David (00:04)
Welcome to Growth Stage by FastSpring, where we discuss how digital product companies can increase the value of their businesses. I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community as part of my role here 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 talking about optimizing ecommerce for emerging markets, not the core markets in North America, Europe, and Asia, but emerging ones with their own unique challenges. And joining us for this conversation are two folks that know a lot about this. I’d like to welcome both from FastSpring, Sudipto Manna. Sudipto, welcome to Growth Stage. Welcome back to Growth Stage.

Sudipto (00:47)
Thanks for having me, DV.

David (00:49)
And Lauren Steyn. Lauren, welcome. Have you been on Growth Stage before, Lauren? I don’t recall.

Lauren (00:56)
No,

I have not. This is my first time. Thank you for having me.

David (00:59)
Excellent, excellent. We’re so excited to have both of you here. We’re going to double click and learn more about what your advice is for tackling e-commerce in emerging markets. And for those watching and listening for a little more context, Sudipto and Lauren are going to share their thoughts about how to approach payments in e-commerce in emerging markets and some of the requirements needed to get access to things like local payment methods and currencies.

It’s more than just a desire. There’s actually some steps to go through. And these folks are going to talk a little bit about that and particularly give us some more information on particulars in certain emerging markets. So I’m going to ask you both the same question I ask every guest here on Growth Stage. Lauren, maybe I’ll start with you. What was the first thing you bought online?

Lauren (01:51)
Wow, that is a great question and I genuinely struggled to remember it for so long ago, but I suspect it would have been something like a movie ticket. Buying that through online instead of going to the cinema and buying it from there. I believe that must have been my first online buying experience.

David (02:10)
Ooh, that’s a good one. Well, what about you, Sudipto? What was the first thing you think you bought online?

Sudipto (02:15)
Yeah, that’s like an old timer. So I don’t recall the first purchase that I ever made online, but I recall a memorable purchase that I did back in 2011. And I would like to piggyback on that side because that brings closer to what we are building here and what we are doing. So my first purchase was airline tickets for my entire family. So that was the first time we as a family traveled from Mumbai to Kolkata. And that was the pivotal moment where

things airline tickets were becoming more and more accessible to common people like us. So that was the first purchase online purchase that I did that I got to recall.

David (02:54)
So what was the occasion of traveling from Mumbai? Where did you travel to?

Sudipto (02:59)
We traveled to Kolkata. It was my cousin’s wedding. And that was the first time we, the entire family, traveled together. In India, back in India, we traveled during our holidays. So that was the first time we as a whole family traveled. Usually I travel alone, but that was the first time we as a whole family traveled. It was a pleasant experience for all of us.

David (03:21)
Cool and it’s kind of interesting that both of you bought tickets you think for the first time you bought something online. I’m trying to remember how you bought airline tickets before online. That’s actually maybe a topic for another another episode. All right. Well, let’s let’s take a little deeper here. You know, we’re talking about e-commerce and payments and emerging markets. And so I just want to kind of get an understanding for both of your backgrounds. I’ll start with you again, Lauren. Could you tell me about your role at FastSpring

And what FastSpring does, I mean, I people listen to the podcast, just like, what does FastSpring do and what do you do here?

Lauren (03:55)
Absolutely. really, FastSpring is a global commerce platform and it’s designed specifically for companies selling online goods across a range of industries. One of the things that makes FastSpring unique is that we act as a merchant of record, which basically means that we handle a lot of the complexity of selling globally, know, collecting payments, taking in taxes, know, calculating the taxes, VAT and GST, doing currency conversion.

making sure that you are compliant, doing fraud management. So really all of that complexity around selling online, we take on that responsibility so that our customers, can just focus on selling the goods that they want and making that product the best that it possibly can be. And really it flows through a FastSpring checkout experience. So we’ve got a range of checkout experiences. So our customers will…

plug in our, the FastSpring checkout into their website or app and ⁓ FastSpring takes care of the rest. So that is the FastSpring side of it. So my role at FastSpring ⁓ is really that checkout experience itself. I am a product manager working on UI UX. So I work on a different number of levels, but really on the UI, making sure that that user interface is very intuitive, but also ⁓ focusing on the

the developer experience and those developer facing components that companies use to integrate with the FastSpring checkout. So ⁓ my job really is about how all these complex systems show up on that buyer journey, that end customer journey that coming through that checkout. So if I, if I would say, you know, my focus is really around how the purchase experience feels to the buyer, making sure that the checkout is intuitive, localized and as frictionless as possible.

So the goal is that when somebody decides to buy, nothing about that interface slows them down or makes them lose confidence in any way so that they can just seamlessly go through that checkout experience.

David (06:03)
Okay, so you’re coming to this conversation through this kind lens of expertise around UI, UX, localization and developer experience. And I think when a lot of people think about localizing for any market, let alone emerging markets, that’s what they tend to focus on a lot are things like language translations and like use this color in this country because of these reasons, like those types of things.

There’s of course a lot more to it and you kind of alluded to that a little bit when you were talking about what FastSpring does as a merchant or record. Basically taking on all of that complexity and compliance like do I need a local entity? What do I need to get access to a local currency? And FastSpring’s customers are basically offloading all that to FastSpring. So we’re going to talk about that today, like what you need in order to get access and the strategies you need to deploy.

But kind of as you pointed out with that merchant of record model that FastSpring customers kind of inherit a lot of those things so they don’t necessarily have to jump through some of the hoops we’re going to talk about today. But we are going to talk about what’s necessary in order to achieve that. But you’re coming to it from like the UI UX and developer experience perspectives that sound about right, Lauren.

Lauren (07:12)
Absolutely, exactly.

David (07:14)
Excellent. Now, Sudipto we already heard what FastSpring does. I’m not going to ask you that part, but what do you do here? What expertise are you bringing to this conversation?

Sudipto (07:22)
Yeah, I’m a Senior Product Manager here for FastSpring and work in the high skilled payment infrastructure with the focus on converting transaction friction into revenue growth. And most recently, I’ve been working with our team to launch certain payment methods which help our customers acquire more subscription, recording, bidding space, optimize checkout flows, have shown incremental growth and we have grown 30 % year over year. So.

I tried to bridge the gap between complex local global compliance and seamless user experience, ensuring that invisible payments remain both secure and high converting. When a customer comes in, they should not feel like they are transacting in an alien software or alien land. They should feel more local. They should feel more ease to purchase and feel secure to pass on their payment information to us.

I’m looking to bring my expertise into modular payment stacks and retention focused FinTech for a team to scale and grow for the next 100 billion customers. That’s my goal for this whole approach.

David (08:28)
Excellent. You know, it’s funny when I joined FastSpring a little over three years ago, you were one of the first people I spoke with who gave me the lay of the land about how the company and platform worked and really much deeper understanding of payments and when I kind of came into the company. And so I’m really excited to have you here today to be one of the folks I’m asking questions around strategies for emerging markets. Now, we’ve talked about emerging markets a few times, obviously, this is like the context of the podcast.

But like what does that mean? Like Lauren, what does emerging markets mean to you?

Lauren (09:03)
Right. Well, I think when people talk about emerging markets in the context of digital commerce, they usually mean regions where online purchasing is growing rapidly, but maybe the payment ecosystem is still evolving. It’s becoming solidifying. In some regions, you’ve got it in really, really very stable place. But in these evolving markets, you’ve got local competitors continuously

creating new payment methods. So it’s a lot happening there. I think that is one of the things that for me, emerging markets mean. ⁓ So in practical terms, that could mean a few things. So maybe credit card penetration might be lower and local pevin.

local payment methods are more dominant. Yes, so I think from a product perspective, emerging markets aren’t just about geography, they’re about payment behavior. To give you an example, if you only support international cards, you may unintentionally be excluding a large percentage of those potential buyers in those emerging markets. And I think this is one of the real challenges that global merchants face when they are trying to go after those emerging markets.

