Why Every Game Needs A Creator Program

[Music] hello world welcome back to the Pocket Gamer podcast with me your host Brian Bago and our Mistress of manifestation

the always wonderful Peggy and salts hello Peggy welcome back it's great to see you indeed Brian and that is impressive that's one I wasn't going to hit upon I was thinking oh he's going to

talk about since it's all about Creator Pro programs it's going to be a c but no it comes out with an M to surprise me and to surprise us all and yes it is a great show a great time because we're

looking at the topics that are just going to make it possible to smash it in 2025 That's My Philosophy I'm an optimist and that's why we're picking

these topics we started out with AI and creativity as you will recall yes I do absolutely and now we're moving on to Creator

programs um so that is another big point it's one thing to create and you need to connect with the players afterwards that's all about the Creator programs so

we have today Justin Sachs he's CEO of Nexus it's a company that's giving the studios all the tools they need to support a worldclass Creator program but

interestingly Justin's career is also about gaming right he started out in Competitive Gaming he founded A League of Legends coaching we website later

then moving to the gaming development gaming Media Company um until it was acquired by twitch and now at Nexus well he's he's back with his passion for

connecting content and connectors and this time it's about engaging community so we are excited to yes engage you Justin welcome to the show thank you

excited to be here it's great to have you here um really looking forward to this but before we jump in I noticed you have it's Peggy said a Competitive Gaming background and even won a World

of Warcraft Classic Tournament back in 2024 leaning into that let's can you pick one lesson from your Competitive Gaming days and Inspire our audience to take the plunge and you know jump into a

creater program from my experience in Competitive Gaming I was never the best player in the world but sometimes my team would be the best in the world and so that was really more about putting

together the right puzzle pieces like can we find the right players who fit specific roles that really can work well as a team and then you can accomplish incredible things and I think that's

similar to Creator program is can the studio and the publisher do what they do best in making an incredible game and then can we help them by putting together a program that connects them with the creators that love their game

the creators who used to play the game and then build something that can truly grow and sustain the game for a long period of time and so um again I was never really the best player but I was able to convince the best players to

work with me and that's a lot of what Creator programs are about as well having the right team Brian that's what I think a lot of our listeners are going to learn more and more about this year

is that more than ever teamwork oh yeah I mean it's we here at time and time again Peggy there's no one siiz fits all there's no you know I single solution that works for everybody

um and as we've heard from so many of the people we've spoken to on the show you can't do everything so build the team around you you know build out those skill and and lean into the change um you know

developers tend to want to develop Justin you know they they see themselves as as game creators and everything else is somebody else's problem whether it's a publisher you know a community manager

or some kind of partner but um having done more and more work over the last year with the craer community uh I'm really learning a huge amount and and

starting to find out more about these guys um so let's dive into that a little bit more and look at why Creator

programs matter so why should game Publishers and developers care about building creative programs and what makes them such a powerful tool for engagement and growth and as you said

that longevity yeah it's from my perspective it's about connecting with players in the ways they want to be engaged with um and a lot of that is through their

favorite content creators so the people that they watch on YouTube or on Twitch or the folks running Discord communities and servers um if the game is building a

way to engage with those leaders um those strong personalities and keep them excited about the game that's the best touch point for keeping the players excited about the game both from a

retention perspective but also from reactivation a lot of the way that it's often thought about with creators is acquisition let's work with these folks to bring in a new audience and that can

work for sure but where creators can be really powerful is actually in growth in retention and reactivation and that's where we've found our creative programs to to truly Excel and that's one of the

places where Studios that care about retention and reactivation they should think about utilizing Creator programs so what does that look like in practice because I think that's very interesting

not just the acquisition sort of been there done that and we know about that but keeping and above all winning people back winning players back because that's so important you had them once already

so if you can win them back that's really a double win you don't have to pay to acquire them again and you don't have to familiarize them with the game that much yeah um the the first piece is

making sure that your game could be a fit for a Creator program and so understanding what are the types of games that are a strong fit that can really work well with creators versus

games that maybe are lesso um and sort of like theistic for thinking about this is if your game is live service versus premium live service you're creating new content all the time there's new stuff

for creators to cover all the time you're probably going to be a better fit um if there's a lot of depth to the game so it's multiplayer and there's strategy and there's a lot of things to discover and talk about again those are going to

be really good fits for creators and really where Creator programs in the way that Nexus thinks about them and builds them where you build an evergreen incentive for the Creator around Revenue

