David Vogelpohl is the Chief Marketing Officer at FastSpring, a platform enabling direct-to-consumer (D2C) monetization for video games and digital products. With over two decades of experience in digital strategy and e-commerce, David offers valuable insights into creating meaningful player relationships, navigating platform regulations, and building sustainable revenue models in the gaming industry.

In this episode, David discusses driving growth through direct player engagement and crafting a successful D2C strategy. He covers balancing value across platforms, discounts, and webshops while staying authentic to the player experience. Listeners will also hear his thoughts on app store openness, new regulations, and their impact on game publishers. Tune in for actionable insights on building a monetization strategy that resonates.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• How game publishers can balance discounts, in-game purchases, and cross-platform relationships without alienating major platforms like Apple and Google.
• Insights into emerging trends, regulatory shifts, and the push for openness in the app marketplace.
• The difference between monetization strategies for free-to-play and premium games.
• Why “release and iterate” beats perfectionism.
• Importance of saying "no" strategically, and cultivating a people-first approach to business.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• David Vogelpohl on Linkedin
• FastSpring
• Adam Lieb on the Here's Waldo Podcast
• Justin Sachs on the Here's Waldo Podcast
  

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus. I'm the founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, and this is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about their journey, and you can expect to get a glimpse into the future of the industry. 

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique recruiting firm that works in tech and games and values quality over quantity. Before introducing today's guest, I want to thank Adam Lieb for introducing us and GamesBeat for introducing us. That is a great show for you to attend this year. 

Today, we have David Vogelpohl with us. David is the CMO at FastSpring, which is a platform that enables direct-to-consumer monetization for video games and other digital products. David leverages over two decades of experience with advanced digital marketing, influencer marketing, and monetization to help FastSprings gaming customers monetize and market games direct-to-consumer. 

Let's get started. David, I'm glad we could make it. None of our kids are sick and we are well. Thank you for being here. 

David Vogelpohl: Thanks, Lizzie. So glad to be here. 

Lizzie Mintus: I would love for you to start with a bit deeper dive into what FastSpring is and how it relates to games. 

David Vogelpohl: Yeah, absolutely. So FastSpring is a payment platform. We've been around for about 20 years. We're what's known as a merchant of record. And what that means is that we provide local global payments and compliance all in one platform. So in other words, you can sell all around the world and be tax-compliant in all the places that you sell. So that's basically what FastSpring does. And we support game publishers with direct-to-consumer monetization by powering payments and e-commerce experiences on their websites. 

Lizzie Mintus: And what percent of your current revenue is games and where do you see that going? I know you have a big gaming hire. 

David Vogelpohl: You know, I did a podcast one time where they asked like insider data that we don't share that I'd have to take like a shot of hot sauce. So we don't share the specifics, but it is a healthy double-digit percentage of our revenue. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's a great answer. 

David Vogelpohl: Yeah. Fastspring was founded, like I said, 20 years ago. It was actually founded by the original creators of the Picasa software, which eventually became Google Photos. Fastspring has a strong heritage in digital software, SaaS, and other types of digital products, empowering payments and subscriptions for them.

We've had gaming customers in various flavors since the Nearly the dawn of FastSpring. And in the last few years, we've really accelerated by winning a few key publishers and have really strengthened our offering around that, including hiring some new folks and expanding in those ways. So that's a little bit of background on FastSpring in game. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. We'd love to hear a briefing on the current state of direct-to-consumer monetization in 2025. 

David Vogelpohl: All right. I think it depends on what part of the game industry you're in and how you think about that a little bit. But in direct-to-consumer, where the majority of action seems to be within mobile gaming and specifically live service games, what we see are publishers creating webshop experiences on their website and leveraging their voice with their players outside of the game in order to convince them to engage with the brand on their website. And then ultimately to use the webshop to transact by things like virtual currencies and in game items and things like that.