David (10:18)
It is an interesting point that this idea of emerging markets is relative. And what we’re talking about is the ability, capability, and I guess the frequency of people buying online and how they do that and how you as a company are going after these customers and what you’re offering to them and considerations, like you said, around credit card penetration, local payment methods.

and other aspects of that commerce journey and payments journey that would be specific to that market, which is going to be different maybe than your core markets if you’re focusing on say North America, Europe, and certain parts of Asia. So I’m just curious, like Sudipto, and I’m particularly curious from your perspective, why is it important to localize commerce for emerging markets? Like if I’m trying to get into India or where you’re from or Brazil or another place that might not be one of my like…

primary markets I’ve already kind of been focusing on.

Sudipto (11:16)
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I can certainly put some color on both India and Brazil, both of the regions which where I have exclusively worked on. So both Brazil and India have a huge young population. So if you look at the

top markets or top growing population, both India and Brazil have a plethora of young population. A younger digitally savvy population, Gen Z and millennials seek convenience and personalization without the long term liabilities of ownership. So that’s where we see a tremendous growth or influx of customer base coming in from. Now this market existed to be sure, like they existed well before the pandemic. What happened?

post pandemic, see a ⁓ shift in the bio-to-purchase phenomena. Both these countries have built a local regulatory system which offers this regional payment method, which in terms like are well beyond the traditional payment rates like cards or pay balance and things. So when we look at Brazil and India, we are looking at a huge population which relies on a strategic payment method which is backed often by the government.

So those are the regions why we, FastSpring try to explore into those regions and try to offer a regional aspect to our checkout flow. Be sure this customer existed, they were not purchasing anything digitally. Take an example, I, as a consumer, when I purchased my first ticket, it was back in then. Prior to that, I still used to go to the airline counter and buy my tickets using cash. So things are changing.

the landscape is changing. There’s a rapid user growth and the customers are looking for a trusted partner. In this case, the partners are the government backed payment methods like UPI, like PIX which are very close to customers and customers can actually use those payment method and have a solid trust in the system. So that’s where when you talk about merging markets, people are looking for trust.

People are looking for growth. People are looking for reliability. And those regional payment methods backed by the government source actually do those things for the customers.

David (13:35)
So UPI is a government backed payment method in India. Is that correct? And then PIX is like the Brazil version of that. Is that sound fair?

Sudipto (13:40)
Yes, that’s absolutely correct.

Yeah, yeah.

And I’m glad you brought those things up and I’m responsible for launching those two payment methods ahead of FastSpring And I can safely say that those two payment methods have a tremendous impact in our customer base and how we see customer transactions act, be it the approval rate, be it conversion, be it new user acquisition. All those things have shown a huge shift in our traditional product launches. And I’m

I’m excited about the future and growth of this payment methods.

David (14:19)
You know, it’s funny when FastSpring first launched PIX, I was on a ski trip, I can think it was two years ago, around this time around spring break. And I got on the lift with someone from Brazil and I was like, Hey, we’re launching PIX in Brazil. And he’s like, yeah, you better because like everyone in Brazil uses PIX and not everyone necessarily has a credit card. And like that really hit home to me because to me that’s like maybe one of the reasons it’s so important.

It’s because my perspective as an American who’s lived here my whole life is everybody’s got credit cards, right? Some form or another or debit card. And the reality is that’s actually not true in every country and places like India and Brazil. The majority of people, the overwhelming majority of people are using these government backed digital payment methods, I guess, for lower fees and convenience and all kinds of reasons, but it’s just different than what I experience here in the US. Is that fair?

Sudipto (15:18)
Yeah, that’s absolutely fair. And I think there’s this psychological shift also. People are more keen on using, which is homegrown. When I look at, and give you an example, like when I go back to India, there’s this whole nationalism and pride going on. Hey, I want to use PIX or I want to use UPI. So that’s the narrative that is going around and making people comfortable in using certain payment methods, which are region, which are backed. And I think…

If I look at the amount of UPI is by far the most important payment method back in India. If you are offering anything in India, it has to be offered or you have to offer UPI. You cannot do business without offering UPI back in India. That’s the reality. And same goes with PIX also. You cannot, the person whom you met on the ski, he is definitely giving it a picture of how things are evolving and we…

sitting in the United States, we just think like, hey, why don’t the customer have access to credit card? Because it’s not the norm out there. Doesn’t mean that everybody should have a credit card. It’s totally fair for other people to have their preferred payment method. PIX and UPI seems to be one. And when we scale up and go to other emerging markets, that’s the case. That’s the scenario. That’s the lay of the land that we’re dealing with.

David (16:43)
Thanks a lot of sense and you know, I actually have done go to markets in India without picks and I would imagine they would have done a lot better had we included that. I don’t know if they were available at that time. That’s very like five years ago or so, but that seems like it’s an important part of it. So Lauren, I want to go back to you though for a minute and talk about like what are the elements that you need to localize for a specific country or region within your commerce engine? We talked about.

local payment methods, but what else do we need to worry about when we think about localizing for emerging markets?

Lauren (17:17)
Yes, absolutely. And you even mentioned, you know, the obvious one earlier, the language, you know, that is at the most basic. want to support the languages that those local users will be using the currency as well. Seeing a language that you understand and the currency that you are used to using just builds that trust. Really the elements should always follow the principle of, want to create trust and confidence in this checkout experience. You know, these layers, there are several layers. we’ve

got the language, the currency, and people want to see prices and instructions in a format that they immediately understand. Then there are slightly more subtle details. Once again, we’ve already gone through the payment methods displayed in that checkout. What they should really reflect, the payment methods that those people in that market are actually using. And even beyond that, show those logos of those payment methods very clearly so that they’re familiar logos. So it’s all these little…

visual trust signals that you need to build up, you know, and reduce that hesitation. And then some of the more subtle ones are the form design. When we come in from a more Western perspective, we have forms built in a very specific format, first name, last name first, and then billing address and so on and so forth. Not all markets follow that form design. So address formats, phone number fields, even name ordering differ across countries. You really should do your

your research on those local markets that you’re going after to make sure that your forms are flowing in a way that is natural to that market that you’re going after.

David (18:54)
Yeah, I know that’s such a great tip and I think that scenario people don’t think about is the form format. think a lot of people will pick up on like, you know, especially if you’re coming from like a US perspective, like the date format is going to be different than the rest of the world for whatever reason. And I really liked your tip around thinking about the default payment methods you’re showing. Shoppers and users when they’re kind of interacting with your checkouts and like if you have these local payment methods, making sure they’re visible and not like.

hidden down in some deep dark menu where it’s like hard to find. I think that’s another like less than intuitive thing that people think about with localization.

Lauren (19:33)
nailed

it 100%. I would say the last thing that people sometimes underestimate is and that is critical, absolutely critical, is how you present taxes and then the totals. They are different across different regions. In some regions, buyers expect the tax to be included in the price, while in others they expect them to appear separately. You’ve really got to cater to that. So giving full transparency

within the expectations of that market of the pricing. It’s going to build trust. If they say that they’re going to buy something and then at the last second they see a different price, it immediately breaks that trust. So really in a nutshell, know, localization is really about making sure that when someone opens that checkout in that market, it looks and behaves like something that is built for them, not something that is a bit jarring and imported from somewhere else.

David (20:28)
You’re giving me memories of travels to places where the tax was included in the price and how great that felt to not have to worry about the surprise extra total at the end. When it comes to localizing, I often talk about a crawl walk run and I like to think of like commerce as like the crawl even where like you can offer local payment methods. You can offer ⁓ you know, localized checkouts that are easy for local populations to use.

even before you localize your website by language or you localize your support by language, do you think that’s fair to think about it in that sequence where like localizing commerce could actually be like the first step to breaking into a new region?

Lauren (21:12)
I think you could definitely work from that way and then backwards. As a matter of fact, it’s probably simpler to do it that way.

David (21:20)
Yeah, that’s kind of the point I make. I mean, I’ve used this in the past when expanding globally at other companies is like localizing commerce first, then language, then platform and support, which are like the much more complicated pieces, I feel. But it’s good to hear your perspective on that.

Lauren (21:37)
I like that. Sorry to interrupt. just want to say I really like that and it’s flowing backwards. if you’re starting from that endpoint and flowing backwards, you also, and this is kind of another one of those UI UX tips is build for consistency. So start at the end point and then you can create the consistency into the platform at the back.