share if your game monetizes well so you have gacha and battle passes and hard currency and all sorts of stuff creators are going to drive a lot of

attention retention reactivation and ultimately sales for those sort of games versus if your game is really advertising driven it's going to be hard for creators to be really effective and so if you have a live service game that

has a really deep strategy and a deep monetization system Creator program is going to be a great fit for you once you've ensured that you have a game which is a good fit um you have to make

sure that they join it um so where do where do Studios start do they come straight to an agency like yours should they do their homework and start looking at the you know the creators they follow or the ones that

they can see are are already playing the game what what's kind of The Next Step yeah so that's one of the big opportunities and challenges for building a worldclass Creator program is onboarding so how do the creators know

that your program exists and then how do they become a part of it the becoming a part of it is actually a ton of work so like one knowing that it exists is making sure that your community communicating with creators where they

get content so this might be social media this might be other creators it might be through Discord it depends in the game but then actually joining it is is often a process so if you think about it from the Studio's perspective maybe

they have a community team or maybe they're really large publisher and they have an influencer team and a PR team and a marketing team and a community team but even then you're now going to have to have dedicated headcount helping

with onboarding so when a Creator wants to join maybe they go through an application process and if you're building that yourself as the publisher you can use tools like Google forms or whatever it is but then you have to read each individual one you

then have to authenticate that the person applying is who they say they are so often people will like say oh I'm Mr Beast let me in the creative program but they're not actually Mr Beast and so you need a way to authenticate that they are

who they say they are and then have them join the program in the way that you want them to a lot of Creator programs have different tiers so they're going to have different tiers for different sizes of creators but also to incentivize creators to make the content that they

want to and you're going to have to as the publisher go through that entire process and then manually put them into specific tiers give them roles on Discord different rewards every month

rewards for joining again ensure their authenticity all that sort of stuff and that can be a big challenge um and so that's one of the buckets that we as a platform focus on which is that whole onboarding piece when you spell it out

like that I hadn't thought of it like that we because we don't do this Brian right you think okay you just have to have live Ops got that strategy constant content you know got this checklist it's like yeah and then you

get the creators they're very passionate great fit with your program and you're ready to roll but that's not the case so let's get down into the weeds a little bit you've got our attention we're totally on board we want to have a

Creator program our listeners Studios maybe thinking about this for the first time ever let's start right there right step one where does a studio start well I think I think it was a really good

question earlier too on the why and so like just again to to make sure that we understand what are the goals and also which are the the games that are a f it

the Y is on growth it's on retention and reactivation and we've seen Creator programs you know 40% of players that can use a support a Creator code to buy something had never bought anything in

that game before so creators do a really great job of converting free players into paying players for reactivating lapsed players and bringing them back and then of course of driving retention

for your most engaged player and so if that's the sort of initiative you as a game want you're probably a game that is live service that has a deep strategy in the game and deep monetization but also you're a game that's been out for a

while the games that benefit the most from Creator programs are mature titles that have been in the market for five or more years some of our partners that have found the most success have

celebrated more than a decade of live Ops of their game so the thing they're most focused on is not getting new players into it but it's keeping the players that they have or critically reactivating their most engaged players

who you know maybe were playing for four years but stopped playing two years ago and how do you get them back you can get them back through a Creator so assuming you're one of those games and you're you

decide yes I both care about making sure that my creators are supported that they're making content that they can make a living but also about those growth metrics that have positive player Behavior impact in the game there's

really three things that you're going to need to do the one that we talked about was onboarding so how do the creators know the program exists how do they join and become a part of it the second one that's really important is dashboarding

you're going to have to give realtime feedback to those creators themselves so they know their performance in the program where they stand what's going on if you have a revenue share impact or or

piece of it how when do they next get their payout of of Revenue yeah but also for you as the publisher the dashboard is critical for you to see the impact of the creators in your program who's

growing who's not growing what are the skews they're driving the most sales of what content is working really well and then all of the little bells and whistles that make a world class creative program world class which is

that we talked about tiers but it's also you should think about Revenue share from incentivizing creators to make the content you want for your game and so maybe that's offering a higher Revenue

share for a new player bundle or for a battle pass and maybe a little bit lower for hard currency that way you know when a player buys a battle pass they become a better player and you're incentivizing

a Creator to drive engagement around that and then also you know you want to run activations and promotions with your creators things like hey if a player

spends $50 using Creator codes they get some special title in game or um there's some special skew that is really supporting creators and when anyone buys

that you know Creator share in a pool or there's some competition where creators are competing to see who can drive the most sales for the new content and whoever wins they get some uh Evergreen

voice pack in the game or something really cool that relates to them I think the promotions piece is a is a really big thing to think about and the only way to do so is if you have great dashboarding the last bucket that we

usually talk about which is the biggest headache for Publishers is payouts and taxes because let's say you're running this Creator program and you have 20 50

