Unity partners with Kindred to reinvent app monetization | App Developer Magazine

Unity partners with Kindred to reinvent app monetization and UX. Kindred is now a Unity Verified Solutions Partner and the Unity team tested the Kindred SDK to make sure it was optimized for Unity, the Unity editor, and that it will provide a seamless experience for developers. 

Kindred, the next-generation app monetization network, has announced it has been named a Unity Verified Solutions Partner, with a focus on reinventing in-app monetization and UX. Being a Verified Solutions Partner means that Unity’s Verified Solutions Partner team has tested and verified that the Kindred SDK for Unity is optimized for the latest version of the Unity editor, providing a seamless experience for Unity developers. 

Unity partners with Kindred to reinvent app monetization 

Verified Solutions Partners represent an ecosystem of 3rd-party SDKs, plugins, editor applications, and more. These companies partner with Unity to drive technical alignment and verify compliance with the latest Unity releases on an ongoing basis. 

To date, mobile games developers have had to rely on paid models such as in-app purchases and advertising models to monetize users, both of which can negatively impact the UX for players and trigger paywall fatigue and churn. 

Kindred’s ‘third way’ offers an alternative in-game economic model to this legacy duopoly, one that creates an emotive bond with mobile gamers and boosts in-game spend by as much as 400% per active player annually, or $28.34, while having zero impact on a game’s core functionality. 

Kindred’s patent-protected technology works by securing savings for players of mobile games when they shop across its ever-growing network of merchants using the Kindred shopping keyboard on their mobile browser, without needing to take any actions in the game itself. 

It then enables them to use the vast majority of those savings as in-game currency. At least 5% of the cashback they earn is also donated to charity (either one selected by the gaming app in question or by individual players from a pool of 22,000 charities) or carbon offsetting initiatives. 

For a typical mobile game, developers also receive a passive revenue increase of $6.75 per active player annually. To date, two-thirds of players offered the feature have enabled it, and click-through rates are 10x higher than typical display advertising options. 

Benefits for Unity developers using Kindred include: 

• Kindred technology is free and frictionless for developers to install and has zero impact on core in-game functionality and UX95% of the cashback players secure on their purchases through the Kindred merchant ecosystem can be instantly redeemed in their chosen game wallet as in-game currency
• The increase of in-game currency leads to a reduction in player churn and pay-wall fatigue
• 5% of players’ cashback is donated to a charity of the developer’s choice, or can be used to offset the carbon emissions from their purchase through the planting of trees, in tune with the sustainable ethos of Generations Z and Y
• 25% of Kindred’s own commission from the merchant is shared with developers as a passive income, further boosting revenues. For a typical game, developers receive a passive revenue increase of $6.75 per active player annually
• Assuming 25% of players of a mobile game with 1m users enable the Kindred technology in a gaming app, annual additional revenue for the game studio would equal $1.69m. The more players a studio or developer successfully markets the feature too, the more revenues they generate
• First-class support from the Kindred for Business onboarding team
• Kindred has already been shown to boost revenue from active players by 400% compared to typical ARPU earned from in-app ads
• Kindred also creates a new passive revenue stream for game developers from their users’ online shopping, amounting to $6.75 per player annually

Crucially, Kindred for Business operates with total anonymity: no data is ever collected and it never knows the identities of an individual gaming app’s players. Kindred uses a combination of random tokens and IDs to track purchases and provides developers with an API to display credits/savings earned back to their players. 

"If there’s one thing that keeps mobile game developers up at night, it’s striking the balance between generating maximum revenue from users while maintaining a positive UX. With Kindred, we believe we’ve solved this key challenge in a way that is free to integrate and frictionless to run. Importantly, it’s not just the developers that benefit but the users themselves, the communities they live in through the charitable donations they make, and the planet as a whole. For mobile game studios, Kindred improves loyalty and stickiness, increases revenues, and creates an end-to-end experience that resonates with young people today," said Mike Gadd, COO, Kindred. 

 * This is a repost from App Developer Magazine. To view the original article, please click here.