David (21:57)
Yeah, love that. All right, Sudipto, so I’m going to kind of come back to you. What are the unique challenges with getting access to local payment methods and currencies? Like we talked about how there’s these government backed methods like PIX and UPI. But what do I need to get access to that? Do I get like a bank account or like open a business? What do I have to do?

Sudipto (22:22)
Yeah, that’s a great question. you think of expanding your business globally, then you are met with multiple challenges. Getting access to a payment method in a developing country requires you to deal with multiple different financial and government institutions. It’s not one piece. You have to deal with financial regulators, the fintechs, the government authorities, and so on and so forth. And each and every one of them have their own model to complex rules and regulation. So when we think about opening a shop,

Now you’re dealing with, hey, which department do I need to go to seek for a license? Which department should I go to seek for the clearance on my shops? So same thing happens when you try to expand into a global market. You need to think about, hey, if I want to offer this payment by the way, that is the bread and butter for me to expand and grow in that market. What are the different things? Things can be like setup, onboarding. Are you doing the KYC and KYB for each NMD buyer?

David (23:18)
What does this mean? I’m sorry.

Sudipto (23:20)
Yeah, KYC would be know your customer, know your buyers. So are you doing the know your buyer, know your customers for each and every financial product that you’re trying to sell. So that will be the first piece. Every time we speak with a partner or an entity back in a developing country, that’s the first question that they are asking us. Hey, are you doing your KYB KYC or are you or do you have a local bank account where we can fund the settlements? Do you have all the rights and regulation to deal with it?

here at Foshpring, we take front load all these aspects for our customers and make sure that our sellers or our customers don’t have to go through all this regulatory process, don’t have to go through all this setup process to ensure that the FedEx or the partners with whom they are working globally, let’s say in India or in Brazil, they have to deal with it. It’s a complex product. If I may, I might give you some examples like

bigger Western companies, they have to close down their business back in India because they could not meet the specific requirements. So what we are trying to do is we are trying to tiptoe and work with the partners and institution to make sure that we follow all those rules and regulation and have all the rights instrument in place to ensure we acquire and we can process the payment for our customers. So if you go alone,

there might be lot of challenges on the way, but if you come with offspring, it will be a smooth sailing path forward for you. Sorry, I it, but that’s the reality.

David (24:53)
Yeah. And you’re on a fast-spring podcast. I don’t apologize too much for selling the benefits of fast-spring here, but it’s so like, if I’m doing it on my own though, right? I can build my own and manage my own payment orchestration layer. can run through my payment service providers and do credit card processing. can figure out the bank account legal requirements of local payment methods and, configure that into my orchestration layer and manage and maintain all of that on my own.

And I can also offload it or outsource it to providers like FastBringing and that reduces that complexity. But getting access to that local payment method comes with some extra hoops to jump through that you might not be familiar with. You’re going to have to get familiar with that country that you’re trying to break into. And then you’re going to have to bring all of that and figure out how to manage it if you are doing it yourself. But these are some of the requirements that you have to jump through some of the hoops you have to jump through to make that happen.

I think that’s helpful for people to understand like how that works in the grand scheme of things, even if they choose to offload or outsource to a provider like fast bring. So I really appreciate you kind of walking us through that. Lauren, I’m just curious from your perspective. What does bad look like when I do business in emerging markets like you talked about like what good looks like from like the UI, you actually inflation, all this stuff. What is bad?

Lauren (26:16)
really, it’s the same concept just in the reverse, right? It usually looks like the checkout that works technically works. It does everything that it’s supposed to, but it clearly wasn’t designed for that local user in mind. And we’ve gone through a number of examples where they may not support the currency or the language or the payment method. And I think in particular, the most…

The worst thing you could do is not support the main payment method because in some markets that instantly excludes a large portion of the potential buyers. So, ⁓ and I think that another, another one is what, what issue is interface friction. Things that slow the checkout pages down. So it might be confusing form fields or a heavy checkout with number of steps to go through. know, Siddipto alluded to this earlier where in some of these emerging markets,

You’ve got users mostly on their phones and they need a light touch and quick checkout that can, you know, just one, two, three clicks and they’re done. So, you know, especially in regions where the connectivity is not necessarily very good. So you want to, ⁓ you know, really reduce that friction as much as possible. Because any friction friction that you add to a checkout, any additional input fields that are not necessary, any clutter. That’s bad. You want to just get that, ⁓ buyer with that.

end customer focused on checking out as easily and as quickly as possible.

David (27:46)
Yeah, that’s really interesting that you bring up page load time in emerging markets. There is a gentleman I got to know who created one of the famous web page test tools out there. And he had created it at a time back in the AOL days when AOL engineers were testing page load times, but they were testing it from like inside the data center and they were like every web page loads great. And he was like, no, you got to test at the other end of a dial up line at that time.

And I know that we’ve gone through phases of that here at FastSpring where like we’ve optimized based on page load times in specific regions. And that’s actually one of our claims to fame is how well we do at page, flip my notebook up there, how well we do at page load times in these emerging markets. And I think that’s a thing a lot of people miss when they’re thinking about getting into PIX or India, like maybe they’re using a CDN, a content distribution network or.

Maybe they have localized hosting or something, but they haven’t really paid attention to their load time in that market. Is that something you’ve seen a lot of? You know, you brought it up there, Lauren, or don’t know, Sudipto, do if you have any thoughts on that on the infrastructure side, but is that a common miss that people do when they start focusing on emerging markets is like testing their speed in that market.

Lauren (29:03)
It’s definitely a common miss. you know, this is partly why we at FastSpring spent a lot of time and energy getting much more accurate measurements and then from there optimizing for those local markets. And we really did see the load times differ quite substantially across those emerging markets. And really, when you’re talking about load times, the

The golden number is almost two seconds. It’s not necessarily achievable, but that is you don’t really want to go much over two seconds. You just want that, you know, that seamless experience. As soon as it goes longer than two seconds, people start wondering, what’s going on here? And that’s where the conversion starts dropping. But it’s definitely something that you need to put some thought into how you can measure the load times in different markets. And you have to put a lot of energy and time into it. So I think that is a lot of companies then.

maybe to make shortcuts or maybe they don’t even realize they need to do that. So ⁓ we can definitely help on that side.

David (30:02)
Yeah, that makes sense. The other thing I’ve seen in the past is people say things like, oh, well, you know, in India, most people don’t have computers, so you need to optimize for mobile. And what I’ve also seen is people don’t necessarily pay attention to their own traffic in that emerging market. They take that little nugget of truth they learned and apply it. But then they sell like downloadable software for PCs. And it’s like, well, yeah, but.

all your customers or most of your customers are probably visiting from a PC. So like looking at your own analytics and determining like really what devices should I be doubling down on. There’s another myth I’ve seen people do when they take these little factoids about a country and then, you know, try to apply that to reality. All right, Sudipto, I’m going to ask you next, because I know this is like something you’ve been working on, if offspring launched UPI subscriptions recently.

Tell me about that and what special considerations one might have with subscriptions in emerging markets. Is there a special set of considerations for subscriptions when attacking emerging markets?

Sudipto (31:04)
Yeah, David, thanks for asking. Yes, we launched UPI AutoPay in India recently and we see a strong adoption there. And let’s take a step back and tell you more about subscription and how things are working in India. There’s a psychological shift in affordability amongst customers. So consumers are increasingly prioritizing access and flexibility over ownership. This is reflected in the own less experience more motto for the millennials and the

urban population. This is close to what I have experienced and I would like to give a small example. Subscription is not new to India. It has always been part of our culture. We have subscriptions for the regular milkman, we call it the doodhwalas, the newspapers and so on so forth. What has changed is we have moved all the subscription away from traditional offline channel to online channel.

and UPI being the most dominant payment method is basically shifting that entire offline traditional cash based payment to digital online payment. And no matter whether you’re selling a physical goods or a digital goods, UPI is bread and butter. If you think of any scenarios where you know that the customer will subscribe to this product and they would like to use this product, you have to offer UPI AutoBee. There is no other way around or else

you will rely on somebody who has already left the market 20 years back, like me, who has left that market, the inner market 15 years back when I moved here. So, U-Pay AutoPay is a great product and the psychological shift is basically driving all the customers in India to adopt to more, like adopting to own less and experience more and more too.

