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If you’re looking for one of the fastest ways to launch your D2C channel, you may be interested in hearing more about the incredibly easy-to-implement solution offered through a partnership with D2C payment platform FastSpring and creator program in a box provider Nexus.
In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview CEO of Nexus Justin Sacks about his thoughts on:
- The core challenges the partnership was established to address.
- How the integration works.
- Exactly how publishers can use FastSpring + Nexus to quickly launch a successful D2C channel.
If you’re sitting on your hands worried that launching D2C has to be a massively disruptive project, you may be surprised what is possible for you and your players. Listen or watch now!
FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world, and for nearly two decades, we’ve been a payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.
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Podcast Full Interview: Audio
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Podcast Full Interview: Video
Transcript
David Vogelpohl (00:04)
Hello everyone and welcome to the Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products and increase the value of their business. I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community through my role at FastSpring, and I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage. In this episode, we’re going to be interviewing Justin Sacks of Nexus around the FastSpring and Nexus web shop integration.
Justin will share his thoughts on the core challenges the partnership was established to address, how the integration works, and exactly how publishers can use FastSpring and Nexus together to quickly launch a successful D2C strategy. And so joining us today, I’d like to welcome Mr. Justin Sacks. Justin, welcome.
Justin Sacks (00:56)
Thanks for having me, excited to be here.
David Vogelpohl (00:58)
Excellent. Well, you’ve been on the show before and I’m trying to recollect it was like, can you actually make 50% of your revenue through D2C? Wasn’t that our prior topic? I’m trying to remember now.
Justin Sacks (01:10)
It’s right. And it’s funny because it feels like every month it’s becoming more and more accepted just how much a percentage of your revenue can flow through your web shop. So yeah.
David Vogelpohl (01:20)
Excellent. Excellent. Well, thank you for establishing that it was possible. That was a burning question. I needed answered, especially when I heard you originally make the claim. But today we’re going to talk about the integration that Nexus and FastSpring built together. So FastSpring, the company that I work for, and Nexus, you’re COO there, is that right? Or CEO, sorry.
Justin Sacks (01:40)
That’s right, CEO here at Nexus.
David Vogelpohl (01:42)
Excellent. Excellent. Well, the first question I usually ask guests is, what is the game you bought with your own money, but you already answered that during your prior interview. So I’m just curious, what is the first game that you ever beat, completed and beat basically?
Justin Sacks (02:02)
I’m sure it was something on the SNES, but the first one that like comes to mind because of like the sense of accomplishment for beating it was Banjo-Kazooie on the N64. I’m sure that it was, you know, Mario or Zelda or something from even before that in the early nineties, but Banjo-Kazooie, I remember like a hundred percent completing it and it was an epic adventure to go through it all.
David Vogelpohl (02:28)
Excellent. Well, that’s a great one. All right. Well, let’s get into the topic at hand, the FastSpring and Nexus integration. So for people to understand, I think it’s helpful for them to get a sense of what challenges the partnership has kind of set out to address. What does that mean to you? In your view, what were the core challenges that you were trying to address here with the partnership and integration?
Justin Sacks (02:55)
Yeah. So I think it, goes back to people that are trying to start doing DTC for their game. What are the things that they need to solve? one of them is they need a way to take in payments and handle taxes, which is really what FastSpring is all about. Two, they need a place to, for the players to actually go and make that purchase. So website that they go to somehow they need to attach that purchase to the player’s account and then entitle that item or whatever
SKU they’ve bought back to that player inside of the game. And for that second piece around like the website and the item entitlement, the developer could do that themselves. They could build that website. They could build that, the interactive rails between web and game themselves. But most game developers, while they have a bunch of engineers at the company, they don’t have software engineers. They don’t have developers that are used to building for the web. And so the idea of what Nexus can bring is
a really, really simple solution that we can help build that for the publisher. So not only do they not have to do their own payment processing and merchant record, but they also don’t have to build and manage their own website or in-game item entitlement. And so that’s what the Nexus and FastSpring partnership is to me is all of the pieces that you need to launch D2C, you can have it in one place.
David Vogelpohl (04:16)
And that’s a really interesting perspective. like how you can, mean, obviously from FastSpring’s perspective, like payments and taxes and then outsourcing and compliance pieces, what we live, eat and breathe. But it’s interesting to also hear you connect the dots through to the value from the Nexus side of the equation around getting that web shop built and maintained, basically offloading all of that to the Nexus platform.
