In this session, you’ll learn about how you can use the Meta Quest Store to monetize with subscriptions and in-app purchases. We’ll review subscriptions best practices, showing platform toolkits to drive user acquisition and reduce churn. We’ll also cover sales and pricing bundles and what’s coming next on our roadmap.
Music. Hi, my name is drew, and I'm a PM on the MediQuest store team. As a developer, driving sustainable revenue is a key part of building a successful app or game. The Medaquest App Store team has been focused on building easy to use features to help you monetize and engage your audience with bundles and sales, subscriptions, IAP, and our forthcoming game trials called Try Before You Buy. Because price sensitivity drives a large amount of customer purchasing behavior, it should come as no surprise that we find content, bundling and discounts are effective means of driving customer sales on the App Store. Today, each of these tools can be reused to extend the life of a product and help ensure many more merchandisable moments beyond an app's initial launch. It's for all of these reasons that we're excited to announce today that we'll be launching self service tools to enable content, bundling and sales. Just in time for the holiday season, the first discounts and bundles will launch for Black Friday. Developers will be able to log into the developer website, navigate to the Sales and Bundles tab, and select any live applications or addon content that you own. Next, you'll select the date and time of the discount or bundle and submit them for review. Upon approval, the discount or bundle will go live alongside your standalone products and will be featured on your app's product pages. Self service tools for content, bundling and sales will begin rolling out today. For those of you that want to go further and provide your international users with discounts and bundles tied to cultural holidays or events, we'll soon also provide you with the tools to select different discounts and times for specific countries or regions to support these new features. Updates to the analytics sections of the developer dashboards will also be added later this year. We think that these features are going to really supercharge your team's ability to help customers discover your great products, and we're excited to get them into your hands to use as quickly as possible. And now, to talk a little bit more about subscriptions, I'd like to introduce Yuri. Thanks, Joe. I'm Curie, the product manager for subscriptions. Subscriptions are an increasingly popular way for developers to monetize apps. On Madacst the past six months, we've seen strong growth in the number of active subscribers. We offer auto renewable subscriptions that provide access to content or premium features in your app on an ongoing basis. They automatically renew at the end of the billing period until the user chooses to cancel. Today subscriptions are a preferred business model among fitness and social apps, but many more kinds of apps can take advantage of subscriptions, including apps that offer new game levels, access to collections of content like music packs software. As a service, you can offer subscriptions a type of inapp purchase alongside other inapp purchase types. To offer subscriptions, you need to configure them on Developer Portal as part of this, you have an option to set up a free trial 714 days or a month. Free trials are a great way to offer users a taste of the app before committing to a recurring fee. This is a great way to increase user adoption. In addition, you can fine tune your business model by setting different subscription tiers and billing terms. Currently, developers can set up up to three tiers for a single subscription for example bronze, silver and gold to better differentiate levels of premium access. In addition, you can select billing terms within each tier, for example, monthly or annual. This will help optimize conversion, retention and monetization. Since subscriptions launch in 2021, we've been actively listening for developer feedback. One message keeps coming loud and clear developers need more tools to grow adoption app developers want to experiment with different flows and grows ideas. The team is working on a set of features to help you do this better. The first of them is extender ul API. This is an extension of the Graph API familiar to many of you. It will allow you to create custom flows to set up inapp promotions, referrals and gifting using free time in app as an incentive. For example, refer ten friends and get ten days free. Next, we want to offer you an option to help increase user conversion by allowing users to sign up on more services in the Medic Store, on Web, Mobile and NVR, and not only in App. In this way, users will be able to sign up right away on the surface they are on. In addition, the team is working on introductory pricing. Introductory pricing will extend the free trial options and offer you more flexibility in setting up offers targeted for new users. For example, sign up today and get the next two months with an 80% discount. Reach out to our team to learn more. Next, I'll turn it over to Andrea to talk about inept purchases, best practices and try before you buy. Thanks, Yuri. I'm