David (32:55)
You say that a consideration though, maybe India is a bad example for this, but are there other markets or even populations within places like India where they’re not ready for subscriptions yet and you should consider like a prepaid model instead? Is that another thing to think about when breaking into an emerging market?

Sudipto (33:14)
Yeah, absolutely. There are tons of market where subscription is not the way to go. So I’ve closely working with customers or partners in China and other South Asian countries. And those markets are again, huge market when we look at the customer base, but they’re not very keen on using the subscription model. They are very keen on, hey, if I want to use the product, I will pay for the product at that point of time. They are more savvy towards make it simpler.

the thing that Lauren brought up. Load it quickly, make the load times faster than possible. Also, they’re like, hey, I know what I want. I don’t want you to auto charge my payment method because I want to have more authority over the payments that I’m trying to approve. If you look at China, if you look at other Southeast Asian countries, they’re more reserved towards the subscription approach. They’re more inclined towards make it secure, make it faster for me.

Let me take a step back and think about my subscription auto recording purchase for a while.

David (34:18)
Yeah, and I know different countries have had different like surges of sentiment for and against subscriptions. I know that’s a challenging dance. Is there also like regulations and laws you got to pay attention to with stuff like that?

Sudipto (34:31)
Yeah,

that’s a great point, Devi. The regulation is also one thing that drives the payment partners like us to ensure that we are not tipping on some regulatory cleaves or some regulatory challenges. There are multiple countries and some of them are coming up in EU also where they are promoting more one-time purchase rather than subscription purchase where they want to give visibility to customers about how much money and who is going to collect from you. So they are more…

the inclining towards. If you do one-time purchase, we know that who is authorizing the payment and when the charge will be. But for recurring purchase, because that happens, it’s an invisible passive income, right? So that happens behind the scenes. So as a customer, I have less more clarity or less more visibility into when the charges will happen. So certain governments are taking this approach of only pursuing the purgatory product. The motto is, if you want it,

you pay for it at that particular point of time. You don’t have to set up and forget it.

David (35:33)
Yeah, that makes sense. Lauren, what about from your perspective? Are there any other considerations folks should think about when thinking about subscriptions in emerging markets?

Lauren (35:43)
think Sadipla raised a really good point about the regulations and the one thing that I keep seeing is that these regulations are evolving continuously, you know, and coming into law and you have to respond, you have to be quick and you have to keep up with that. And it’s absolutely, as Sadipla said, it’s all going towards that transparency of what exactly you are buying with the subscription, what are the charges going to be.

So you really just have to keep your pulse on all of the markets that you’re working within and make sure that you’re up to date on those regulations and adapt accordingly. That is one of the things that we do at FastSpring is we are constantly scanning what are happening in the different regions, in the different countries, and making sure that we update our regulatory, whatever it might be, but elements.

so that we keep our customers safe so that they can just continue to sell through us safely and within compliance.

David (36:47)
So if I have built and maintained my own payment orchestration layer, it’s more than just like seeking some product managers to research how to do it and be compliant initially. I have to then implement all that the right way and to keep up with it and modify it over time.

Lauren (37:06)
Absolutely. Yes, that maintenance is a large piece that is continuously ongoing.

David (37:14)
Yeah, and it’s interesting to think about it from the compliance perspective. And I know people get, you know, kind of freaked out about fines and stuff like that, which obviously is concerning. As a marketer, I think about conversion rates and like if I’m delivering an experience my customers aren’t expecting or aren’t used to, and obviously that’s going to have an impact. And I might walk away from going after emerging market thinking like, geez, it didn’t work. I guess that market’s not for us. But the reality could have just been I was bad at localizing that.

commerce experience, which I think is a really interesting perspective you guys have shared kind of throughout this interview. So now I’m going to ask you both the same question to wrap this up here. Lauren, I’ll stay with you. If people just remembered one thing from what we talked about today, what should that be?

Lauren (38:01)
It’s really what I’ve been saying all the way through the interview, which is don’t assume that you know the market that you’re going after or the customer within the market that you’re going after. What is tried and tested in a well-known market, you cannot shift and lift that to a new market. You have got to do your due diligence. know, a company might do everything right, have a great product, great marketing, global reach. But if the checkout experience feels unfamiliar or confusing, people simply won’t complete that purchase.

David (38:32)
That’s a great one. What about you, Sudipto? If people only remembered one thing today, what would that be? Should that be?

Sudipto (38:38)
Yeah, for me, it will be the psychological shift. It’s happening, which is opening up new opportunities. As long as the products are affordable and meet the customer demands and you make it affordable and easy to pay, you will find customers. When I say affordable and easy to pay, I’m leading towards offering local payment methods. Do not expect or do not wait for someone to tell you that the market is evolving. Look around, do your due diligence, and you will soon see the markets which are opening up and

where you should focus on. At Am, Africa are two big examples where I believe based on working on this whole portfolios, we see there are a lot of opportunities and we truly believe the customers are there. We need to just position ourselves in a way that it becomes easier for ourself and our customers to be enhanced. We are focusing on those regions more.

David (39:35)
Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Shadipta. Thank you for being here today.

Sudipto (39:39)
It’s always pleasure to be with you, DV and Lauren.

David (39:42)
Thank you, Lauren, as well.

Lauren (39:45)
Thank you so much for having me.

David (39:47)
If you’d like to learn more about what Sudipto and Lauren are up to, can visit fastspring.com. Again, thanks for joining us here for Growth Stage. I’ve been your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community here at FastSpring as part of my role. And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage.

Chip Thurston (00:04)
Hello everyone and welcome to the Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring, where we discuss digital product companies and how we can increase the value of a business with FastSpring. I’m your host today, Chip Thurston. I’m the head of gaming at FastSpring and I look forward to bringing you deeper insights on marketing and monetization in the gaming industry. And in that vein, today I am joined by the CEO of Game Data Pros, Bill Grosso.

Bill, how are doing today?

Bill Grosso (00:33)
Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Chip Thurston (00:35)
Yeah, yeah, course. Thrilled you were able to join me. ⁓ A peek behind the curtain for our listeners here. We’ve been a little star-crossed getting this on the calendar. We planned it for January, had to push it back, planned it for February, had to push it back. And here we are at the end of March, but we are talking. It is happening today.

Bill Grosso (00:53)
yeah, and you know in a very real sense, I mean it’s much better this way right? One of things we wanted to talk about was predictions for 2026 and we get to view the predictions not only through what was predicted but also through what has happened and sort of do a little bit of an update there. So you know I think this is actually fortuitous.

Chip Thurston (01:13)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good point. In fact, it would probably be even better if we did your predictions for 2026 in like December and then your predictions will be true. The year will be done. ⁓ No, no, I’m being glib but I do think, yeah, it’s great that we can record a few months into the year because you posted these predictions back in December of 2025 for what would happen in 2026. And now that we’re a few months in, we can really reflect on those and meditate on

and think, okay, what has already come true? Or maybe what would you repackage a little bit now knowing what you know with the beginning of 2026? So I’m excited to have this discussion for you today. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go through your predictions for 2026 one by one. You made seven bold predictions, I would say, what will happen this year. Before we do, I would love for you to tell me a little bit and tell our listeners a little bit about Game Data Pros and what you do there.

Bill Grosso (02:07)
I’m happy to talk about Game Data Pros. What we are is we’re a small consulting company focused on optimization in digital entertainment. grew out of my work at Scientific Revenue, one of the very first dynamic pricing and machine learning startups in digital entertainment. And what we do is we essentially analyze data, propose solutions, help companies understand their performance with respect to industry best practices.

Sometimes we build prototypes, sometimes we don’t. But a lot of it is focused on if you capture the right data and then you look at it, what can you tell about your game performance? And what can you tell about your application performance? So a lot of it is actually focused around user acquisition or your user acquisition campaigns working correctly. A lot of it is focused around pricing and a lot of it is focused around retention.