100 creators in it well each of those people are earning different amounts of income each month through the revenue share they all need to get paid different amounts every single month and

then at the end of the year you have to handle taxes for them and there in dozens of different countries and just Staffing that is going to be multiple new headcount in your Finance accounting team and you're going to have to work

with multiple vendors in order to support that and so those are critical pieces of running a Creator program but they all have you know their own challenges within it and just to be clear for a moment because I also want

our audience to be clear on this you know give me an idea in Nexus where you begin and end there's no misconception because one thing that you are not is

you are not an agency per se it's a really good point so Nexus our our piece is we want to be the infrastructure and the tools that let any game have a world

class Creator program assuming their game is the right fit and the games that are not the right fit for us are games that need us to bring them the creators so if your game already has organic

creators or creators that maybe used to make content but haven't in a few years we would be wonderful for you but if you're looking to us to find the creators get them excited about the game get them to start making content and

they've never played that before maybe they've never even played the genre before you might want to look to an agency to do influencer acquisition and Nexus we're more the tools and the platform to build and manage that

worldclass creative program and so we often work hand inand with agencies out there but to be clear we are not the agency if you have no creators playing your game we are not going to be your first step well there's a lot left to do

outside of just finding the creators I mean when you were going through that laundry list it's almost almost discouraging Brian if you think about it I mean the contracts the assets the

taxes wow these These are great great points um Peggy and really really well made Justin because one of the things that you know I I'm a former PR guy so I

used to work with you know influencers who at that point were writing magazines um any listeners out there who are wondering what magazines are they were like iPads but less expensive um yes you

could swipe but you couldn't pinch and zoom uh and it was very much an informal um agreement you know it was based on grace and favor and persuasion and you

know the occasional um big dinner out so I know a lot of Studios a lot of companies out there who are adopting the same approach with influencers and content creators which is it's very much

on a a favor basis but this sounds like an entirely different level of agreement and so I take it this is something that that has to have as Peggy just said the

contracts in place the payment agreements all of this kind of thing because that I think for a lot of the studios a lot of the people listening is going to be something they've not even

considered yet it's a really good point so um what you're talking about is is really what I think as influencer marketing traditional influencer marketing which some of it is you know

relationship and favor based what you're talking about and often it is you know you're giving them a big bag of money upfront to make content and usually for influencer marketing you're targeting

the large variety creators the people that play different games all the time and you're trying to be like hey I'm gonna pay pay you $10,000 an hour to stream for three hours you know over two

days and I want you to play my game and then I hope that some of your audience comes and plays the game but the challenge is there's really no attribution in traditional influence marketing there's no way to know well

when you gave them you know those $60,000 did they end up actually getting their audience to start playing the game or did any of those people actually end up buying anything but when I think of a

Creator program I think of an evergreen holistic program that works with creators over the the lifetime of the game itself and it's fully performance-based meaning the Creator

only gets paid when they're actually driving value for the game and the way that that works is they have a Creator code so we'd say code Brian and you'd go and tell your audience hey I've been playing this game for years there's this

new battle pass coming out if you're going to go buy it please use code Brian and when the player does that then youd know that you drove that player to make that purchase and you'd get Revenue share for making that happen and that

aligns the incentives between the Creator and the game so the Creator wants the game to succeed the game wants the Creator to succeed versus traditional influencer marketing almost disigns the incentives because

you're saying here's $10,000 to play my game and then the Creator in their head is thinking well I'm not going to play it again until they give me another $10,000 to play it and so I really like

the performance-based approach rather than the more like brand marketing where it's here's money we don't know what's going to happen and you're never going to play until you get another big check

from us what a business model that was but that's just it it's now very much about performance and you made the point yourself and that's sort of like on our checklist for me the the number three is

okay yeah it is about Revenue sharing that is the incentive to get the creators on board but how do you keep the money the dynamic going keeping