From a regulatory perspective what we've seen in the US or lawsuits by Epic with Google and Apple with different levels of outcomes that you could view as being publisher friendly, the most optimistic thing we're seeing now, we're still waiting to see how they'll implement it, is perhaps the ability to do what's called steering with inside mobile games, where you could basically put a link to your shop in the game without paying additional fees or much additional fees. That's still being worked out in the US and similar type kind of give and puts are happening in Europe with the Digital Markets Act. We're also seeing things heat up in Japan and other jurisdictions like that. So that's the state of D2C if you would, Lizzie. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Tell me about the different regions. I mean, what goes on in Asia? Obviously we, I feel like everyone's pretty familiar with the Epic lawsuit here, but how are their strategies different? What is allowed in different regions? And how might one region's laws start to influence another's? 

David Vogelpohl: I mean, right now if you say, what's allowed with direct-to-consumer with Apple or Google? You're going to get a list of, well, in Europe, you can do this. And we think you're going to be able to do that. And Apple said you could do this, but we think regulators are going to think that's not far enough. And we've seen this out in all of these places. 

What I suspect it could be that, you know, the mobile platforms do play this kind of whack-a-mole game around the world where they allow things in some places and not others. But what I would hope and where they may land is kind of, one unified view of how to approach it. It's so nuanced in terms of the regional differences. You have Google dealing with their antitrust issues in the US and what could come of that? So it's very, very complicated.

But what I would hope for where they may land is a kind of unified approach around the world, which is a little more publisher-friendly in terms of what folks are allowed to do, but still preserving the core value of what Apple and Google provide because it's huge what they provide in terms of the marketplace and the trust that it provides. And so finding that balance, I think is what our digital world and mobile is really going through right now. And there are some growing pains there, but it's such a nuanced story. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I'll have to see. A lot of questions for 2025. 

And if I were to set up my own webshop from scratch, you can come at it from the angle, probably both- if I'm an indie dev and I think I have a great game versus I have a really established publisher and people know who I am, but what best practices should I think about if I'm starting to enter this space with or without a historical customer base. 

David Vogelpohl: Yeah. The first question you're going to ask is, well, how am I currently distributing my games and how might a web shop play a role in that? Am I only on Steam and PC gaming where I might need an installer if I go with my own webshop? Could I resell steam keys in my mobile only in live services and how might I approach that, in terms of like how it would integrate with your shop and what offers and things like that are available.

I think the number one thing though if we think about it, earlier I mentioned how mobile live service games tend to be the highest revenue within the direct-to-consumer universe. And if we look at games like that, one of the critical things that's kind of a criteria before you even build the shop is, you need to have some level of direct relationship with your players.

In today's environment, without paying additional fees to the mobile publishers, you can't link directly to your webshop in your game. So this means you need some way to communicate with them outside of the game. So if you're a publisher that has fans of your business and fans of your games that connect with you on Discord or maybe they follow your social media profiles, maybe you have things like e-sports events or other things that are happening outside the context of the game itself- these are all opportunities to share with your players. The experiences they might be able to get on your website.

Things like a web shop that might have better deals than maybe what they're seeing in game. But also other experiences you might have in your shop. Certainly games where there are creators that are making content around the game and can say things like, go get a 10% boost on gems. If you go to the web shop to buy gem packages and things like that. These are all things that are going to be really helpful. 

So the shop itself and building the shop is technology. It's not that hard. There's like a bunch of different ways you can go about it, but I think having that core fan base is going to be really critical to your success as you think about DTC.

Lizzie Mintus: And do you, you mentioned influencers, do you feel like that's one of the primary strategies today for driving people to your webshop? 

David Vogelpohl: It's part of a blended mix of how publishers are approaching promoting their webshops. Some are quite specific about it. You mentioned Adam Lieb. Adam's such a great person. Adam introduced me actually to someone named Justin Sachs who runs ... 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, Nexus. 

David Vogelpohl: Yeah. Nexus. 

Lizzie Mintus: He has been on my podcast too. 