The practice goes deep into experimentation, deep into multi-armed bandits, and deep into predictive analytics. as part of that, we look hard at industry trends because one of the things we try to do is understand if the industry is moving in this direction, how does that impact the data you should collect? How does that impact how you should structure your predictive analytics and your analysis?

Chip Thurston (03:24)
I love it. And that’s such a valuable service you provide, especially in the predictive side, being able to tell where these trends are going. And I’m especially excited to talk to you today because this will be such a broad topic. So much of what we talk about at FastSpring is the direct to consumer space and we will touch on that. And that’s one of your predictions. And that’s certainly what my expertise lies. But the other six that we talked about of your predictions will touch on all sorts of topics from PlayStation 6 launch to Grand Theft Auto 6 to

and many other topics that we’ll get into. So it’ll be a great far ranging conversation. And the other reason that I’m excited to talk to you today is because you make these bold predictions each year. I was looking through your 2025 ones and was pretty impressed. Can you tell us about the success rate you had on predictions last year?

Bill Grosso (04:10)
Well, I mean, there’s two different notes to thank you, first and foremost, both for reading it and for, you know, saying nice things. The interesting thing about predictions is you get to see which ones were correct, and that’s interesting. And it helps you correct your thinking as well, the ones that were wrong. But then the other part is you get to see the trends you totally missed. And that’s something that I think is perhaps the most interesting thing about predictions in gaming.

Every year, starting roughly November 15th, going through January 15th, about 100 people do this. some people are predicting just for their segment, some people are doing more general predictions. But then you can look at this and say, this is the consensus opinion among the people who are willing to make predictions of where we’re going. And then you can go, OK, ⁓ how did we do?

And I always think that the trends we miss are perhaps the most interesting thing. fast forwarding to this year a little bit, it totally wasn’t on my radar that Phil Spencer was going to retire and that Microsoft was going to be completely rethinking their Xbox strategy. And that’s like, ⁓ you know. And so I think, you know, the metric is like, if you look at the 2025 predictions, I think six of the seven came out correct.

And I did this thing where I, you know, everyone always believes their own predictions. ⁓ So I actually, I went out to Chat GPT and I think it was GPT four at the time. And I said, you know, assume the persona of an industry pundit and assume the persona of an industry CEO and, now grade this. ⁓ And that’s sort of an interesting change in the world as well. You can actually take somebody’s predictions and you can feed them into an LLM.

know, Chat GPT is now at five four and you can say, what is the evidence that they were right? What is the evidence that they were wrong? What is the systematic gaps in their thinking? or what are the systematic gaps in their thinking? And you can use that to not only know whether they have a track record of being correct, but to know where they have a track record of not paying enough attention. And that’s a fascinating thing. You know, candidly, I’ve been doing that.

Like, I made these predictions, this is what I think is gonna happen. But I do monitor my own predictions. Are they coming true? What have I missed? What are the changes? And that’s sort of the really interesting thing as you watch the evolution gaming industry.

Chip Thurston (06:41)
Yeah, yeah. And I especially appreciate the notion of the predictions that you don’t make are where we can really learn because there’s things that maybe we didn’t see coming going into the or we as an industry didn’t see coming. But then when we look back at the year, that can really inform where the next year will go. And I think that’s a really good place to start with where we go with your predictions of and I’ll quote here seven things that are absolutely going to happen in twenty twenty six. Love the title.

and the confidence there. ⁓ So we’re just gonna run through these in the order that you posted them on your site. Of course, gamedatapros.com. You wanna go through the full article. But number seven, we’ll go seven to one. Number seven is the new normal will continue and revenue will be up and headcount will be down. Can you take us through this one?

Bill Grosso (07:28)
Yeah, I mean, so basically this is sort of the safest prediction, right? If you look at the past five years, the peak years of COVID through today, you know, the gaming industry over expanded during COVID. A lot of people were, you know, under house arrest, essentially, record highs in video game playing record highs in a lot of different, you know, entertainment software categories.

And so there was always going to be a contraction from that. ⁓ The rise of AI as well. There’s a lot of efficiencies, horrible term, but there’s a lot of things you can do with fewer people now. And so that contraction exists and has existed for a while. And it’s still showing up. I think GBC this year announced that they had an attendance of about 20,000 people. So that’s Game Developer Conference.

It’s one of the top five conferences in the world and it’s the North American top gaming conference. And 20,000 people sounds like a lot, unless you realize that last year it was 30,000 and pre-COVID it was 70,000. And you look at that and you’re like, okay. And there’s a little bit of an industry blinder around that. The number of people posting on LinkedIn that the conversations were absolutely great and absolutely energizing. it’s like, yeah. ⁓

When you lose the 50,000 people who weren’t true believers, yes, the conversations are gonna be exciting and energized, but still, the fact is if you’re down by one third over a year, that’s not a good signal. And at the same time, know, Epic just recently announced a thousand-person layoff. It’s a 20-person layoff in a company that is one of the poster children of success. Fortnite was a monolith, right? Apparently it’s not doing as well, but…

It’s interesting that GDC is much smaller. There are alternative conferences springing up. like PocketGamer Connects are adding cities where they bring the conference to you as opposed to having you go to the conference. And that’s a great service to the community, but it’s also a sign that maybe budgets aren’t where they used to be and we can’t really afford to send people on a week long trip to San Francisco anymore.

And then just the ongoing layoffs. In North America over the past three years, it’s been a 40 % layoff. And it’s continuing. And it’s continuing on a weekly basis.

Chip Thurston (09:51)
There are a few interesting points you brought up there. One is we are seeing the unfortunate continuation of the layoff trend you mentioned Epic. I also saw the Eidos Montreal was just announced this week in terms of, it seems like each week or every other week we’re seeing these big headline studios announce other contractions, as you said, ⁓ which is unfortunate. I think that

the flip side of the coin there that you mentioned is the events and how we’re seeing those events shape up. And it is really interesting to me that we’re seeing these more targeted events come up. You have the giant events of a GDC and a Gamescom, which still have a place in the market and this really special way of extracting global decision makers and strategic conversations and having those take place at those events. ⁓ But I almost see it as an evolution of the events now that we have more targeted, maybe regional

events, where you have some maybe in Toronto, or you have some in London or the Nordics or in Spain, and we’re seeing them pop up and be a bit more targeted, and it will be a smaller audience, but still extremely relevant to that audience. And maybe that’s a function of ⁓ where we’re heading with the investments that these studios are making, as you said. But I think that will be really healthy evolution from the event standpoint and making those meaningful connections on a regional

of those events too.

Bill Grosso (11:12)
absolutely. ⁓ And then the other part of it is, ⁓ you know, with the rise of generative AI, and there’s all sorts of controversies about, you know, it’s proper role in gaming that I’ll just sort of skip over. ⁓ It’s possible to build a game company that is much smaller and yet successful. I know a number of people

who have said, I don’t need to be within the corporate studio umbrella, and I don’t need to have 200 people in order to produce a good game. The marketing apparatus, like last week or two weeks ago or something like that, Applovin sort of started pushing hard on, we can generate your creative for you and target it. Something that Meta started pushing on last year, right? They can evolve the creative and target it for you.

and you can target more and more smaller and more niche audiences. And so that’s interesting because the advertising portion, the user discovery portion used to be one of the primary functions of publishers. To some extent, the networks are taking that over. And you don’t need as many people building the game, you don’t need as many people doing the artistic part of the game.

creating the creative and the imagery and so on. And what that means is you can have a smaller, lean game company, but now if you’re a 20 person game company leveraging all of these things, do you really send people to San Francisco? No, you’re best served by a conference in your country that brings the things that you’re interested in to you. And so I think it sort of naturally dovetails.

As we go more towards single-A or double-A and indie style game companies, and as the fabric of the game studios changes, the monolithic conferences still have a role, but it’s a much smaller

Chip Thurston (13:04)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. think we’ll see that role continue to play out. And I do want to make sure to advocate for the human value in those disciplines as well. Anything from art to engineering to production, like we do see the capability quickly evolving on the generative AI side. ⁓ But I think the incumbent experience and knowledge and just systems that we developed over time.

still have immense value. And so I think we’re in this interesting inflection point where I think it’ll take a little time for that to balance and settle. And we see what really the optimal path forward is. And really, there’s not a single optimal path forward for a given studio. think in some cases, it will be the hyper AI side of it, where it’s a truly AI-powered studio. But in others, it will be much more human-driven and human-powered. And I think both can be completely viable for good game production.