And it’s kind interesting how you talk about how game companies have a lot of developers, but they’re not software or web developers, if you will. And so a lot of those skill sets aren’t internal. Now, Nexus itself, though, it has a core value beyond just the web shop piece. What is Nexus’s core value?
Justin Sacks (05:00)
So the core, the reason for our existence is to build and manage creator programs, which is basically a way to align the incentives of a game publisher with the incentives of an influencer, usually around revenue sharing. So we build and manage creator programs. And a lot of the time that actually is done in game. So,
creators come to Nexus, they get a code, they tell their audience, hey, use my name when you’re buying something inside of the game. And then when a player does it, Nexus handles the attribution, and then we handle the payouts and stuff for the creators. But a lot of games increasingly are wanting those programs to exist either for a new web shop that they want to build or for existing D2C motions that they already have.
because one of the biggest challenges around D2C for games are the steering rules in place within the platforms. Basically that the games themselves can’t tell players in the game, go over to the web shop and buy instead because it’s a better deal.
But those rules don’t apply to content creators. So a YouTuber or a streamer, they can certainly say, hey guys, you get a better deal over on the web shop. And by the way, use my code when you’re doing so. And so our core thing that we’re trying to solve is creator programs, but they interact really directly and positively with D2C for publishers as well.
David Vogelpohl (06:20)
So Nexus is a platform and the creators and publishers that use it, the tracking from the creator to publisher referral or relationship, that is in a sense, a little platform agnostic, I guess, or works on many platforms, not just D2C. Is that true?
Justin Sacks (06:36)
That’s exactly right. Yeah, we build one partnership with the game and then whether they’re in multi-game platforms, meaning they’re on Steam and Apple and the Google Play Store and they’re on, you know, Xbox, we’re agnostic to all of those, as well as of course, if they’re on the web. Frankly, on the web, it’s an even easier integration.
David Vogelpohl (06:57)
And so for the creator marketing side of the equation, you kind of pointed out because of the anti-steering rules, creators have like, they’re in a sense, almost like this unique opportunity where it’s like their own platform to communicate. And so they don’t have those restrictions. So there’s like this natural connection to the D2C universe in that way. And then for the Nexus platform itself,
You have this ecommerce functionality built into the platform, correct? The ability to have shopping experiences and coupons and catalogs and effectively a web shop and ecommerce platform from the UI and UX perspective, effectively kind of in a box. Is that correct?
Justin Sacks (07:44)
Yeah, it’s, funny before, you know, web shops for mobile apps or games even like became a realistic possibility. were building web shops for creators, for, for a bunch of years. And so we built, you know, all of the tech that has to do with how does a player visit a website, see different SKUs, go through that shopping experience, then get the game or the item of the thing that they’re looking for. and just so happens that that’s the piece that
game developers need in order to now have that D2C motion. And so yeah, it’s been a big part of our DNA for the past half a decade or so.
David Vogelpohl (08:22)
Yeah. And so on the FastSpring front, then, so FastSpring for those unfamiliar payment and subscription and compliance, basically platform and the FastSpring platform can be integrated with kind of any open in that way e-commerce experience. And so we often think of the world as like, what do you want to build? And then how do you put FastSpring into that experience?
But the value of the in a box approach is it seems like a large piece of it is around speed to market really and ability to maintain. Is that how you see that value in leveraging and kind of in a box or out of a box type experience? Is it about speed and consistency? What do you think that core value is?
Justin Sacks (09:12)
I think that’s exactly right. And I think it’s, it’s also about the, like the team extension, you know, when you’re building out your team to handle whatever the pieces for your business, if that’s making a game, it doesn’t really make sense to also build out a core competency of web development. If that has nothing to do with the game itself. And so when you can have partners that can handle that for you, it can be valuable. And, know, as I think of like, what are the core pieces to have successful DTC? It’s the two that we talked about.
payments and merchant record, and then having the actual website that the players can interact with in order to get their product. But then to close the loop, you need to get your players to visit it. And that’s like, that’s where the core part of Nexus comes in with the content creators, but it’s also, there’s a bunch of different methods that the publisher can use to make sure the players can visit the website.
