White Nights 2015: VKontakte report and transcript of questions and answers based on its results

We continue to post videos of reports from White Nights 2015. Next in line is the speech of Mikhail Boldov, Product Manager VK.com . At the conference, he spoke about the future of the VKontakte mobile gaming platform. We also deciphered his answers to questions from the audience.

Will it be possible to support two logins in one application, for example, VK and Facebook?

Logins of various social networks are possible in one application. As for how we will track users who have come from us, we will simply track those who have moved from our catalog to the store and downloaded the game, and not those who have logged in to Vkontakte.

That is, developers share money only with those people who came directly from your application.

Yes, that’s right.If he came organically and he logged in himself – are these completely our people and our money?

Yes.Why are there few games there now?

Because we worked on a closed model, the way Kakao and Line work approximately. It wasn’t just moderation, it was a tough selection. The games have been integrated quite deeply with VK and we said a year ago that we would release one game per month. In general, it turned out that way. Now we want to release more games so that you, like many of our users, do not have such a question why there are so few games. For this reason, we decided to make the platform open.

Is there or will there be an SDK for Unity?

It’s not there yet, but we have plans to develop and release it. I can’t name the dates, we will try to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Why did you decide to change the percentage from “50 to 50” to “30 to 70”?

A lot of people asked us to do this, plus, it looked quite logical, so we went to a meeting with developers.

How will you track the people who came from you?

There are two points there. We will track them by transitions from the catalog. We will divide the money according to our statistics. There will be a method in the SDK. When making a payment, you will simply transmit information about it.

Will the money of the person who once switched from your application to our game be shared between us?

Yes.Will there be a showcase? What will it look like, will there be a feature? How do you plan to promote the “games” section?

Yes, we will change all this, of course. We have a desktop catalog in which there are collections, features, advertising. Until now, it didn’t make much sense for us to implement this in the mobile version. If you have ten games, then the easiest way is to show them in a list, and it is unlikely that you will win much if four games are shown on a separate banner at the top. Now we understand that there will be more games. Accordingly, a block of some kind of feathering will appear. Perhaps there will be paid places.

As for the promotion of the section itself, we understand this problem, there are several approaches to solving it, we will try, experiment, test on different audiences. But we wouldn’t want to aggressively promote this section to all users, because it’s not quite right, but we can highlight the gaming audience and attract their attention with, perhaps, push buttons or something else.

If there is information about what other ways there will be to promote the new version of the platform?

Look, we now have an official platform group. There are about a million participants. And we think that in order to attract people with targeted push, we will experiment with other formats.

And what happens if a person made a log out? How will revenue share happen then?

Revenue share will occur not by login, but by transition from the catalog. If a person comes to you from the catalog, then we charge 30%. It may not even be logged.

That is, a person is tied to the entry point tightly?

It turns out like this.

Will you allow traffic to be transferred from the desktop to mobile phones?

I think we will allow it.

And is it possible to give a link in your desktop game to a mobile one.

Yes.And then you will need to share the money?

Yes.

But the man didn’t come from the catalog.

But he came from VK.

But not from the catalog.

Good question, I need to think about it.

On what grounds will you give a feature, how will it be possible to get it? How will you rank games in the new version of the catalog in general?

Let’s just say that feathering is not an objective thing by default. There will not be any list, after completing all the points of which, it will be possible to get promotion with 100%. Some percentage of subjectivity will remain and if we don’t want some application to hang in the feature, we can refuse it. We will rely on money, on how the application is growing in terms of audience.

What will happen to the old mobile games released under the VK brand?

They will work within the new model.

What are the requirements for the games, what is the appruv?

There will be a general appruva system, we will try to make the same one that is now on the desktop. There is a list of requirements regarding the use of social mechanics, some technical issues, tracking payments and the like.

Will it be necessary to share money with the user if the money is earned through advertising?

Now we will not restrict external advertising, but we reserve the right to refuse moderation if the application, for example, earns only on advertising. We won’t track him either. Perhaps this will change in the future.

What about the refands?

We are currently working on this issue. We try to make them as convenient as possible.

What about the attackers, how will you deal with unscrupulous developers who do not want to share with VK?

We understand that this is possible. We can make control purchases, but we would like developers to pay more attention to how they integrate our SDK. And we want to encourage them by the fact that the output of their application in the catalog sorting strongly depends on how much money the game brings.