David Vogelpohl: I was going to say he might've been on your podcast. And it's really interesting because yes, absolutely. Folks will lean into the kind of creator side of the universe. You'll see creators that have challenges are coming to spend X dollars and try to achieve Y in the game. These are moments where they can mention the better deals or creator codes that can be used for redeem for discounts on the web shop, in addition to the standard discounts people will offer there, and reward those creators with a payback for referencing that. So it's a big part of promoting web shops, the creator side.

I think it depends on the publisher, whether that would be the number one way or not. What I've experienced and seen for publishers that are the most successful with this, are those that kind of have a holistic view of how they're communicating with their players outside of the game and thinking about their website as a destination beyond just the shop and better deals.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

David Vogelpohl: How do they own that relationship with their players? 

Lizzie Mintus: How would you go about making it a destination? Having a 10% deal is one thing, but what would be so appealing that I'm like, I have to go here. I can't miss it, right? 

David Vogelpohl: One of the lessons I've learned in a little over 25 years in optimizing digital experiences is that we're often playing a balance between suffering and joy. So in the mobile universe, we know that we can't link to our store directly without paying additional fees. And so when you talk about making your website a destination, what you're talking about is putting content in your website, that's not in your game. And when we talk about a leaderboard, like why not just load the leaderboard in the game? Why make me go to the website? 

Maybe I load it in the game, but there's a special version on the website. So you're thinking about this balance between like, what am I gating with not putting it in the game versus putting it on my website? And in some cases, it may be better that it lives on your website than in your game. But of course, from your player's perspective, they may have to link out to a browser to experience whatever it is that you're putting there. So it's this balance between suffering and joy. 

But some of the things that you can leverage on your site to make your site more of a destination, we've talked about leaderboards. Another big one would be tutorials and playthroughs. And I know you don't want to go necessarily too far because creators play a role in that too. And that's super valuable. You might not want to step on their toes too much, but maybe there are some basic tutorials and playthroughs you might want to publish on your site and promote it in your game to continue that relationship with your players.

You can gate some of that content, maybe to collect an email address and give you the ability to communicate more outside the game. Cheat codes, if that applies to your games, lore content, it depends obviously on the style of game, whether that's relevant or not. And then some publishers will just straight up give you an item for logging into the web shop or something like that, or into the web experience or web portal where you'll just straight up get an in-game item or something like that, just for logging in or like a frequency award for doing it every day or something like that.

Lizzie Mintus: So there are many different strategies, but you have to make it appealing to go through the hurdle of getting out of the game and linking somewhere outside. 

David Vogelpohl: That's the pragmatic way of thinking about the balance between like where you're putting your content here or there. I mean, at the end of the day, you want to deliver a really solid player experience and your website is wholly owned property of yours. It is a place for you to deliver experiences, content, and commerce that allows you to have a direct relationship with your customers. And I think publishers often resign that direct relationship because so much of the distribution is happening through controlled marketplaces if you will.

And so really adopting like, it's such an interesting idea in business because of course, you have a direct relationship with your customers. These web portals, these web experiences, they start to create the core of that. So as your players transit between platforms over the course of when they play your games or just even over the course of their day, they still have that core relationship with you as a company.

Lizzie Mintus: And how does that evolve as a live service game evolves? I mean, what do you really need to think about when you're launching versus the continual engagement? Because that's so much of what we've seen is that games come out, people play them, and then they go back to playing whatever it is they've been playing the whole time, and the metrics are just nosedive. How do you keep players engaged from that perspective? 

David Vogelpohl: I mean, I could definitely give you all my opinions on player engagement and releases and live service games. But I think from thinking about it from my commerce perspective, what's interesting about live service games and direct-to-consumer is live service games effectively operate like recurring revenue. Now, granted, the person's not guaranteed to buy the next battle pass or whatever, but by releasing products all the time, you create a recurring revenue stream from your players. 

Well, in other recurring revenue businesses, you typically would err towards subscriptions in that case. And I know, you know, Warcraft and other games do subscriptions, but for the most part, what we're talking about here are somewhat of micro transactions or at least, transactions of virtual currency can not necessarily be micro. But my point is transactions over to individual transactions over time, because the player is making a transaction over time and making a decision over time. If you can get them to establish a direct relationship you as a company and you as a brand and make those transactions on your website, they may do that again for the next transaction. So oftentimes, you have a lot of at-bats with players to convince them to engage with your brand directly and transact on your webshop. 