But of course, before you even start thinking about that, you need to make sure you have a website. And for a lot of developers, it’s, it’s not as simple as it is for us. We’ve built, you know, we built a platform and tools to make it, you know, within hours or days, we can stand up a new web shop. But for most game publishers, they’d have to hire the team. They’d have to choose the technology stack. They have to build it out and do QA and fix bugs and like, then maintain it forever. so often it makes sense when possible, partner with someone who can make it real easy for you.
David Vogelpohl (10:29)
So if I’m a large publisher and I’m going to go all out on my web portal and I’m going to have extensive player experiences, all integrated through everything custom end to end.
That’s not an out-of-box type experience, right? It’s completely custom. But maybe that’s a benefit for orgs that have the resources to invest in that. Do you look at it as like a size thing, or do you think, like, is there a sweet spot on the size front? Or is it also beneficial for people maybe further up the size scale, basically?
Justin Sacks (10:46)
Yeah.
I think it depends. It depends on the specific organization. I’d recommend for all of them, regardless of the size of the company, start out with an out of the box one, because you can always, like at the end of the day, it should be living within your game’s ecosystem. So on your own hosted website, you know, it’s easy to point domains there.
And you can always move into your own full developed stack if that’s a place that you want to go, but at least like start with someone else because you can see what is the potential for your business. And then also what is the experience of working with partners?
And to answer your question really directly, I think it depends on the customization level of those features because some of the platforms out there like us or like other folks, they might still be able to solve the unique needs of your game, even if it seems like it’s a lot of customized sort of like white glove experiences for your own web shop.
But if it’s things that are unique to your game that wouldn’t be true to any other game, then it’ll probably make sense once you also have the resources to build and manage it yourself. But for a long time, I think you can rely on partners to kind of figure out what works and what doesn’t work.
David Vogelpohl (12:20)
You know, it’s interesting to hear you talk about how speed is so important and kind of like, just get it out there. lot of the people, and publishers we talked to at FastSpring, you know, what a lot of, one of the popular stories we hear is, you know, we launched a web shop a year or two ago and we didn’t really do anything with it. And it’s already like 15 to 20 % of our revenue. So we’re like, I wonder what would happen if we tried.
do you find that that experience is common? Like, is that where you’re coming from with like, just get it out there.
Justin Sacks (12:50)
I mean, yes, I think it’s like, if you have a functional web shop and you make any attempts at all to let players know that it exists, you should see something around double digit percentage of all of your revenue come through your web shop. Which if you think about how the margin structure works, it immediately pays for itself with essentially no effort put into it. I’ve seen that to be true. Now it is.
What percentage of your revenue will flow through your DTC is a little bit dependent on things like the type of game that you have, the type of community you have, the type of monetization that your game has. But in general, I have seen that to be true, which is why I recommend people just try it and do it quick. Like throw something out there and see what happens. And you can always grow it over time and build that closer relationship with your players. But you got to get started somewhere.
David Vogelpohl (13:42)
Excellent. All right, well now I want to get a little nerdy and a little technical. We won’t go too deep though, because I think you and I mainly play technical people on TV, but we’re kind of on TV now, so maybe that works. But I want to talk about how the integration with FastSpring and Nexus works.
Let’s say that I’m a game and I sell in-game, I sell in-app purchases for like inventory items or maybe a battle pass. Where do I load that up if I’m using FastSpring and Nexus together?
Justin Sacks (14:17)
Yeah. So what the partnership looks like is Nexus will communicate with the publisher and then we’re going to do a seamless and easy API integration. And it basically is so that the publisher can tell us what the SKUs are and then what the information is about the SKUs. So there’s something like a store name, which is what it’ll appear to the player, a SKU ID, which is like the, you know, behind
the doors, like information about the SKU And then we’re going to need information about pricing and then some currency stuff and all sorts of pieces. But basically the publisher does one quick, easy API integration with Nexus. And through that, they provide the information that Nexus needs to know. What are the SKUs that should be sellable for what price to what players? and then we send back information post purchase. So the player comes to us and then there’s a couple of different ways that they can tell us who they are.
So either they can authenticate through their platform ID, so like their Apple ID or Steam ID or whatever it might be. Or most often, they’re going to use some unique player ID, which they can get in-game, which will be provided by the game’s back end. So it’ll be some string of letters and numbers. And then the player goes and makes a purchase.
And then we send information through that same really simple API back to the game. And it says, hi, game. This player ID should receive this SKU item. And then the game gives it into their account just like they would if that purchase was made in-game or in any other fashion. And that’s kind of the whole experience.
