CII Minsk 2025: Yandex.Games Report on the Web and IAP Monetization

We’re starting to slowly share videos (and transcripts) of talks from the Minsk session of the "Gaming Industry" Conference (KII), which took place in April. The first presentation up is "IAP Monetization on the Web and Future Plans" by Nikita Bokarev, CBDO at Yandex.Games. Plus, a quick reminder that on July 10, the "Gaming Industry" will take place in St. Petersburg.

Presentation on YouTube

Presentation on VKontakte

Today we will talk about Yandex.Games. Since 2019, we’ve reached a level where we have 45 million players per month. That’s quite a lot. We are the largest platform in the CIS and rank among the top three largest platforms in the world. We are actually very modest when we mention the 45 million because we’re talking about players who have played a game for a few minutes. If we were chasing some statistics, we might’ve pointed out visits, which are actually about twice that number.

What makes us very happy? That despite such a large traffic volume, such a large number of games, the average playtime on the platform is 50 minutes plus. This is more than good for browser gaming. Many of you know that we had times when we had more than 20 thousand games, but in the last year, we have slightly changed our policy regarding the catalog, the content, certain genres that we featured. And in the last year and a half, we have removed several thousand games from the catalog.

I think you know that Yandex was initially open to all developers. A huge number of indie teams launched some of their first projects with us. We certainly want to maintain this paradigm but at the same time, still more strictly control the quality of content.

Yandex.Games is part of the Yandex ecosystem. I think most of you understand the power and breadth of Yandex as a large holding, a large structure. Games occupy their place among entertainment services. And, of course, within the ecosystem, there is interaction between different services. We generally want to bring something useful into people’s lives, for people to use our navigator, watch movies on KinoPoisk, order groceries in our store or food through Yandex.Eats, and, of course, play games.

And of course, we have a large number of promotions within the company when we help each other match with the right audience. Another strong point of Yandex is, of course, the volume of data we collect on users. It is easy for us to understand what a person loves, what they are interested in. And, among other things, we use this in the ranking of the catalog for different users on Yandex.Games.

58% of our audience is women. So, browser games, after all, are mostly played by women. Men, historically, have a slightly different place for games in their lives. Men play more on consoles, play more on PCs, play more apps. Accordingly, browser games are somewhat more typical for women. Regarding the age of players, the key point here is that 80% of our audience is people over 25 years old. This is good for many reasons, including the quality of the audience, its payment ability, etc. But we see that, in general, 20-19% of our audience is young people.

In terms of playtime distribution across platforms, we see that desktop accounts for 40%, mobile browsers 50%, and the remaining 10% we didn’t list here because it’s a split between TVs, tablets. Basically, each of these segments makes up an insignificant portion.

We started primarily as a platform targeting the CIS audience. In the early years, most of our traffic came from these countries. Over the last few years, we have made great progress towards international markets, and as of today, 40% of our MAU is mainly from these countries. This is very cool for a service that started in Russia to have 40% international traffic.

Over the past year, we have focused on acquiring traffic from the USA. We are interested in Tier-One countries. The USA is currently at the top for us. We have been working very well with the Vietnamese market for several years. We have several very large partners from there, content produced there, and, of course, in terms of traffic, we feel confident. We work closely with the Turkish market, with a large number of local publishers and developers, and, of course, with Turkish traffic. Latin America is also an interesting region for us, and we will continue to expand there.

What about content? There is a myth that I see is gradually disappearing in the industry, that you can only play hyper-casual games in browsers, at most casual games. This is not true. More than two years ago, we launched a portal currency on Yandex.Games, which is used for in-game payments. We noticed that this metric is gradually making up an increasing share of our turnover. We noticed which games this primarily occurs in and realized that in-app content is something we need to continue focusing on. We are now actively moving towards large projects with in-game monetization.

Let’s give a bit of an overview of us. We have 5000 developer teams on the platform. That’s a lot. These include both large Chinese teams and small indie developers.