And I think the other interesting part of that is not only do you have like this kind of frequency aspect of it, but the other interesting thing about live service games over games that say would monetize through a subscription or a premium game is that players are worth vastly different amounts. So when you have a VIP, of course, that may spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on your game, VIPs can make up to 70-80% of your revenue and only be 20% or less of your players. 

So the dynamic part about live service games and direct-to-consumer is you can target a very small amount and have a really big impact on your- profitability- whereas if you were trying to change the behavior of all of your pet players, it would be a lot harder and it wouldn't have that kind of scaled impact.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that makes sense. Like all business, right? On the 20%, it makes up the 80% of whatever the math is. 

David Vogelpohl: But on a premium game, that's not necessarily true. You know, Call of Duty costs $60, every player's worth $60. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's true. Okay, so if you're not Call of Duty, how do you go about thinking about the right monetization strategy would you say for your game and testing that and making sure that it's resonating with the players that you want it to resonate with? 

David Vogelpohl: I think game publishers, as they think about their live services, product inventory, what's in it, how much it costs, I feel like in general, they're pretty good at understanding what their players want, testing and iterating and finding the right formula.

I think where folks start to feel uncomfortable is like how they coordinate that with what's going on in the webshop and maybe even what's going on cross-platform. But at least in the context of the webshop, one of the first things you consider is, well, what is the discount rate going to be? Am I going to offer a discount? Am I going to offer something in the form of literally lower prices or maybe I would be the same price but get more things like virtual currency? 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

David Vogelpohl: And so it's the balance between these. In doing this also in a way, because again, like Apple and Google are super valuable partners. So while it's beneficial to establish direct relationships, you also want to do that in a way that's respectful of these other platforms, but it's the balance between like what you're giving in each context to try to incentivize that behavior to not create too much-despaired differences between the two experiences that you come off on an authentic.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And I guess you wouldn't want to be off-putting for the major platforms as well. How do you see that evolving over time? There's lawsuits, new shops is popping up, new app stores. There's always an app gallery, there's the Amazon app store. How are these impacting the market? 

David Vogelpohl: I started my career in 1996 ,so I have a very long perspective on the internet and digital, at least relatively, and I think of things in the terms of openness. And on my PCs and on my Macs, I can install any software I want and do whatever I want with that computer that I own. 

In the case of mobile, I don't have that choice. And in Google, I do because I can sideload an app. So in that case, I was running Fortnight on my Google Pixel, because I could sideload it, and sideload the Epic store in order to do that. And so I think what I hope to see is a push towards openness. Now we're seeing that with regulations and regulators in Europe, we're seeing that with companies like Epic and Spotify kind of pressure testing things with lawsuits. And so in general, obviously, if you control these gates, it's really valuable to not take a more open approach, but I see the future really evolving to be more open. Again, I'll have growing pains, but that's what I hope. 

As we always see in technology, I mean, Apple and Google have effectively a duopoly on phones. And what they usurped in order to get that duopoly were local, effectively duopolies and monopolies from cell carriers. So before Android and iOS, in your market, the entity that controlled the phones and the software that ran on the phones was your cell phone provider. And so now it's actually the maker of the phone. And so that completely flipped up on its end and that control was in the hands of the telcos for so long. And now it's in the hands of the phone and operating system manufacturers. 

It's such an interesting time. So this tug and pull between eyeballs and content, as my first boss on the internet put it, has existed even beyond the context of digital, but it's existed since the very beginning. And so this struggle still rages on, Lizzie. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, just in a different light. So if I'm trying to figure it out, I'm trying to launch my game. I have what I think is a good game. I hope that it gets discovered. And this is ultimately the key to my success as a game maker. There are all these different regulations. I'm trying to figure out just how I launch and how do I get the right people to discover me. What are your two cents on just figuring out marketing strategies, figuring out what resonates, figuring out how to monetize in a way where it's still good for the player, right? It's a win-win situation. This is the million dollar question. 

