How To Optimize Xsolla Sales For Your Game

When it comes to generating revenue, Steam is far from the only way to do that for your game. Xsolla recognizes that and created a powerhouse platform that enables diverse and enhanced revenue streams by allowing developers to independently distribute their games and items in ways that traditional platforms don't allow. Through their suite of tools, players can engage in:

1. Direct Game Key Sales: Selling Steam, Epic, or DRM-free keys directly through your own site, keeping a larger percentage of the revenue.
2. Pre-orders: Capturing purchase intent months before a game is even live—a critical period for optimizing your initial launch-day "algorithm boost."
3. In-Game Items and Virtual Economy: Selling virtual currency (Gold, Gems, etc.) and in-game items directly to users and microtransactions tied directly to player accounts.

Imagine you're selling your game at $15 and you get 10k pre-orders, you are already earning $150,000 gross revenue before access!. To achieve that kind of scale you do need to market your game, and one such marketing channel is advertising, which can be expensive when not optimized. After you have optimized your creatives, you need to feed information about who is making those Xsolla purchases back to your ad platform, the platform stops guessing and starts finding the "Whale" players our industry relies on to generate massive returns for your game.

Closed-Loop Scaling: How CAPI Saves Your Budget

As we’ve previously covered in other lessons, ad platforms require training. When you start an ad, you basically give the platform a map (targeting criteria like interests, age, and location) and a goal (Sales). Initially, the platform will deliver your ads to anyone who fits the map. When you send information back to the ad platform, it will then choose your optimal audience.

The Threshold Difficulty:

To move into "Optimized Delivery," an algorithm generally needs to reach the threshold of events within an attribution window for the specific ad platform that you are using. There are several events that you can train the CAPI on from Xsolla, each carries a different weight.

• Xsolla Store Pageview: This means someone gets to your Xsolla store, you can send a pageview back to the conversion API. This event is typically a low-quality event and doesn't signal purchase intent yet.
• Purchase: This event is when someone actually purchases something from your Xsolla Pay store. It is the first good signal for someone having true purchase intent.
• Game Install: This event is sent back to Xsolla when someone installs your game. It is a strong purchase event because the player is now fully engaged with your game.
• Day 7, Day 15, Day 30 Events: These are the strongest events and the holy grail of the user you want to train it on. These are players who are not only engaged with the game, but are also less likely to return it, and most likely to become members of your game's community.

Training your ad platform to send you users who are likely to install your game and retain is the best kind of user. Now each platform is different in the number of events it needs, Meta and Google threshold is generally 50 events, TikTok is 40, etc.

The costs go up for stronger events because you will likely get less of those at first. For example, for every $50 spent in advertising, you may get 10 purchases, 5 installs and 3 players that retain. With those kinds of numbers, naturally purchase events will be trained first and retention events trained last.