By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
Samsung Electronics has just launched a new platform that is boosting mobile game adoption rates by an astounding 1,000%.
Anyone who has designed and/or published mobile games or software knows that the first big hurdle to get over is just getting someone to dowload and try out your app.
What Samsung has done is create a cloud gaming platform that eliminates a lot of the friction for gamers trying out an app. That’s also important for licensors involved in gaming, as it’s one thing to develop a game, and quite another to acquire users. Anything that makes user acquistion easier, faster, and less expensive is typically a good thing.
Introduced in open beta last year, Samsung’s new mobile cloud gaming platform allows full-fledged Android-native games to be played instantly without download or reduced latency on all Galaxy devices.
Samsung says it is essentially adopting a ‘streaming’ model for gaming, similar to what has happened in music and video.
“Today, a large majority of entertainment and media consumption is immediately available through streaming services, but the largest category of media – mobile games, with over 2 billion users globally – still employs the download model for each piece of content,” the company said in a statement. “Samsung strives to make mobile gaming just as accessible.”
Increasing Conversion Rates is Key
Samsung says that the number one issue facing all developers is conversion. At the beginning of the mobile gaming industry, a lot of games became successful through word of mouth, but today there are so many games on the market, that success is largely driven by expensive marketing campaigns.
“In today’s mobile game ecosystem, 80% of Android game downloads are a direct result of targeted paid advertising in places where our attention is aggregated,” Samsung says. “However, this business model also presents one of the biggest pain points for publishers: conversion rates.
“The industry average of an ad click resulting in both a successful install and first play session is less than 5%. That means over 95% of people who have expressed interest in a publisher’s game, via an ad, never make it into the game itself, resulting in considerable cost implications for publishers and making advertising an inefficient funnel for monetization.”
A big reason for that is what Samsung calls the onboarding process. To install a game through current app stores, players have to opt into permissions and agreements, and then download a large data file to access the gaming content. Creating an account alone, with the requirement to create user names and passwords, is often enough to cause a potential user to dump the app.
Samsung’s idea is to get rid of the obstacle of going through the download process altogether. Instead, when players click an ad for an Android-native game, they will be navigated into the Galaxy Store where they can immediately start playing within seconds. They don’t have to wait for the download, create an account, or download any data.
Samsung experimented with this process during their beta launch, and says they saw conversion rates rise dramatically from just 5% on a typical app store, up to a 50% conversion rate on the app streaming system, a tenfold increase on the industry average.
As well, Samsung found the system is more ‘sticky’, as more users stuck around and continued using the apps. Cloud gaming on Galaxy devices experienced substantial growth with a 149% increase in monthly active users year-over-year in the United States and Canada.
“Our cloud gaming platform offers the ability for publishers to significantly increase their top-of-funnel conversion rates for their user acquisition (UA) campaigns by seamlessly converting an ad click directly into first gameplay, eliminating the need to drive users to an app store to download and install,” said Jong Woo, Vice President and Head of Game Services at Samsung. “We’ve seen it dramatically increase UA efficiency for publishers, expanding the number of players coming into their games and driving superior return on their advertising investment.
“In the long run, we believe our cloud game platform will not only change the way Samsung Galaxy gamers play mobile games but disrupt how publishers commercially scale their games within our device ecosystem.
For publishers and their licensing partners interested in redefining their mobile game distribution on Galaxy devices with Samsung’s cloud technology, visit Samsung’s Developer page to learn more.