David Vogelpohl: Yeah. And I think from a direct-to-consumer perspective, if you're an early-stage publisher, maybe you got funding for your game. You're about to launch it. Unless it's like a browser game or something like that, don't mess with direct-to-consumer right away. Launch on Steam, launch on Apple, launch on Google, launch on, um, different marketplaces and try to get adoption through there. I mean, the marketplaces have tremendous audiences and eyeballs. And that's a complexity on the direct-to-consumer side. You probably don't want to mess with right away. You want to probably wait till you have a little more scale. 

It also depends on how much revenue your game's making now? Cause you're also thinking about, what percentage of it could I potentially convert to DTC? But from a DTC perspective, I would say just wait until you have more of that critical mass, and experiment by just releasing on platforms and then iterating from there. Game development and creation is not my area of expertise.

Lizzie Mintus: Totally. 

David Vogelpohl: Yeah, release and iterate. Perfection is the enemy of progress is a great saying. And another one I love is, the first version of everything is the worst version it will ever be. I think when you release a game though, you have this moment where people will judge you, right? You do your big release on Steam. I do think that perfection element's there, but releasing and iterating is how I approach everything. 

Lizzie Mintus: You might need to drink some hot sauce here, but for a larger publisher, what percent of revenue ballpark are companies looking at for DTC versus a traditional platform? Is there a framework for that? Like at a certain point you want to try and think about converting XYZ? 

David Vogelpohl: Yeah, I mean, there's going to be a cost of setting up your webshop and maintaining it. And so that'll be different for each org depending on what they want to do. And that cost will create a tipping point, in terms of like where you might think about, well, when is it worth it for us or not? Now it's with everything in business, the cost of the thing, isn't the point. It's the profit that thing is going to make. So from your business perspective, when is it going to be worth it for us as executives and as an engineering team or whatever? And even within the product, monetization, or within publishers, you have got to spend time on this. So at what point does it need to be worth it? 

Now, what our larger publishers will say is, well, when they release and really scale their direct-to-consumer offerings from scratch. And we have folks who are very far along in their journey where they're getting like 20-30 % plus of their revenue. There's many orgs publishers that are getting 50% plus through direct-to-consumers. And we have others that are very large publishers that haven't fully launched yet. And their expectation is that it should produce the revenue of having another hit game. And these are very, very large games, this particular publisher makes. And so that's how they view 

So it should be a significant driver, but that whole, you know, 20-80 rule, 80-20 rule really helps. But you can absolutely get 50% plus of revenue going through your webshop. 

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. What a perspective of making a whole other hit game? 

David Vogelpohl: Right? Yes. And obviously, the amount of work to set up a direct-to-consumer channel is a whole lot less than obviously creating a game. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, yes. I was wondering where you were going to go with that. Yes, a whole lot less than making a game. 

David Vogelpohl: Yeah. The other interesting thing we see a lot, when you go to make your web shop, like I kind of dismissed it earlier. I'm like, that's just a webshop. It's not that hard to make, right? But what you'll see a lot of publishers do is they'll leverage some sort of shop in a box approach. You know, like I'm going to air my products and I'm going to have a webshop next week or something like that. And then it'll just start making a bunch of money.

And all of a sudden it'll be 15-20% of revenue. And they're like, what do we do? And then they'll think about that next phase. And this is without trying, literally sticking it up on the website. So I do think there's a lot more opportunity than people realize. I do think there's a lot of like, "well, we're going to wait and see how things turn out with the regulations."

The way the rules work now, there's a lot of latitude there. And I think it is very reasonable that you should seek a direct relationship with your players. I mean, a business that doesn't have a direct relationship with their customers, isn't much of a business. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's very true. Yeah. Okay. That's good advice. So try now, stick something up, even if it's just out of the box and see what happens. See what comes out almost organically. And then you have it up and then you have to start trying to figure out what channels are going to be right for you. 