Bill Grosso (13:58)
Absolutely. AI actually makes people who have a vision much more effective. And then the other thing that it does that is underappreciated, at least in the public discourse, is it enables cheap experimentation. Right? If I want to just try an idea, that used to have a lot more barriers. Doing the creative for a wacky idea used to be hard. Right? And so, you know,

Not only are we enabling people who have specific visions of what they want their game to be, but we’re also enabling larger scale experimentation. The barrier to, well, let’s try it and see what it looks like, is much lower. And so I think we’re actually about to enter a year of massive innovation across gameplay. And that’s going to be powered by expertise.

Chip Thurston (14:46)
Agreed. Agreed. I’m excited for the innovation that will come. like Bill, I knew this would happen. We’re on track for I think like a two hour podcast here. So we got to pick up the pace a little bit. We’ll try to go a little faster through these next predictions so we can not keep people on the hook for too long. Number six, adjacent verticals will continue to staff marketing teams from mobile gaming. So I think this is a really interesting

contrast with your previous point of if there is this continued reduction in gaming, you’re saying that there’s this ⁓ other outlet that those gaming people can go to. Is that right?

Bill Grosso (15:24)
Yeah, absolutely. we saw a lot of fairly high profile moments in 2025 around this. ⁓ know, I personally, ⁓ know, Kimberly Corbett became the CMO at Underdog, which is a fantasy sport. So she moved from Fortis to Underdog. And Jeff Gurian became the VP of growth at PrizePicks. And those are both very clear examples of an adjacent vertical.

fantasy sports, valuing expertise that was primarily generated in the gaming sphere, around marketing, around user discovery, etc. etc. And I think we’re seeing that play out. And you know, the clearest evidence we have of that is we crossed a threshold in Q1 of this year, which is non-game revenue exceeded game revenue in mobile app stores. ⁓ And you might say, but it’s true, mobile gaming

was more than 50 % of the revenue in the app stores for a long time. Games are a very popular thing. And what we’re seeing is the world has moved to a point where phones are the way you interact with everything. I was first surprised and then utterly delighted by the fact that Claude Code now has this thing called Dispatch, where I have agents doing things for me and I can be out on a job.

and check in with my agents via the phone, right? Everybody got a phone and that’s a really interesting thing. And the revenue on the app stores is now more than half non-gaming. And that means all this expertise we developed in gaming around how to manage mobile apps, how to manage mobile experiences, how to queue things up, all valuable. And so we’re seeing this continued, okay, gaming is contracting a little bit. Non-gaming is increasing its revenue share.

and the skills we developed in gaining are bleeding over

Chip Thurston (17:19)
Yeah, yeah, that’s a great point. think it’s extremely transferable. And I think even in more disciplines than people might realize, because I think the first place people might go with this is something like marketing, right? If I’m trying to get installs for my game versus get installs for my non-gaming app, it’s very similar in terms of the strategies, the vehicles you may be using.

and all that, but even for something like product management, ⁓ like live operating, retaining users on a mobile app versus retaining users on a game. Sure, they’re not gamified maybe as much as a game literally is and you have that day-to-day gameplay, but things like live operations are still very critical for mobile apps and finding ways to engage the users of a mobile app. And so I think what is really interesting to watch for me is the ways that

those skills and that perception continues to evolve of how all those various disciplines can translate to ⁓ non-gaming apps.

Bill Grosso (18:19)
Absolutely. One of the consulting engagements we did last year was essentially explaining to a non-gaming company what a core loop is. it’s like, central to the idea of a mobile game is there’s a 10 to 20 minute core loop where you achieve a thing, and then a lot of times you’re dropped off in the metagame to collect some rewards. And then the core loop, you go through it again. And it’s very carefully designed for how long people are willing to…

How long do you wait in the Starbucks line? You know, I mean, because that is the unit of time in a mobile app. ⁓ And so you have to structure your activity that way. Gaming took 10 years to figure this out. The 2010s were all about figuring out how to architect core loops. And it’s a very valuable lesson in almost every other field of mobile application. And so that’s an interesting product management exercise.

Do we have a core loop that fits into the amount of time people are going to interact on their phone before they get distracted? And have we made it obvious what the next steps are? do we have, et cetera?

Chip Thurston (19:24)
Yeah, yeah, that’s a great example. And you reminded me one I will stack on top of yours, which is direct to consumer revenue. We’re seeing more mobile app stores make sure they have their own web stores. And they’re thinking about the user journey of how the user gets from the mobile app into the store. And especially because there’s often mobile apps are subscription based. And so thinking of having a good subscription manager on the web store, which is something we don’t see be as common on the gaming side.

and FastSpring is really well suited for both of those cases, but I think more broadly in the industry, it’s going to be interesting to see how those evolve.

Bill Grosso (20:00)
ties into some of the other things we’re talking about as well, because as we look at the evolution of the industry, mobile gaming talks a lot about discovery and how discovery has gotten much But a big part of that is the new players that are entering have businesses in other verticals. Mattel just bought Mattel 163.

So they had this joint venture that did mobile gaming and Mattel is a toy company. And they decided, no, we’re not really a toy company and we need to own our mobile gaming company. So they bought it or they need to own that. And so they bought it and they’re doing these other games, which are not all entirely mobile and they sell things that are not digital, right? And there’s an entire, we want to have a relationship with the consumer.

that goes past the mobile app store. And we want a unified ⁓ customer experience. We want a unified wallet. We want a unified idea of who this person is as they interact with us as a larger entity. And that plays into the whole web store idea, the whole D2C idea. That’s a place where think companies like FastSpring have an enormous advantage.

Chip Thurston (21:15)
Absolutely. Absolutely well said. So I’m going to keep us moving here. Let’s get to… Well, we’ll try to do some of these pretty quickly. I think we’ve already covered this one for the most part with some of your ideas about innovation and how AI will facilitate that. But number five is that mobile apps will continue to get weirder. Can you quickly explain this one?

Bill Grosso (21:36)
Yeah, mean, so a large part is ⁓ AI lowers the barrier to experimentation. You can try new things. A large part is that the capabilities that are being built out in the SRNs, the large scale ad networks that do analytics, meta, you know, et cetera, enable micro targeting. And a large part is that there’s just enormously increased competition for attention.

If you look at the Q4 statistics for 2025, the ⁓ rate of submissions to the app stores continues to just go up. Barriers to building it can go down, rate of submissions goes up. How do you rise above the noise? And so you put those back to back and you say, the ad networks have enormous micro-targeting capabilities and the ability to evolve your creative. And the marketplace is frothier and noisier than ever.

If you do your creative yourself, you have the ability to try new things at very low cost. And you put all of this together and you just see an explosion of, you know, and it’s not like, that’s completely unprecedented, but you sort of see that we’re sort of gradually drifting towards more and more interesting ads, which is fun. you also see a lot more scammy ads. The number of, you know, you need to update your game and it’s actually an ad for a different game sort of thing show up as well.

But the market is essentially trying whatever will work. And the tools enable the experimentation.

Chip Thurston (23:01)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The anecdote this one reminded me of is in my time in game development when I was overseeing user acquisition for a mobile game I was working on, the bottleneck for us was ad creation. And we were working on using playable ads. And the lead time to create a playable ad was several weeks. It took a long time just to get the creative direction aligned, then we get it created with an agency, and then we get the feedback.

or we provide feedback from that, have to iterate. Anyway, it became this long drawn out process to go from concept to launch was over a month. Well, now we have a partner that we co-host an event with called Playables.ai and they just can crank out playable concepts very quickly. And I think about that from a game development standpoint, wow, if I had had that tool when I was doing this, I could have easily found what would have been the most successful playable. Throwing several concepts out there.

learned from it, iterated from it. And I would say had much more successful UA, but at the same time, I have to recognize that my competitors are doing the same thing. And so it’s, yeah, yeah. And so it becomes, I think, more challenging in the user acquisition space and an already challenged space. But also the opportunities there, and it requires you to really invest in those tools to quickly iterate and to quickly think of different concepts. Otherwise you’ll

quickly fall behind.

