we are able to track such cases even better.

You mentioned G2A Direct. What is it?

We saw the need to provide developers with access to the trading platform. The game developers did not have anything like this, and we gave them this opportunity. Before that, we had neither a tool nor a service through which developers could contact us directly. A month ago we launched G2A Direct in softlonch mode, and after that we launched the official store on G2A. If you are a developer and have joined G2A Direct, when your game is searched for, it will appear first and the user will see full product information. The page may also contain a trademark and full company details. Thus, game developers have gained an additional sales channel with more than 10 million customers worldwide.

On which platforms is the platform implemented?

At the moment G2A.com I focused my attention on PC games. We also work on mobile platforms, we have launched a mobile application for iOS and Android, where G2A.com — a site where the user looks at information about games, but at the moment we are more focused on PC games.

How do you survive with a commission of 10% of the cost of all transactions?

To be precise — 10.8%. With all G2A services: G2A Pay, and G2A Shield, this is an attractive model of revenu-cher, because the developer actually gets 89% of the cost back into his pocket.

Most platforms charge up to 30% commission, in fact is this your marketing strategy?

We see what consumers want, and they stimulate the market. Obviously, the user is looking for a suitable price, and we are thinking about two sides: both the client and the developer. If we had a standard sales model, users would have no incentive to use our platform. This is a competent business strategy. We have an excellent service, we constantly optimize the system so that it is convenient to work with it, we try to show developers that they can sell games on G2A.com and make a profit.

Tell us about the projects in which developers managed to earn c G2A Direct?

G2A Direct has been launched in softlonch mode recently, and technically we don’t have any data that we could provide. When we launched the program and started working on it, the developer communities flooded us with reviews. We didn’t expect such a reaction. At the beginning of next year, we will be ready to share figures and successful cases.
It is already a success that the program is working, and we will provide accurate data next year. At the moment, it’s better to ask the developers. I would not like to speak for them.

What are your plans for 2017?

We will improve the service and simplify it for developers who would like to work with us. Communication is an important task, we need to optimize feedback. Judging by the feedback from the developers, they are basically surprised that we want to respond to them on a daily basis, instead of sending emails to someone else and making them wait. Internal development is important. Developers are constantly suggesting what to change or improve, and we are constantly refining our platform. It is planned that G2A will make even more efforts to promote G2A Direct.

Is the Russian market important to you?

Russia is an important market for us. Many of the developers with whom I communicate and who come to conferences are from the Russian Federation. In G2A, we localize both product pages and game information into other languages. Game developers don’t need to do this. We promote games by Russian-speaking developers in any market they need. We should focus on the Russian market properly, because there is a lot of good content and video games here.

Is there a future for small companies or a future for corporations?

There is enough space for everyone. Teams of 3-5 people have more freedom to create content, what they need is to look at the business side of the game development process. A lot of games that have great potential go unnoticed because the developers did not react in time, did not even use the available free tools to promote their products. I met a developer who wrote a great game, but he doesn’t even have a website. He doesn’t have time for this, and for a business strategy. The website is a business card in the business world.

What advice will you give to developers: what is worth learning, where to go and what to focus on?

Make a simple business plan. It sounds like a cliche, but not a large number of developers use social networks, they do not use either Facebook or Twitter. If you want people to know about you, conduct a PR campaign and marketing yourself so that people see your game. How often it happens: developers are so focused on creating a game, they put their heart and soul into it, they want to make the game as much better as possible, but they forget to tell people that they are making a game. Developers need to contact fans more, notify them of what they are doing. Use Twitter. I am subscribed to cool developers, and every day they post pictures or information about the development of their games or suggestions for improvement. The power of the internet is in your hands, the only thing you need to do is use it. Developers, if they have a game, can find 10-15 similar games, and find out how these games were sold, understand who their potential client is, what audience they are targeting, and how much money they will earn. Collect information: which games were successful, and which PR agency the developers of these games worked with.