Andrea. And aside from subscriptions, which we just heard a lot about, there are two other types of inapp purchases to consider consumables and durables. Durables are singleuse items that persist with the user, meaning once the item has been purchased, it can't be purchased again. For example, maybe you offer an initial game download for free with only a demo level. Then you offer additional levels as an inapp purchase. The second type are consumable items, which on the other hand, can be purchased multiple times. Some examples of consumable IAPS are character lives or coins that you can use during gameplay. So once you've created some cool IAP, either durables or consumables, there are two ways to help users find it. The first is to promote your IAP in the Medaquest Store and have it featured on the app pages. This is great because users can see it right as they're browsing your PDP, and this can be a great way to get users excited before they've even bought your app. The second way is to sell your IAP directly within your game for experience. This keeps users engaged, and if you can come up with compelling hooks, we'll help ensure that they keep coming back for more. Since it might be helpful to have some inspiration, here s what we've seen work well for some other developers. The first best practice is to try connecting your IAP to an event, whether that's a real life event or an inapp event. Creating these tieins, for example, to a sporting event or a holiday can create familiarity and relevance in an emotional or even a cultural way. Connecting your IAP to an in game event or trigger also creates a reason for purchase and engagement. For example, maybe you have a sunny environment. Then perhaps you offer sunglasses as an interesting way for users to interact with their environment and identify themselves. The second best practice is making sure your IAP offering makes sense as part of your experience, either aesthetically or functionally. IAP requires development effort, so we want you to be thoughtful about the value you're adding in the utility sense, or whether some novelty for the users or some sort of social aspect. If your app requires an outfit or accessory, it should fit within the story that you're trying to tell or the experience that you're trying to create. The third best practice is to try giving a little bit away for free, which can give users a taste and inspire them to come back to purchase. We've also seen this be effective when users know that something is only available for a limited amount of time. Lastly, users respond well to new content, so keep things fresh. Try not to let your offerings get stale. We've seen developers have good success by creating attractive assets for IAP. After a while, downloads may start to plateau, and users like to see that the product is alive. So updating your artwork is one way to show that you're keeping things fresh. Creating a compelling app experience requires a lot of different elements and constant experimentation. Don't just try one thing. Compare two and decide what works best and then riff off of that. The developer dashboard provides an easy way to upload and associate store assets such as screenshots, video trailers, and more with your extra app content. The last thing I want to talk about is a new feature we're working on called Try Before You Buy. One piece of consistent feedback we've heard from many MediQuest two users is that they're hesitant to purchase store content. Sometimes it's because they aren't sure if they're actually going to enjoy an app or they're worried about a game not being worth the price. Reading descriptions, browsing reviews, and watching trailers is no substitute for being fully immersed in an experience. Try Before You Buy will allow interested users to try full gameplay trials that are timeboxed to provide the full flavor of the game and encourage purchasing. In our early experiments, we saw that Try Before You Buy increased top of funnel engagement, driving more PDP clicks for all the developers in the experiment. For some developers, we also saw a strong increase in post Try Before You Buy purchases, demonstrating that free game trials can provide the value that demos traditionally do without requiring developers to explicitly build the demo. Our goal is to make this a fully selfserved solution so you don't have to do any additional work. Simply configure the trial duration anywhere from ten to 60 minutes. In the developer dashboard. Users will be able to start the trial, and five minutes before the trial is over will let them know that time's almost up and prompt them to purchase the app. We'll share sales performance in the Developer Analytics tool. We know that this feature might not be right for every app or experience, which is why we're building an A B testing so you can experiment with free trials for percentage of users and see if the results help you meet your goals. We've already heard positive feedback from users, so stay tuned for the launch of Try Before You Buy later this year. Thank you for joining us for this session on how to supercharge your app with sustainable monetization. We hope you'll check out subscriptions bundles and sales as well as Try Before You Buy as they become available.