Bill Grosso (24:25)
Well, and so this is also sort of, there’s another step to it, which is, I’m an advisor at an incubator ⁓ called Berkeley SKYDECK. It’s sort of a program that’s run in conjunction with UC Berkeley. And one of the companies I’m advising is a company called Vectorial, which basically builds synthetic users out of marketing data. So for example, if you have a game or you’re going to compete against the game,

you can create a synthetic population using the Reddit groups associated to your competitors and then try out your ads there. And that’s a really interesting idea because you can create ads faster. You can also, you don’t have to put it out on Meta pay tab at display to 10,000 people. You can sort of get quick feedback from synthetic focus groups. And that’s early days. It’s fascinating stuff and it works really well, but it’s

not widely adopted yet, but that’s also going to be a driver. So like if you go back to your UA days, it’s much cheaper to do the final creative. Absolutely. And that’s a revolution. But now you can also at the concept stage, even before you generate the creative and without having to go and buy the ads and wait a week, you can actually get a first pass evaluation from synthetic users.

Chip Thurston (25:44)
Yeah. Wow. That’s awesome to have feedback even before you’re launching the app ⁓ from a focus group of how they can perform a synthetic focus group. ⁓ Okay. So let’s keep it moving here. We got number four, GTA 6 will ship and the live ops backlash will end. Can you tell us about this?

Bill Grosso (26:01)
We

don’t have the evidence on this one yet. you know, ⁓ at GDC, I was talking to whole bunch of people and opinion is divided as to whether it’s October or November, or whether it is ⁓ next February. And the argument for next February was essentially because AI is consuming all the memory.

you know, the PS5 and the PS6 and the next generation Xbox are going to be delayed and more expensive. And therefore Rockstar is going to have to go back and make GTA 6 perform on current generation hardware. And that’s going to cause the schedule slip. But that was entirely, you know, late night drinks and hotel bars, you know? I mean, there’s no, there’s no public evidence yet of that. ⁓

Chip Thurston (26:50)
Yeah, so from what we know, still penciled in for ⁓ Q4 this year, but there is a chance that that doesn’t happen. you mentioned the LiveOps backlash will end, and I assume your meaning here is that Grand Theft Auto is such a well-monetized and well-respected game that players will be okay with the LiveOps monetization structure within Grand Theft Auto 6. Is that right?

Bill Grosso (27:14)
Yeah,

I mean, they’re okay with it in five, right? Five is sort of the poster child of effective line ops. so if you go back 20 years, there was this extraordinary backlash against the idea of in-app purchases and in-app transactions, right? And, you know, gradually people, got normalized, people got used to it, people understood that like, okay, you get the game for free. And then if you really like the game, you can enhance the experience.

And we developed a whole set of rules, you know, we can’t do gotcha except in limited cases, we shouldn’t put loot boxes in front of children, there’s now a societal framework for what constitutes acceptable IAP. And you know, there’s still a certain amount of, I really don’t like in-game events or I feel like they’re exploitative. And the point is,

that we’re now going to evolve the societal rules. And what we really need is a couple more large scale success stories to sort of outline the acceptable best practices.

Chip Thurston (28:13)
Okay, I love the prediction there. I feel like the backlash will always exist. That’s my prediction. Players will find any excuse to get out the pitchforks, but we’ll see. I take your point and I agree. I Grand Theft Auto will certainly help drive the case forward and really demonstrate effective live operation of the game.

So number three here is that Apple will drop the standard rate to 15 % and Google will be a fast follower. What is your reflection on this one?

Bill Grosso (28:52)
Yeah, I got that wrong. Google came first. ⁓ I’m a little surprised by that. But that’s part of the Google Epic settlement within the past month. Essentially, the point is, for a long time, there’s been this 30 % rate in the mobile stores, right? And actually also on the Xbox store and so on and so forth. And the question is, what does that really get you?

And it doesn’t get you enough. And that was Epic’s point writ large, right? I’m giving up 30 % of my revenue for the privilege of being listed in an app store that doesn’t really do much for me other than I get listed in that app store and it’s sort of the choke point onto the device. And so, know, Epic did ⁓ the high profile lawsuits. You know, you could argue that Epic lost billions in revenue as a result of that. But the walls are crumbling.

and they have been for a while. They’re alternative app stores. When you sort of look back to what I said earlier about Mattel 163 and wanting to own the relationship. mean, all of these things, you can do them and you can do them well and FastSpring does them well. And you can help people take payments. You can help people handle taxes. You can help people.

understand the overall fabric of how to do monetization and sales and purchases and processing payments well. And that’s not a thing that’s worth 30%. ⁓ And so it’s an interesting question. Why is Apple kept at 30 %? And the answer is because they can. ⁓ Would you give it up? No, I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to. ⁓ But it’s crumbling And then the Google cave, well, that’s probably too soon.

But that Google has negotiated with Epic and they’ve settled and Google fees are dropping is really interesting. ⁓

Chip Thurston (30:42)
Yeah, yeah, it is interesting. And also the fee amount. So the fee dropping to basically an all in of 25%. If you’re an install and you’re not involved in the level up program, which is the general

take from publishers. And so if we’re still 25 % there for like 20 % service fee plus 5 % billing, that makes me still very confident in the future case for direct to consumer. Why I feel this settlement is actually, as we’ve learned more about it, very ⁓ impactful for the future growth of direct to consumer. One part is that it legitimizes direct to consumer revenue.

But up until now, it’s been kind of this gray hat territory of like, how can I get my players out of my game into my web store, but without the platforms knowing too much about what I’ve got going on here. And this is saying, this is the policy that in this case, Google has defined and we expect Apple will be a fast follower to define similar policy. And so now we’re operating within that policy and driving revenue in an effective way. And there’s no constriction on messaging.

within this policy, which is another big change. Up until now, they’ve been very prescriptive, they being the platforms, have been very prescriptive about what I as a publisher could or could not say about my web store, talking about the percentage bonus or just that the store exists and having these draconian policies and this doesn’t have any restriction on the messaging. And beyond the messaging component, it’s global in scope. At least Google intends for it to be global in scope. Up until now, the main

case for steering has been inside the United States. And with this settlement, Google has said, no, this will be our new global policy. Now, I’ll caveat this saying that that doesn’t mean every country globally will accept this policy. Different countries will have different appetite for it. And we’ve seen this pop up in different regulations otherwise. So that’s something we’ll have to continue to watch. But the fact that Google is saying that they’re intending to roll this out globally is extremely significant. ⁓

And the last part is that, it’s cutting Google into these revenue streams, which I think is great in terms of that partnership, but also the fees that Google takes are limited in scope. They’re very specifically applied to when you link a player directly from your mobile game into your web store. If a player gets to your web store through other means, like an email campaign, a content creator, social media, even direct load, where they’re just coming back to make another purchase, you’re not paying that fee to…

the platform, you’re just paying it to your merchant record like FastSpring. And so it still becomes this extremely valuable revenue stream for you. And so those are, as I’ve thought more about this settlement, I’m like, wow, this is really going to accelerate not just adoption as people get more confidence in the state of D2C, but also just the growth and the potential for what we can achieve here.