On the back end, the way that Nexus and FastSpring work is, as the player goes to make the purchase, they’re going to go through the FastSpring payment experience, and they’ll be able to use payment methods across the world, whatever makes sense for them. And all of that stuff is handled on our end, and the publisher doesn’t have to deal with any of those pieces.
David Vogelpohl (16:14)
So it’s the integration with the payment side and compliance features and capabilities that FastSpring offers. When you pull in the inventory or doing that via the FastSpring API, is that synchronized? Like if their inventory changes over time, can they push and pull from that into the Nexus system? is it kind of basically just like a one-time or manual sync?
Justin Sacks (16:38)
No, it’s dynamic. So it can be updated when there’s new items in the game or new prices or discounts or all sorts of stuff.
David Vogelpohl (16:48)
So the source of truth then it sounds like is the publishers data. It’s the publisher source of truth when it comes to the SKUs and items in their game. Does that sound correct? And then they’re basically synchronizing that with Nexus. And they are the source of truth is what it sounds like.
Justin Sacks (17:06)
That’s exactly right. Yeah, the publisher is always fully in control of what SKUs are available to which players at what price and all sorts of stuff.
David Vogelpohl (17:14)
Excellent, because it’s an open API, well, I guess it’s not too open, but what I mean is because it’s an API that they can leverage, then if their source of truth were to change to a new system or platform, in theory, they could still integrate it with Nexus. In other words, you’re not doing it only to work with one specific type of inventory system.
Justin Sacks (17:37)
That’s right. Yeah. Yeah.
David Vogelpohl (17:40)
In that inventory, I didn’t hear you say that it gets pushed to FastSpring effectively. As I understand it, we’re effectively invoking it on checkout. So you have the SKU, you’ve tracked what the user is purchasing. When it’s time to check out, you basically invoke FastSpring to charge that amount, localize the payments and do all the tax compliance pieces. And then FastSpring tells you if the transaction has gone through and then you can then tell the game via API that the player should have access to that entitle.
Did I catch that right?
Justin Sacks (18:10)
I think
that’s exactly right. Like if we imagine it as three points on a line, you know, the publisher says, here’s the SKUs that are available. Nexus features those SKUs. Player goes to make a purchase. We tell FastSpring, hey, someone wants to make this purchase. You let us know when it’s finished. You say, hey, this was completed. We then go back to the game and say, hey, this player with this ID is owed these items. So make that entitlement happen.
David Vogelpohl (18:37)
And that integration and all the systems and platforms behind that effectively is fully managed. So nobody’s having to like go update software or worry about like pen testing and all these other pieces basically, because it’s effectively all outsourced.
Justin Sacks (18:54)
Basically, yeah. We always do testing for any new launch that we do to make sure that the experiences matches as close to what the player would experience in game on their web shop and to the design and the specs of what the publisher is looking for. But effectively, yes, yeah, we’re not recreating new experiences for each new launch.
David Vogelpohl (19:13)
This is kind of interesting because the benefit of a platform is you inherit features, right? Everybody on that platform has access to it, and so it’s efficient. And of course, you don’t inherit the maintenance costs that goes along with that. But there is customization, right? As you launch these shops, help us understand the level of customization that you’re
doing for publishers as you get these out of the door? And then how long does that usually take? I guess not like exact working hours, but maybe like turnaround time in terms of days. And maybe I get that it’s a wide range, but help people understand like how quickly you can help get them going.
Justin Sacks (19:51)
Well, I can speak to Nexus. I think there’s other platforms out there that are less customizable.
but also more open, like, for example, like not anyone can come and build a web shop with Nexus. have to like say yes, and we will build this for and with you and make that partnership. And so we have some discernment of the size of the game or the type of the game or whatever it might be. but that’s because we’re highly customizable. A lot of that is for on the design front end, you user experience side of things. So
We at least tried very closely to match what the player experience would look like and feel like and seem like in game to seem like on the web.
But at the end of the day, it’s up to the publisher of what that literally will look like. And, you know, the, the, the aesthetics and the branding and the color scheme and all sorts of stuff. It’s, up to the publisher, but we can build that basically to their specifications beyond that on the feature set. There’s a lot that we can do. probably the most bells and whistles that Nexus has is on the creator program side of things. And so for example, we just launched with a partner last week, or it was two weeks ago.
that wanted to do, a multi-tiered system where different creators got different revenue shares for different SKUs, but also they got some custom SKUs that their audience could see after putting in a creator code. And there’s a lot of fun stuff that you can do there where you can like create personalized offers to groups of players.