people Hest St you think about it Justin yeah I think it's uh it's about a close partnership between the game and their program so it's the game really understanding what is the live service

and the live part of it what is the new content that's coming out let's make sure the players are excited about this that they're they're finding a lot of fun and value in it but that the creators also understand what's coming

up so for example you know a game is launching season 4 and they want to make sure that players come back and are excited about the new season and the best way to do that is to communicate

with creators and get them excited about it and so that might be enhancing the revenue share for all the new battle pass in season 4 or some of the new content that's created saying hey for 48

hours every Creator gets an additional 10% Revenue share for driving anything uh for driving sales around this new content in the game again when it's fully performance-based it does a really

good natural job of aligning aligning the game authentically with the creators because a Creator won't be successful if they don't care about the game and if Their audience

doesn't care about the game if the only way they can make money is when their audience actually buys stuff using their creator code well then they have to make sure they actually care about and are excited about it and interested in that

new comp they're invested I have I have a little followup on that if I may um Peggy which is when it comes to influencer marketing it was still very much based in the in the sort of the

marketing team it was external facing but for this it sounds like there's so much more internally for the the publisher to be doing you know so it ties in the design development team it

ties in Community Management it's a far more holistic approach um and just to kind of extend that even a little bit further J can the Creator actually play

a role in updates design and feedback through into the the the developer the design team um as part of this kind of ongoing process yeah it's really really

great Point yes uh this sort of holistic creative program is very much cross functional um it is you know it sits certainly within the marketing team because they care about working with

creators and spreading the word about the game but also you know the GM or EP or head of Studio because this touches Revenue directly we see a lot of our game publisher Partners they set up

Creator discords where there's a direct line of communication between the creators and the developers where they set up you know early early uh previews of patches so that creators can make

content a few days or a few weeks ahead of time and really talk about what's going on and by building this sort of creative program not only is it a revenue driver on a growth initiative but it also helps to bring the creators

on board because you can separate them into into those different tiers and you can say hey the more successful you are within our game the closer relationship you're going to have with the developers and the developers then can have a

closer understanding of really those pillars of their Community what are the things they care about what are the things they look forward to what are the things they're worried about and it can be sort of that harmonious relationship

between the game and its Community by working with those creators I'm Bas in Scotland just outside Edinburgh we have a local studio um that has just brought

in one of the long-term cre s to be a key designer on their next title um so you know it it really kind of shows the opportunities there on both sides of

Defense if you're willing to kind of get that involvement get that engagement um working and build in those connections so that's astonishing um I know a lot of

Studios out there who are going what now we're letting somebody outside the company design parts of the game but to me it makes perfect sense yeah I I do love that pipeline of Creator into

joining the game team whether that's on the marketing side or the design side I think we're going to see that more and more often in the future so staying with our our checklist is there a rule of

thumb about how to do this I mean we've talked about all the different ways that you can practically approach this part of the Creator relationship you know

there was rire incentives now it's about activations promotions game updates new new content what's your rule of thumb there to our Studios again listening in

um what is their checklist if you're going to be building this yourself as a studio and publisher you know I do want to let you know like there is a meaningful amount of investment that will need to go into this both from a

Time perspective but also a direct resource perspective you're going to have to staff up on the marketing side and certainly on the finance side also even on the technical piece like

building out Dash ws and doing some of that more like web development side might be um something different for your your game engineers and so just be prepared for the meaningful investment

if you want to build this first party I think one of the best examples I've ever seen for gaming creative programs is supercell and they did it first party but they have they have spent years of

building it to be like you know the absolute best of the best when it comes out there um if this is something you're excited about and maybe you don't have those resources or you want to trial it or dip your toone in the water there's

platforms like Nexus that can help with that piece um but let's say you've made that decision you've built you've committed that investment how do you know how do you think about how to make this successful that's what I call the

structure of the program which is how do you communicate with creators of announcing that this program exists how do you figure out which are the creators that are going to be able to join are you going to have a open program where

any Creator can come in get a code and and start participating an application based program where creators would apply and you would approve or reject them or an Invitational only closed program you

say hey we're going to start with just these 10 people and just invite them in so you have to figure out that structure you know you asked about some of the rules of thumb I think it depends on

where your game is um if the your game is more mature um I would think more of an open or application based program if your game is new or just launching I would think more of that closed program where you can really test things and

figure things out with a really small group of of folks that you can build with really closely um and then you have to think about the communication and the management part and so basically let's

say you're a game and you have new content coming out you want your creators to have access to that content so they can show it off that might be new skins or new battle pass or whatever it might be and doing that manually is