Bill Grosso (33:32)
Yeah, I mean, and the nice thing there is exactly the last part you said. It’s like, okay, so now if the person comes to my, if they’re a fan of the game and they’re used to buying things or they’re thinking about making a purchase and they know about the web store and they go through there through an alternate means.

the platform doesn’t get anything, right? ⁓ And that’s interesting. And so now your incentive as a game company, when you’re small and you don’t have very many players, focus on the game, focus on growing the game. But as you start having a significant revenue stream, your focus shifts at least a little bit towards building a permanent direct relationship with the consumer. that’s actually a little bit of a change. didn’t, know, if you go back.

you know, five to 10 years when the only payment option you had was in the game, you know, why would you maintain that outside the game relationship? And we see lots of really interesting things, you know, so like the Supercell store is the Supercell store and it sells stuff for all the Supercell games. And that’s an interesting little change, right? I mean, it’s not a big deal, but it’s an interesting idea because it means, you know, we have a suite of games and you can see them as you interact.

one game you see the other games and you’re just sort of subtly made aware of the variety of different things, right? ⁓ And so you know now you start to say my goal as a game company is to establish a direct relationship with the consumer outside of the envelope of the platforms, outside of the Apple envelope, outside of the Google envelope and that’s a place where I think FastSpring plays well as well.

Chip Thurston (35:12)
Yeah, absolutely. The relationship will be critical and the data that comes along with that, that you get from facilitating those direct purchases, things like email addresses, will enable so much more just optimization and really understanding your player base in a way that just purchasing through the apps does not.

We’ll go ahead and go through the last two here. And I think this is a good time to insert the asterisk that the views and opinions here and the predictions are those of Bill Grosso and they are not reflective of myself or FastSpring I am going to abstain from commenting on this one, but I will tee it up for you. Your prediction was that Elon Musk will begin to talk extensively about the Neuralink as the ultimate gaming platform. Go ahead.

Bill Grosso (35:56)
Well, every set of predictions has to have something that’s a little bit forward thinking, right? And it’s an interesting thing, right? So, know, Elon does Tesla, does Starlink, etc., etc., etc. But one of the things he has is this company called Neuralink, which has early stage clinical trials where you’re essentially inserting electrodes into people’s brains. And that’s a really, really valuable technology.

If somebody is partially paralyzed, they get the ability to manipulate things by thinking about them as opposed to moving their hand over there and things like that. It’s an enormously powerful assistive technology. ⁓ But it almost immediately started having people thinking really, you

what if I didn’t have to move the mouse, right? What if I could just think and I could get more precise control, right? That impulse happened almost immediately. And we have a lot of really interesting precedents for things like this. So a friend of mine ⁓ ran a headphone company for a while. And the point of his headphone company was that it had sort of these very special speakers that went behind your ear.

and used subsonics and sending sound waves through the bones because they go faster than they go through air. And so these were incredibly expensive headphones that were positioned to send sound waves through bone because that way you got a tiny, tiny little advantage. You could react a little bit faster. And people would buy these and I’d be sitting there going, seriously? Seriously. That costs more than your console, you know that.

Chip Thurston (37:37)
You

Bill Grosso (37:40)
But nonetheless, people do that, right? ⁓ And we know that cheating is incredibly widespread throughout gaming, right? Anti-cheat systems are, you know, we don’t talk about them in public very much, but they’re endemic and they’re hard to build and players innovate constantly in performance enhancements. And so then you start to say, okay, so Elon Musk is an ardent gamer. He’s made various

public pronouncement of how important games are. He’s arguably lied about how proficient he is as a world-class player in several games. ⁓ I’m not gonna wade into that, but there’s evidence. And then you say, and he owns a Neuralink company. Okay, how long before those beams cross? And what we’re really waiting for is Tesla to have a bad quarter. ⁓ More than anything else, right? ⁓

because it’s a certain element of public distraction. And so Q1 of this year, there’s been a lot of really interesting clinical trials and clinical research. There hasn’t been a lot of focus on gaming, but as we move forward, I expect there will be. And that’s an interesting thing. I don’t know how mainstream that playing platform will ever be. We’ve seen that people don’t really want to have VR goggles. And so I think that bodes ill for the injecting, you

electrodes into your brain to play Grand Theft Auto better. But I don’t know. You know, that might actually be normal behavior in 10 years.

Chip Thurston (39:12)
Yeah, okay. Well, that is certainly a trend to watch and something we’ll be watching for in 2026. Like I said, I not be commenting on that. But we can go to your last prediction here, which is that the PlayStation 6 will be delayed until 2028. I think you touched on this earlier with some of the predictions that we had touched on at the top. But also, we’ve recently seen the PlayStation 5 price increase announced. And so I’m curious how you see that impacting a prediction here.

Bill Grosso (39:41)
Yeah, no, mean, the fundamental thing is I think this has been confirmed at this point, or at least it’s strongly on track. There have been announcements about DevKits not making it out for a while longer yet. And we also know that memory prices are through the roof right now. The AI boom has basically caused a spike in the price of all hardware. so you look at that and you say,

on any projection of what the PlayStation 6 is supposed to have in it as capabilities, it’s going to be a thousand dollar console, right? And you stare at that and you kind of go, okay, so it’s behind, we don’t have ship dates, we don’t have dev kits. And the recent spikes in equipment and component prices have indicated that when it ships, it’s going to be out of the reach of anybody. A thousand dollar game console is not

mass market device. And so that means that that cycle is going to elongate. And we talked about that a little bit because that goes back to the Grand Theft Auto VI question. If you’ve been building Grand Theft Auto VI on the theory that it’s really going to take advantage of the capabilities of the next generation of consoles and PCs and those elongate, do you now have to go back to the drawing board?

Do you have to rework fundamental systems to make them work on current hardware? And so it sort of has echoing going on.

Chip Thurston (41:10)
Yeah, that’s great point on how it can impact some of the bigger game launches that are coming up, certainly at Grand Theft Auto, but I’m sure other games could get caught up in that as well.

Bill Grosso (41:21)
And

then on the Xbox side, because this had sort of like, the Xbox will also be postponed, you know, we had Phil Spencer retiring. We had a whole set of leadership change on the Xbox side. you know, I don’t know what Microsoft is thinking. I have no connections there, but that certainly feels from the outside like a whole strategy rethink, which also feels like maybe it’s not full steam ahead on the Xbox.

Maybe we pause and think about what we want to be in there. And given that it’s 2026, that means 2028 for the Xbox as well.

Chip Thurston (41:55)
Got it. Okay. Well, in the interest of time, I think we’ll go ahead and wrap things up here. So we’ve covered your predictions, but one thing I do like to ask at the end is what is the number one thing people should remember about what you shared here today?

Bill Grosso (42:12)
that’s a great question. I think the number one thing I shared that I, it’s partially in this conversation, partially outside the conversation, I’m extraordinarily bullish on the future of video games. Owen Mahoney, who used to be the CEO of Nexon, wrote a blog called Size Matters. And what he basically said did some math. said, hey, you know what? If we assume that

people go from spending 45 minutes a day playing video games to 60 minutes, which seems like a reasonable assumption. And we assume that the world gamer population increases from 3 billion to 5 billion. Seems like reasonable assumption. Then you’ve essentially doubled the amount of video game playing that’s happening. That’s a really interesting thing to say out loud. You know, on the one hand, we have GDC shrinking, we have the layoffs, have, you know, the headcount reductions, et cetera.

On the other hand, the available markets increase, or is increasing dramatically. ⁓ And so those are interesting parallel trends. And then the third trend is what we were talking about earlier, where Applovin and Meta, et cetera, can do micro-targeting, and you can build a game with a much smaller team. You can build a high quality game with a much smaller team. And all of a sudden, it’s like the golden age of entrepreneurship in video games.

And that’s a really interesting, it’s not any of these predictions because like how do you measure it? But it’s a really interesting moment. We can build better games faster with smaller teams. We can target them more effectively. And we know that the addressable markets increasing in size dramatically. ⁓ That’s an opportunity that is mind-boggling. And so that’s sort of like the biggest takeaway of these predictions. That’s not actually in the predictions, but nonetheless, I think I believe.

Chip Thurston (43:59)
Yeah, no, but it ties together if you ⁓ put some wonderful bow on it. And I think it’s a great note for us to end on is the optimistic future of the gaming industry about the impact of all these. So I think we’ll wrap it up there. But thank you so much for sharing today, Bill. If you would love to learn more about what Bill is up to, please visit gamedatapros.com.

But thank you to you, dear listener, for your time and for joining us on the Growth Stage podcast. I’m your host, Chip Thurston. I love getting to dig deep on gaming topics like this with experts like Bill and share them with people like you. So thank you for listening and I will see you next time.