You can do discounts, you could do promotions, additional content, exclusive content. There’s a of different pieces and ways to do it. Next, we have our recommendations and best practices, but the way that we always think about working with a publisher is we are their partner. And so it is up to them. they’re always fully in ownership of what will the web shop look like? What will it feel like to players? Who is it? Who is it available to? What are the SKUs that are available? What are the prices for those? What are the promotions and the activations and all sorts of stuff?
And so there’s a lot of options and recommendations that we make, but it’s really important to us that the publisher knows they always have a hundred percent control and ownership over what that looks and feels like.
David Vogelpohl (22:00)
What would the typical rollout time period look like? I mean, an ideal, perfect scenario. guess the worst case could be very high, but are you talking the matter of weeks, days, months?
Justin Sacks (22:11)
Yeah, so I use our last few as examples. And I think the longest from, Hey, we’re ready. And we like have some idea of what we want this to look like to launch was three weeks and the shortest was one and a half. and so it should be, should be weeks, not months. I would imagine.
The lengthiest would be like six weeks and that’s probably only if there’s really significant design cycle, you know, back and forth and some heavy QA and testing and stuff. But the actual like process of developing and building it with a publisher should be just a couple of weeks.
David Vogelpohl (22:48)
What other types of systems should folks be thinking about with this type of rollout? Like we’ve already talked about entitlements in game, we’ve talked about pushing and pulling my inventory back and forth. What other kind of systems should folks be thinking about with a rollout like this?
Justin Sacks (23:06)
Well, we recommend a creator program, but we’re very biased. You know, if your game is the sort of game that is live service and has some pool of organic creators, probably makes sense to incentivize those creators to drive sales specifically of, you know, new content in the game. There’s a lot of other cool pieces that are game dependent things like forums and blogs and leaderboards and competitions. Those are like systems that can be helpful when you think about DTC and
Now, D2C isn’t just about getting better margin than what you can get in the app store, but it’s also about building that direct relationship with the player and then offering them unique personalization. So if you have a really highly engaged player who’s spending a lot of money, maybe you can offer them something really special to keep them engaged and keep them excited and interested. And this is a good place and way to do that.
David Vogelpohl (23:56)
Yeah, it’s a great point. Such a good relationship builder, feel, not only with VIPs, but just with players writ large. This whole idea that, you know, are you a real business if you don’t have a direct relationship with your customers? In gaming, that’s quite common, right, to have this kind of third party interstitial type relationship. And so it’s really interesting to think about that opportunity to deliver a better player experience.
Thinking through the systems you mentioned, that made a lot of sense to me. Maybe we can switch gears on the rollout side. You’ve underlined a couple of times with the FastSpring Nexus partnership that you get payments and compliance, you get the web shop, but you also get the creator program in a box, which is interesting to think about in the rollout perspective, how you might roll something like this out. What should publishers be considering when
they roll out D2C to their players.
Justin Sacks (24:57)
I think they…
The first part to consider is the experience for the player. want like necessarily it requires more friction because you’re having the player change their normal experience of staying inside the app store and making a purchase. So how do you limit that friction as much as possible? That’s where I think of things like making the, the web shop, you know, mimic the experience and the aesthetics and the brand of your end game as much as you can. But then also I would think about just standard
better offers to the player. It’s really…
It’s sort of industry standard at this point that you’re offering at least about 10 % additional value on the web shop than you do in game. Usually that comes with additional content. So for example, if you sell a thousand gems, which is a soft currency for $10 of a hard currency, instead offer 1,100 gems for the same $10. I think those are like the core pieces to be thinking about as you establish your DTC. And then also think about that, those touch points.
that you were talking about, David, around how do you communicate with your player? How do you let them know about upcoming content or cool deals that they shouldn’t miss or exciting stuff going on in the meta experience around the game? I think those are really important pieces,
David Vogelpohl (26:20)
We’ve seen a big push from a lot of publishers who’ve rolled out with us around creating and activating their player accounts. Do you view that as a major pillar? guess it probably depends on the publisher, but how do you view the use of player accounts logging into a web portal with that player account, like that whole universe around the account side?