GNA be a whole process you're gonna have someone on your team sending hundreds of people individual keys on Discord or whatever it might be and that'll be really challenging but so you need all of them to sign in they're going to have

to send out individual contracts to each one of them and then messaging you're going to have to send out individual messages or maybe you can do it through you know through a server or through newsletter where you you send it out to all the creators but still you're going

to have to be able to handle that communication and management directly and so if you're doing it on your own I would recommend investing in building out some tools in order to do that um which you might have to like there's not

really any great off-the-shelf things that just do that piece um so you're going to have to think about that part of the management and communication and then there's all of the actual like

Creator support part of well how do you talk to the creators that run into challenges where they want to know how do I go from tier two to tier three or hey you rejected me when can I next

apply or whatever and so you're gonna have to have that team handling support um again that's where I might think of partnering with a third party um or

really really committing to investing those resources internally if you're going to do it all yourself um because there's a lot of pieces that have to do it that aren't even on like the building and the technical side or even on the

financial side just in management and Communications that's a lot of like people time um that you're going to have to devote to this it is worth it to do so it is just a really meaningful investment if you're going to do it all

yourself that makes a huge amount of sense and again I have a a little added bonus question if I if I may um Justin which is when as we discussed earlier you you sometimes have creators working

in countries and regions all over the world how big a challenge is the localization you know the the the translation and just dealing with the different communities and the different

sort of regions assuming you have a game which has gone Global is is is that an additional Challenge and is that something that Nexus can help with yeah that's an enormous challenge

um especially when you think of like the the depth of the communication that you're having with the creators and like the unique like you're talking about things that maybe don't yet exist in the game and you have to communicate it in a

way that they can understand both in their language but also in their time zone um and so you know when you think about working with creators across time zones you're going to have to staff up people across those time zones that

understand those languages and those cultures and that can be really challenging that is a thing that Nexus helps with um but it is also a meaningful investment um a lot of games

do have you know even if they're Global their creators are centralized into one language one area and so that can be helpful but if you do have a truly

Global Creator audience it can be a big lift um and a really a thing that you're going to want to be thinking about and focusing on and you know have country managers or region managers and and that

can be challenging and what I might recommend is is starting with one Focus um because that's such a a big investment maybe you start with just english- speaking creators or you know

just creators in Southeast Asia or wherever you have some dominant group of folks a lot of what we recommend with our partners especially because you know Nexus is built to be TurnKey in a way

that you can turn it on but also turn it off at any point is start with trials start with more closed programs where you see hey we're just going to start with these 30 folks or just with the this language or whatever it might be

and let's run it for 60 days or 90 days and then see what happens is this truly having as meaningful and as positive of an impact on player Behavior as we hoped this system would and then you can grow

it over time rather than starting out fully Global and fully open that can be really a challenging place to start so I I guess my followup to that um Justin is

in terms are there any games you know you mentioned games which are maybe offline ad driven that are not particularly uh appropriate for a a Creator program but are there any

particular like genres or anything that you wouldn't expect that that just don't really catch fire with with creators out there or is there a an infinite number

of niches single player titles so RPGs um even if they are live service games um so they do have you know deep monetization and there's new content added to them they tend to perform a

little bit worse um than multiplayer games you know I think the reason for that is around collaboration so it's it's great in multiplayer games where creators can collaborate with other creators or compete with other creators

and that can be more challenging when there is no multiplayer PVP aspect um we've seen some of those still be successful but that is you know one of the genres that might be a little bit

more challenging to have a really excellent Creator program on the flip side one of the places that I've been especially you know here with Pocket Gamer that I've been really impressed with is mobile um you know Mobile isn't

the platform you think of when you think content creator that's more PC and console you think of you know the League of Legends of the worlds and the Minecrafts of the world and things like that but I've been so impressed with the

impact that creative programs can have on mobile games and it's it's really a difference of scale so like yes you know a PC or console Creator might have

millions of subscribers every view gets hundreds of thousands or millions of views and in Mobile maybe they'll only have a few thousand subscribers um and they'll have each video will get in the

hundreds of views get two to three hundred views not two to 300,000 but those creators will still be so impactful we've seen creators of that size still drive tens of thousands of dollars a month through their Creator