As of today, we have more than 2000 games with in-app purchases. Of course, the main thing isn’t the quantity, but the quality. Because there are games where some in-apps are nominally inserted, but they certainly won’t have much impact on performance. And there are games that are generally globally oriented towards in-apps and don’t traditionally earn any money from ads in mobile apps.

We have a very varied genre offering, covering over 30 genres. This is also cool and something that was hard to imagine for browsers a few years ago.

One of the main tasks we pursue is for developers working on projects oriented towards mobile or, for example, Steam, to consider the web as an additional source of traffic, an additional source of revenue. Ludus is essentially an example of this. The game is growing wonderfully on mobile and is currently one of the most popular with us.

Another project we have been operating for maybe two years is Battle Arena. This is another example of a super successful in-app project. 90% of the game's revenue comes from in-apps, and as for the studio itself, Red Bricks Wall, thanks to their success with us and, for example, on Crazy Games, their web revenue share has exceeded 30% globally for the company.

In fact, the first game we started with and initially believed in was the game "Hedgehogs". "Hedgehogs" was the first game on Yandex.Games to start earning a lot from in-game payments. And most surprisingly, to this day, it continues to break records. The team constantly manages operations, launches promotions.

What is special about games on the Web? There is a completely different unit economy, different traffic acquisition, different conversion, everything is different. A player doesn’t need to make a serious decision to download a mobile app. They don’t need to see 5000 ads before some complex brain reflex kicks in. They don’t know why, but they’ll download the game. Maybe just so they stop seeing ads for it. On the web, everything happens very quickly. Interaction with the game happens in one click. The player clicks and switches to it. Then they see the loading. If the loading takes long, they won’t wait. They’ll just turn around and leave, go about their business. Therefore, the main thing to pay attention to, which mobile game developers often miss, is optimization. Of course, it’s great that engines help games come to the web, but I wouldn’t recommend restricting to just WebGL because in terms of loading speed, the process will still be very long, and you’ll lose a significant amount of traffic because of it.

Modern browsers offer excellent performance, nothing lags, everything works perfectly, shooters run in the web. Our platform also has the feature that we provide traffic. As soon as a game gets into the new section, it gets initial traffic. Based on this traffic, we look at metrics. And then our traffic distribution system, automatic ML, distributes based on metrics.

Plus, of course, it’s really cool that you can play both on desktop and mobile. A person can use both platforms in different conditions, in different situations, and keep their progress in the game. I have already said that all engines today are very actively providing all-around web support. I think this trend will only scale in the future.

How do we monetize? The primary share of monetization on the platform historically, to this day, is advertising. With ads, anything can happen. The advertising market depends on the general situation in the market. And I think those partners who work with us are aware that advertising CPM hasn’t performed well in recent months. So, of course, we suffer along with our partners and hope that over time this situation will improve. Our second monetization model is in-apps. Well, we've already talked a bit about them. We are now actively scaling this direction. The share of this revenue in our revenue stream is generally growing every quarter.

We have matured significantly in terms of the developer console and the tools we provide developers. Today, working with us is very convenient. We received a huge amount of feedback from our partners with thanks for implementing A/B testing functionality for creatives. As mentioned, conversion on the web works very differently than on mobile. Knowing which creatives perform best is critically important. And for that, you need research. We will definitely continue to expand this functionality.

In my opinion, we have already done a lot of work in this area, for which we receive very positive feedback from our partners. A lot of analytics, a lot of dashboards, many indicators can be viewed.

Additionally, we have a distribution direction. We can distribute games from our catalog to other websites worldwide. The developer’s share remains intact, essentially bringing in additional audience, additional traffic. In summary, I can say that we are doing everything possible to allow our partners to scale their business on Yandex, earn more money, and diversify their revenue with mobile.

Yes, if you want to move towards the web, you should understand that the web does not live only by Yandex. And a great topic is to launch your games on all platforms. In general, then your revenue will be maximized. Other platforms often push towards signing exclusive terms. Well, I can't especially recall any great cases on this topic. We’ve seen a large number of developers who signed such agreements and eventually came back to us saying they regret it. It’s better to be everywhere. The web is large, it helps, it provides traffic, it provides money.