David Vogelpohl: And you don't have to over-engineer it. It could be, you know, four virtual currency packages or something that you give it. That's not even a platform. That's a webpage with links on it where you can buy stuff. You don't have to over-engineer the store experience in the beginning. And again, we've seen quite a few examples where people have done it as a side project and it just got out of control, but in a good way.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's good advice and a great reminder. And that is the enemy of success in business, is over-engineering and waiting until it becomes perfect and putting so much work into something where it's better to just get it at the door. Great advice. 

Okay, I want to talk about your own career a little bit and how you got here. And one of my favorite things to ask in the podcast is about mentors that you've had and what they've taught you. If you could go back 10 years or whatever and tell yourself, like, Hey, here's, here's this life hack. Here's this cheat code. What do you think you might say? And where did that come from? 

David Vogelpohl: Yeah. As I mentioned, I started in '96 and I had a lot of good early internet mentors who really taught me about the balance between the control of, in the early days of the Internet, it was control of different chunks of the network and the balance between who controlled that and how commerce was affected within that. And I think it's really informed a lot of my points of view and even obviously a lot of the work I've done today. 

One of my really most impactful mentors, in answering a question, if I could go back 10 years and do something different, this kind of ties into another mentor. It's Heather Brenner, the CEO of a company called WP Engine, who I used to work for. And Heather's an incredible, incredible business leader. But also one of the things she's really, really good at is really growing an organization and growing people and really building a culture around professional development and improvement. It's kind of this people's first approach. She was really impactful for me as I thought about my management strategy. I'd say prior to that, it was more just like brass tacks and like, let's get stuff done. She really helped me to see how to incorporate more of that heart into the smarts.

And then the last thing to go back 10 years is just to learn to say no more often. I often say you won't grow until you say no, you need to know what to say yes to. I think we often try to please others and try to make everything work, but really saying no is so critical in business and I know I've said yes way too much in my career.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, yeah, that was our pre-podcast conversation. The power of no, that's my goal for 2025. So if you talk to me and I say no, just expect that I'm going to say no. And if I say yes, maybe even question Lizzie, I thought you were going to. 

I have one final question before I ask it. I want to point people to fastspring.com. Are there any teasers, anything that you have for our audience to look forward to from FastSpring? Any big announcements or anything we should pay attention to in the games world are coming up. 

David Vogelpohl: Yeah. To keep up with everything like gaming related with FastSpring. FastSpring.gg actually will get you there 

One of our biggest announcements recently was that we hired a Head of Gaming, a gentleman named Chip Thurston who is a director who came to us from Scopely, formerly of SidePlay where he was a monetization lead. Chip has extensive experience with live service games, managing them there at Scopely and SidePlay, as well as the orchestration between that and direct-to-consumer. So we're really excited to have Chip on board to help lead our gaming practice. 

We do have a roadmap that we've developed or that we've developed for 2025 that we'll be announcing over the course, but I don't have any teasers for you there. But in general, supporting our customers and new customers around helping with global payments and making sure that's done in a way that helps address things like risk, fraud, and helping make sure that players like VIPs transact and have the experiences that are reflective of the value they provide. That's pretty much it on my front. 

Lizzie Mintus: Great. We've been talking to David Vogelpoel, who is CMO of FastSpring. David, where can people go to work with your platform, learn more about you, or chat with you? Or maybe have you speak if you're saying yes to those kinds of things right now. 

David Vogelpohl: Oh, nice. I actually did say no to one of those things earlier. But like I mentioned, fastspring.gg. Watch for us at various conferences. GDC in March, we'll be at Pocket Gamer Connect London in January, and then various events throughout the year. And then if you'd like to check me out, you can look me up on linkedin.com/in/davidvogelpohl, and then you can find me on X @omgitsdv.

Lizzie Mintus: That's the best. And Vogelpohl is VOGELPOHL. 

David Vogelpohl: Yes, yes. The audience doesn't know how to spell my last name. 

Lizzie Mintus: I do. Thank you, David.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.