code and so I've been really impressed with how even if mobile games have less creators that are a little bit smaller the impact that creative programs can have on their game is still substantial I didn't think about that I mean you

think about mobile as having a you know it's it's a media it's a platform but you don't think about the the impact being so different that actually you

know small impact has large repercussions or large large revenues that's surprising yeah and on the platform side it is interesting um to

think about where Creator platforms are better fits for different games so for example for mobile YouTube is absolutely King and then I would say Tik Tok but for PC and console twitch you know like

the live streaming platforms can be more powerful and some of that is is is actually culturally based So like um you know in the west uh there aren't it's very rare for

a mobile game to be successful on Twitch to be live streamed successfully but that is not the case in the East um whe whether that's on platforms like Facebook or some of these doyu and some other like uh asian-owned streaming

platforms there are a lot of mobile uh streaming live streaming content creators and so I would also think about that as as your your game is thinking about launching a Creator program which platform is going to be the best fit for

you probably if you're a mobile game it's going to be YouTube um and also Tik Tok has started to be you know more successful we'll see what happens to Tik Tok in the US but um but we've seen it

be really powerful for games over the past couple years well this is great cuz we started out we want to have a checklist for like a worldclass Creator program what to do what not to do and

now we have the platforms as well but I wanted to move on from the checklist to some of the challenges right it's great to say this is what you need to do to succeed but then there are common

challenges that Studios face what do you see as being some of them and and how do you at Nexus help address them yeah the biggest challenges are overhead and management this is a usually a totally

new system for games and it's something that has really nothing to do with what the game's been successful with this is not about making the game better it's not about making the in-game player

experience better or making the system for learning the game better this is you know we need to build transaction-based dashboards on the web you know we need

to send money to 300 different individuals and do 1099s at the end of the year and so like that management and overhead is really where I see a lot of Studios stumble if they're if they're

doing it themselves like one particular Horror Story is around reporting so there's a you know there was a game that built a first-party Creator program but didn't have dashboards for their

creators and what that means is the creators don't know how much sales they've driven or when they're next getting paid or how much they're next getting paid and sometimes this was like

this was a larger game and these creators were earning tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and this became a meaningful part of their income but they didn't know if they were going to get paid this month

this quarter or even like in the next six months and the game couldn't report it to them either and so the way that it worked is like the Creator would go to their influencer manager the influencer manager would go to the finance team and

be like please like what were the sales over the last 45 days and then they would have to manually go one by one tell the creators about it and then try to get them paid out every seven months

or three months or whenever they could get the finance team to get the time to be able to do so because they hadn't built you know the the rails to make it automated and really easy um obviously

that's that's that is a thing that Nexus you know handles is you know we have live realtime dashboarding and we do AO we handle all the payouts and it happens monthly and all sorts of stuff but like

that can be really painful obviously for the creators when this becomes a meaningful part of their income which these Creator programs absolutely can and will do um and so and I and I also I

don't blame the developer for that like building those sort of dashboards and adding half a dozen new Finance managers to your Finance team is not their goal with building the Creator program and so

like that it can be really challenging to to be able to solve some of those problems if you don't invest the right resources in the right time way up front as you're building this sort of program out so let me follow up on on what Peggy

was just asking and ask about the actual onboarding process you know you mentioned something as simple as Google forms what's the biggest mistake you see being made out there and and what should

Studios do differently um I'll give you two uh authentication and then again just the overhead and management so authentication is a big piece and it can

be really tough to do if you haven't built the technology that like you um as a Creator applies they actually have to authenticate their their account to their YouTube or twitch or Tik Tok or

whatever Twitter whatever it might be if you haven't built that piece knowing is the creator who they say they are is really challenging because immediately when you announce your creator program everyone's going to try to sign up as

the big creators for that game and you have to make sure you're not giving out the Creator code to someone that isn't actually that person um and then and then on the management and the overhead

piece as the creators apply to join or try to join you know some of them are going to be a fit and you're going to say yes and you're going to want to put them in a specific tier and you're going want to communicate to them in a specific way and give them rewards and

work with them and build that relationship but also some of them you're going to say no and say like hey you're not a fit right now either because you don't have a large enough audience or you don't make enough content for our game or whatever is the

reason and if you're doing this manually whether it's through Google forms or any way that you can do it well how are you going to work with that Creator so that they can reapply to join like maybe you

have some limit they have to have 5,000 YouTube subscribers and they're at 4,250 well in two months maybe they're going to be at 5,000 they're going want to join are you going to let anyone

reapply immediately because then as soon as you reject someone you're going to get hundreds of thousands of people immediately reapplying how are you going to Institute a cool down period without