Justin Sacks (26:44)
I think it’s generally good. I do think there’s one unique piece of not doing the player accounts, which is it actually makes gifting easier. just by like, if, someone doesn’t have to authenticate their account in order to make a purchase or experience the website, but instead they’re using a unique ID, you could get your friend’s ID and then just gift them really easily. So it’s sort of like naturally enables gifting and gifting is a powerful part of
e-commerce, also this sort of like D to C motion. but generally attaching player accounts to the, to the website and to the web shop makes a ton of sense. It’s ways to like build more of those personalized offers and unique experiences. And it’s totally a thing that is worth doing. when you have the resources to be able to provide something special and unique to that player.
Whether that’s a daily login bonus or it’s a personalized offer or whatever it might be.
David Vogelpohl (27:42)
One of the interesting things that stands out to me about all this is that with live service games and mobile gaming in general, you tend to have things like VIPs emerge, obviously people that disproportionately buy from you. In the mobile app world, that actually rarely happens, right? It’s mainly driven by subscriptions and all players are effectively the same, or users are worth the same amount of money to you in a very real way.
In gaming though, we have the VIPs at Emerge. Do you feel like rolling out and focusing primarily on VIPs is a valid strategy in the beginning? Or do you like when publishers go broader with their player base? Like, can’t you get like 70 % of your revenue with like 5 % of your players?
Justin Sacks (28:33)
It’s a really good question. I don’t know if I would recommend starting only focused on VIPs, but I would, I would certainly not recommend ignoring your VIPs. I think they should be part of the strategy and should be part of the intention and the idea of building that direct relationship with your VIPs, with your most engaged players. That’s like.
Yes, it’s one of the biggest values that you get by, having a web shop, by having DTC. and it’s exactly right, especially if you’re a game that has, you know, a minority of your players driving a majority of your revenue. then your web shop is going to be even more valuable to you, not only because you get better margins on those few people and it’s easier to get a small group of people to make a shift to a web shop versus a large group of people, but also you’re starting to build that direct relationship.
And then as mentioned, you can communicate things that are really valuable to that person to keep them engaged and retaining one more month of a VIP might be worth retaining years of dozens of other smaller players.
David Vogelpohl (29:40)
That’s great insights. You’ve talked, of course, about the role of creators in promoting your D2C offering, and that makes a lot of sense. You’ve talked about the anti-steering provisions, and I know that you are able to promote your website within your game. Obviously, you can’t promote your web shop within your game, and so many publishers will kind of skate the line between what can we promote versus what might be going too far.
But I’m just curious, like either in that arena or just generally writ large, what are some unique strategies publishers should consider when promoting their web shops?
Justin Sacks (30:20)
Yeah, well, I do think I think influencers and creators are a good way to do that. So just partnering with the creators you have in your community and they don’t necessarily have to be YouTubers or streamers. can be ambassadors or community leaders. This might be people that run Facebook groups or discord servers or things like that.
I also think separately leaning into social is really powerful. Most publishers have built some social presence about around their games or the IP and, you know, letting the folks that follow you on, on, your social media and know that the web shop and the website exists is great, especially when ideally you can combine them and your website has some value to players beyond just the web shop. So it might be.
blog or news or more information or, you know, two of like the core pieces that I see all the time for competitive games are leaderboards. If your leaderboards exist somewhere near your web shop, then there’s like a pretty straightforward funnel of your competitive players go and checking out the leaderboards and then go into the shop in order to top up their currency. and then I forgot what the last one was.
David Vogelpohl (31:28)
Must have been a great idea though, but just in general, it sounds like, like I hear people talk about this and it’s so funny because so many gaming publisher sites, it’s like really cool looking imagery from the game, a list of the games and a few call-outs on where you can download or install or buy it. And that’s pretty much it.
And what we’ve seen, what I’ve seen anyways is more and more publishers really turning their website into a destination. so is that I talk to folks that’s often how what I’m seeing is like, if I have my leaderboards there, if I can log into my account and do stuff, if I can make it a destination where my players are engaged and interacting with it, then that’s just going to strengthen the connection with that player, with my brand and my business. And then of course your web shop is there and you get to take advantage of that.
Justin Sacks (31:53)
Mm-hmm.
David Vogelpohl (32:15)
But it’s this idea of owning your customers instead of renting them and using your website as a destination in order to do that. That’s my own point of view. I don’t know how you think of some of those variables, but what are your thoughts?
