How Support-a-Creator programs benefit the long-term growth and success of live service games
This article was originally published on GamesIndustry.biz. Read the full piece here.
When it comes to making a successful live service game, it's not enough for it to be a fun and exciting concept with fully-fledged ecosystems. The continued rising costs of maintaining and expanding these games means there's increased pressure to be able to monetize with existing live service models in the long term. A new game may have a successful launch, but based on a Game Developers Collective survey, 70% of developers expressed concerns on the sustainability of current live service models, especially from trying to maintain players' interest as well as competition from other live service games.
While it's important for live service games to introduce new regular updates and content that will keep their players engaged, publishers need to harness the power of creators that are passionate about their games. Whether these are Twitch streamers or community leaders on Discord servers, they play a vital role when it comes to driving discovery, engagement and monetization. The best way to harness this power is through Support-a-Creator programs.
A Performance-Driven Growth Flywheel
"Support-a-Creator programs are really about aligning the incentives for the creator with the incentives of the game," says Justin Sacks, CEO of Nexus, a platform dedicated to building Support-a-Creator programs. "Content creators drive a lot of value for games just from telling their audience that the game exists and talking about new content to keep players excited and engaged, but there's a big disconnect between the value that the creator generates and then what they actually get out of it, because if they help a game make a million dollars, they don't see any change in that.”
"This is obviously not great for the creator, but it's also not good for the game, because when there's that misalignment, then sometimes the creator will move on to different games, and maybe it's just a game that they can get more advertising dollars from, or they can get a larger audience, but it's not the game that they love or that their core audience really falls in love with."
Support-a-Creator programs can be thought of as similar to affiliate marketing – albeit dedicated to just a single product – whereby a creator can apply for a creator code and share it with their audience. When a player declares that creator code when making an in-game purchase, that creator will also share a percentage of that revenue. What makes revenue-sharing an impactful business model for live service games isn't just because creators are effective at driving free-to-paid conversions and reactivations, with more than 50% of purchases coming from players who would not have monetized otherwise, but because there's a different and more personal motivation behind these transactions.
"If a player makes a purchase, they get a little message thanking them for supporting their creator, and that is the magic moment that gets the player to become a better player," Sacks explains. "Even though a game already has creators making content and players already buying stuff, as soon as the player knows they're supporting a creator with making that purchase, those players start spending more and becoming better players."
Since creator program revenue is performance-based, creators produce more authentic, passion-driven content, promoting games they truly enjoy. At the same time, publishers only pay for results, making Support-a-Creator programs a more effective and cost-efficient alternative to traditional marketing. "A publisher could pay a streamer $20,000 and very few or no players will actually care about that game, and that streamer might never play the game again," says Sacks. "So instead of the publisher taking all the risk, it's the creator saying, 'I know that my audience loves this game and that I really care about it, and so this is worth it for me to participate'."
That also makes these programs beneficial to different sizes of live service games and not just those already operating at a dominant scale in the industry. Taking the example of BoomBit, publisher of mobile game Hunt Royale, Sacks adds, "The organic creators for that game are smaller, maybe hundreds of views rather than hundreds of thousands, so those creators are only making at most $30 a month from their channel. But when you enter creator codes into it, suddenly they're driving tens of thousands of dollars in sales, and now they're making thousands so that they can focus full time on just making content for that game that they wouldn't have been able to otherwise. This is obviously good for the game, but it's also great for the creator because that's the game that they love, so they don't have to go to the biggest game and try to be a small fish in a big pond." In other words, publishers win when creators win.
These creators don't need to be streamers either – indeed, Sacks says YouTube creators tend to drive the best conversion and performance – as they can also come from creators of short-form content on TikTok or Instagram reels, or even organisers of Facebook groups and Discord servers. What matters is that they have influence to cultivate player communities that drive long-term loyalty, while those players not only engage in a game for longer sessions but also spend more with a creator code than the general player population.
Build it Yourself or Partner with Experts?
Some of the biggest publishers of live service games already have their own first-party Support-a-Creator programs, including Epic Games, Supercell, and Roblox. However, it can be challenging for publishers to establish their own programs. "The first step is onboarding creators: how do they know where to sign up? And when they apply, if a thousand people are all saying they're Mr. Beast, how are you going to know which one is real, if any? Then there's the dashboarding, because it's really important that the creator knows when they've driven value, when they're next getting paid, and it's important for the publisher to have that data as well. Then the last and biggest headache is paying out taxes. If you have hundreds or thousands of these effectively independent contractors, all making different amounts of money each month, and you have to pay them out and do taxes at the end of the year, your accounting team is going to be so mad at you if you make them handle all of that."
This is where Nexus's world-class creator program comes in. It's easy to implement, taking care of onboarding, and tracks attributions to update creator and publisher dashboards accordingly. More importantly, there are no upfront or maintenance costs and is 100% performance-based, while all tax information and creator payments are handled on the publishers' behalf in accordance with local currencies and regulatory requirements. Publishers only pay Nexus a cut of revenue made from creator codes, while of course also sharing a cut with the creator. As a platform-agnostic platform, publishers already implementing creator programs with Nexus include Capcom, Hi-Rez Studios, and Gorilla Tag VR publisher Another Axiom.
"Along the way, there's a lot of little bells and whistles that the publisher can do to make it a uniquely best-in-class program for them and for their game," Sacks adds. "They can make it so there's different tiers of creators, so creators can have different revenue shares, so you can incentivize a creator to really be focused on your game to make this sort of content that you're looking for, you can have different revenue shares per SKU, you can do promotions, we have a CRM so that you can message creators or provide them with keys. There's all sorts of stuff that the platform provides."
While Nexus isn't an influencer marketing agency, and the onus will still be on the publisher having a product that will attract creators in the first place, just as it's also on the creators to make exciting and engaging content that can drive sales, having full attribution can also help optimize monetization "You can see all the data, for example, that this player bought this SKU at this time using this creator code, so on the dashboard, the publisher has all the information about which creators are selling, what SKUs at what time, what new content and promotions are working well," Sacks explains. This could for instance enable publishers to connect with their biggest-earning creators to make more focused content or educate creators on what content they could make in the future that players respond to well.
Another major tailwind in recent years have been web stores, which mobile publishers have been building for players to make their purchases in order to circumvent the exorbitant cuts taken by Google and Apple. "One of the big challenges for those games is you're not allowed to tell players to go purchase on the web shop instead of in-game, but a creator can, so we found that to be helpful too."
In a highly competitive market where new games are having to compete with existing games, implementing a creator program will by no means turn around the fortunes of a live service game that isn't already attracting creators to support it. But for live service games already performing steadily for three, five, or even ten years, the value of creator programs would be immediate. Based on surveys with Nexus's current partners, players supporting creators are retained twice as long as players who do not, while players using creator codes spend an average of 32% more than non-creator code users. Across all metrics, whether it's acquiring new players, retaining players, or driving sales during a promotional discount, creator codes bring increased value that can be accurately measured compared to more expensive traditional marketing channels.
Sacks concludes, "If a game has depth in strategy, closer to the core gaming side, with deep monetization, in-app purchasing, battle passes, gachas, currencies, and organic creators, then you need a creator program right away. It will be the best thing you can do for the game."