Building Technology around that and then even once they join how are you going to communicate to them and give them the things that they need in a way that doesn't take a dozens of people's time

doing manually so for example a lot of our creator programs they want to give creators you know currency in the game every single month but that can be really challenging because let's say it's different amounts of currency based

on what tier they're in and then you have dozens or hundreds of individual people and you're doing this manually where you're just sending like that's going to be maybe even a couple people's full-time jobs just sending out those

rewards because as soon as they get to the last person it's the end of the month and they got to start overall again um and so those are some of the challenges to onboarding that is nuts that's so we've got the the finance team who are doing payroll and we've got the

virtual Finance team who are doing virtual payroll creators yeah this just you you have opened a couple of eyes I think this

afternoon this is uh yeah mindblowing stuff it is it is totally solvable um it is totally solvable through technology and any you know any publisher could

build this themselves again it'll it'll probably take 18 months at the fastest and a full new team to do it but like you could build that you could solve this through technology this is also like the point of Nexus is we think

these Creator programs are really powerful every live service game in the world should have one but they shouldn't have to build and manage it themselves because it's a headache to do so um but

these are like solvable problems um just by building a couple different systems that all can communicate with each other in the right way so Justin this has been absolutely fascinating and we're

learning a huge amount as I'm sure our listeners are as well but when we were talking beforehand you said one of the big trends and opportunities for 2025 and Beyond is is DTC direct consu to

Consumer um what trends or Innovations do you see shaping the future of creator programs across the next year um so more Studios can take advantage of this and

and ride that whole DTC wave yeah I think the biggest one so DDC or or web shops is hugely powerful for for Publishers obviously especially mobile Publishers and one of the biggest

challenges is Discovery how do you actually move your players especially your VIPs from in-game to the web to the web shop and a lot of the challenges there around the steering roles where

the the studio can't tell the player directly in game hey don't buy here go buy on my web shop you'll get a better deal but you know who can is creators YouTubers and streamers can literally

say hey I have a Creator code over on the web shop please use my code and you'll get a better deal it's going to be a great experience um and so we found Creator programs to be really helpful

for D Toc and for D Toc to be a Tailwind for the idea of spreading creative programs to more games um it's one of the big drivers of being able to move those VIPs from ingame over to the web

shop Justin we're going to have to bring things to Hal unfortunately uh we would love to carry on talking to you but sadly it's round about that time but before we let you go we have two questions we ask all of our guests that

brings it right back into the world of games and what's in your pocket and on your desktop so what game are you playing right now what you obsessing about right now what you can potentially creating your own content for right now

and then number two favorite game of all typ okay I'm giving you two for both which is maybe not fair but I'll go fast um right now uh batro which probably

everyone is saying but batro is my downtime game or my you know pling game um Marvel Rivals I've been playing a bunch of which just recently came out also Marvel Rivals is a perfect fit for

a Creator program so Net's if you're out there let me know um and favorite game of all time uh gotta be World of Warcraft it's where I really got started as a content creator as a competitive

gamer was a big part of how I got into this career of of being in the games industry and then also um dear to my heart uh maybe this is like also aging me a little bit is conquer bad Fay

specifically multiplayer on the N64 that's maybe one of my maybe my favorite game of all time I can't argue with you I can't argue one of my first my first games as a developer was um buddy

Harvest and space station Silicon Valley on the N64 so I I remember the tear and the Tantrums trying to get that thing to work but beautiful fantastic answers

Justin thanks again it has been a revelation It's been a eye opener speaking to you this afternoon a lot for our um audience our listeners to take away so hopefully we can invite you back

on towards the end of this year or maybe into next and find out more about just how this incredible area is continued to evolve yes the DAT to see we'll have you back to talk more about that because I

think web shops that's where it's at Great checklist to keep us going until then Justin and and really yeah we have it in plain language so that Studios can

start working in this direction and understand yeah this is the work that is ahead of them in 2025 thank you I appreciate the

time this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone

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the pocketgamer.biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future until then I'm Brian Bago I'm pegan saltz and that's a wrap until next

week a