Justin Sacks (32:30)
I think that’s right. think it is really building it into a habit where it doesn’t feel like additional friction to go to the website, but it feels like just a part of the player experience. And so that reminds me of the last piece that I was going to mention. That’s one of the two core things that folks do. One is that that leaderboard piece, if the game has any competitive elements. And the second is some sort of like daily reward. So just saying, Hey, you visited this website, you get something. which requires that the player has logged in and they’re
experiencing this and that there is value on the website for them to go and see every day. Ideally more value than just like getting an additional, you know, hundred gems or whatever, but that’s great too. It is valuable to make it, like a normal experience for the player to visit your website and see content about the game in addition to actually playing the game itself.
and in addition to just using the webshop itself. I totally think there’s a lot of value in making it a destination more than just a place to transact.
David Vogelpohl (33:29)
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So how can publishers use FastSpring and Nexus if they want a custom webshop or create one in the future? Like, what if I didn’t want my webshop to be the out-of-the-box option? I was actually going to go build my own. Could I still use Nexus for my creator program and FastSpring for my payments on a custom webshop somewhere?
Justin Sacks (33:54)
Yeah, you certainly could. could, you know, if you’re…
totally building the website, which is what is the thing that the player is going to interact with? And then you’re building the rails to like tell your, your games back into entitle that item to the player after purchase. You can build that piece. can integrate with FastSpring to handle payment processing, your merchant record. then next, next is can certainly easily still provide that creative programming experience for the web shop. You could also just try it and start with nexus building it. and then, you know, before you invest all the time and resources
into making it yourself, but yeah, we’re Nexus is certainly platform agnostic. So you can have a creator program in your own first party web shop in one that obviously that we build in one someone else builds or in game, you know, we’re happy to work with you.
David Vogelpohl (34:41)
Yeah, I think like in my experience, that’s where I think people get a little like awkward around like out of the box experiences because they feel trapped, but it doesn’t feel like that’s actually the case here. You can take the value of Nexus forward with you regardless of your DTC future.
Certainly FastSpring is a similar type of fluid platform in terms of the web shop side. And then if you had a custom web shop either today or in the future, you could still use all three together if you found value basically in all three. And I think that openness is really powerful when you think about it through the lens of a partnership. least it is for me, someone who likes flexibility and options.
Justin Sacks (35:21)
That’s totally right. Yeah. If you want to build the pieces yourself, both of us, FastSpring and Nexus can be a module that lives in your ecosystem, or we can build that part for you. It’s up to you.
David Vogelpohl (35:33)
Okay, so just to recap one time since obviously the core topic we’re covering today is the integration, but effectively Nexus will help you set up your web shop customized for your game’s design and the type of inventory basically you’ll be selling associated with your game. You’ll help connect through to entitlement systems via API so publishers can allow their entitlements in the game.
The inventory itself, of course, is synced with the publisher being the source of truth. And then on the payments and compliance side, when it’s time to check out, FastSpring swoops in, does our checkout magic, offers local payment methods and compliance worldwide. And the publisher gets to stay focusing on their game and promoting their D2C channel and not implementing and managing all of this technology and integrations on their own. Is that about right?
Justin Sacks (36:26)
That is exactly right.
David Vogelpohl (36:28)
Excellent. Well, this is awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat this out here on the podcast. Obviously, we’re, at FastSpring, really excited about this integration and really wanted to get the opportunity to kind of talk about it here and be able to share it with others. But is there anything else you want to make sure we mentioned about D2C or the integration before we kind of wrap up here?
Justin Sacks (36:52)
I think the only thing to mention is if you have a game that has any amount of players and revenue and you haven’t already explored D2C, you’ve got to get on it. And again, my recommendation is start with some partner that can make it super easy just to get something up there. But it is certainly positive value for basically every game publisher out there.
David Vogelpohl (37:15)
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Jessen.
Justin Sacks (37:20)
Thank you, I appreciate it. I’m glad to be here.
David Vogelpohl (37:22)
Excellent pleasure as always. And if you would like to learn more about what Justin is up to, you can check out nexus.gg. If you’d like to learn more about the FastSpring and Nexus integration, you can go to fastspring.gg and click “Demo” and we’ll get you connected with all the right folks who can help you take a double click down and learn a little more. Thank you all for joining the Growth Stage podcast. Again, I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital marketing community through my role here at FastSpring. And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage. Thanks everybody.
