Josh: Hey, Nathan, thanks for joining us. Can you introduce yourself, who you are and what you do. 

Nathan: My name is Nathan. I work at Xsolla and have done for close to 2 years. I’ve been in gaming for around 10 years. And my role here is to help the indie scene in Europe, really nurture them. And we have funding products, we have onboarding products, we have to go-to-market products. The goal is to work with the whole ecosystem here and help them get to market and get their games in front of people 

Josh: How long have you been working in the gaming industry? And what kind of roles have you had so far? 

Nathan: I have been in gaming for close to 10 years and started out with Serious Games Company acting as a producer. I did that for about 6 or 7 years and ended up going broke but that was a good experience. Not so much going broke, but certainly working on the Serious games! 

From there I was at a metaverse localization company working with services and I did that for about 12 to 18 months and from there the last two years I have been with Xsolla.  

Josh: What brought you into the world of gaming?  

Nathan: Yeah, for me it's always been creativity. This lovely intersection of technology and creativity. And I think gaming is unique amongst creative pursuits. The technology is relatively recent compared to a lot of other creativity-based careers of the past.  

I just love the way that the technology evolves and interacts with the creative people and the way that people are able to bring new experiences as the technology continues to improve. I think that's kind of what's always drove me to it.   

Josh: Are you a big gamer yourself? 

Nathan: I try to be. I have a baby at home, so I don't play as much as I once did. So, I'm much more premium PC, indie, smaller games than the of computer triple A titles with 100-to-200-hour experience.  

But yeah, my whole life has had games. I remember getting a Commodore 64 for Christmas. And I think we had the Super Nintendo even before that. So, I don’t play as much as I used to, but I still try to keep across it. 

Josh: Can you tell us a little bit more about Xsolla, what is your MO? 

Nathan: Xsolla helps publishers and developers go directly to their consumers. So, we help with payments, and we have a bunch of products on top of our payment infrastructure which allows any publisher, any developer, to have a direct relationship with and sell directly to their players. 

Something crucial to that is our merchant to record services which basically means we take on all of the liability for that financial transaction, so that when the tax rate changes in Texas or Bangladesh, now we have teams of people that understand that and make sure of the developers and publishers' compliance. And we do everything we can to make it as easy as possible, for, as I said, publishers and developers to sell directly to their players. 

Josh: What are the greatest challenges your publisher and developer partners are facing when they come and speak to you? 

Nathan: So, I think actually that publishers and developers are all facing the same issue at the moment, which is discoverability and user acquisition.  

There are so many great games out there. It's never been easier to make a great game, and I'm not saying that it's easy, but it's just never been easier with the tools that are out there. We were at Unite Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago, and just looking at their next iteration of generative tools you have to be able to make these bigger and bigger experiences with smaller and smaller teams, faster and faster and faster. And the audience for these games just isn't growing at the same rate as the suppliers. 

So I think what everyone's navigating at the moment is really, how do you find your audience, and it's certainly, I think, what a lot of the publishers are increasingly focused on, and certainly a lot of what I hear in Mobile is the landscape just isn't what it once was in terms of UA and your ability to have predictable returns on the investment that you put into those campaigns.  

Josh: What is your advice for publishers and developers out there who want to tackle discoverability? 

Nathan: The biggest thing I think developers need to get is, you just need to start early. And it's not something you can expect to do on release or before release. It's as much a part of video game development now as almost the core development. So, I always say to developers, if you've got a bad game, you'll always have a bad or unsuccessful launch. 

Alternatively, you can have a great game, but if you haven't done some of that groundwork to build a bit of an audience there's no guarantee that you will have a great launch. It is not always easy for developers to hear that, because they're very focused on the game as you'd expect, but it's just become increasingly true in this, in this kind of landscape. 

Josh: What kind of opportunities do you see in growth beyond mobile gaming? How should mobile companies be harnessing the power of PC and console and vice-versa?  

Nathan: I think with the multi-platform the competition is not just with other games it is with other forms of attention seeking, you know whether that's Instagram, whether that's Netflix and cross-platform gives you the ability, I think, to stay connected with your audience in a lot of different locations.  

So, with Console, you know, I need to be at home in front of the console to be really engaged with that product. With a mobile I might not want to be on my phone while at home. But when you're going cross-platform you are giving the consumer the ability to stay engaged with what you're offering them for a longer period of time because you’re limiting the breaks that they have. And that's kind of what everyone's looking for, is that ability to keep the player base engaged. So, it's just about the access points which become most relevant. 

Josh: What can our audience expect to hear from your presentation at Gamesforum Barcelona?  

Nathan: So, in Barcelona we're talking about web shops, with the presentation focused on how you build a shop to sell directly to your players outside of the traditional digital distribution platform. So best practices around that. How do you set those up? What are the types of tips we can offer. What we see really works for our partners and sharing possibilities with as many people as possible, so we can give you the best chance of success. 

 Josh: Every time you walk into a room a song plays. What song is that for you and why? 

Nathan: Yeah, I thought about this little bit. I think I'd go with something a little bit obscure, and I don't know if it would work, so we might have to change this, but I was thinking for some reason, in the game Golden Eye, when you open the watch, there is this really kind of banging interlude. This got a little famous recently when it was re-released. Which kind of brought me back into that that space.  

Josh: It's interesting, it's the first time we've had a sound effect as opposed to a song. 

Nathan: Yeah, that was a lot to do with like that intersection of creativity and technology, I think because they were really limited with what they could put together. But I listen to it now and it always takes me back to that game. It reminds me of playing that game. I think of someone just working away and being constrained by what they could put into the game. You know, they didn’t have unlimited space. They didn't have the types of digital tools we have now so they had to work with it. 

Josh: True! It has come a long way in a short time. Thanks for joining me Nathan and see you in Barcelona!