ZBD and TapNation forge new status quo in rewarded gaming

ZBD, the payments innovator powering real-money rewards for games, has introduced embedded in-game rewards, an evolution in how mobile games use real-money rewards to engage players, alongside launch partners including TapNation and Fumb Games.

Embedded rewards are a new approach to rewards in the mobile gaming industry, taking lessons learned from the rise of rewarded play apps to give any game the ability to incentivize users to play more, for longer and more profitably. Players can now earn real-money rewards inside the game, not a separate app, resulting in triple-digit retention boosts.

This solves an issue inherent in rewards apps which, while undeniably effective, limit the scale at which games can benefit from rewards by only applying rewards systems to users sent to a game from a specific app. Additionally, this system mostly performs well for IAP-monetized games due to the high cost of rewarded users, which are difficult to absorb for ad-monetized titles.

ZBD’s solution changes that. Already successfully integrated into titles such as Idle Bank, an idle tycoon hit by TapNation with more than 12M downloads, it embeds rewards directly into the gameplay experience. Powered by a lightweight SDK, the ZBD model drives improved retention and monetization for titles that monetize with ads as well as IAPs.

Philippe Lenormand, Head of Web3 at TapNation said:

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“ZBD is taking a bold approach to boosting game monetization while keeping players happy, which comes at a good time for the industry. Embedded rewards have the potential to transform performance for games, especially those that partly rely on ad monetization.”

Beyond TapNation, the new SDK is already live in 20+ games from 7 other partners, including Fumb Games, PlayEmber and Hazmob. This includes a mix of older games, like Merge Monsters from Fumb Games, which saw a +181% increase in D7 retention after years of little activity, as well as new titles geared towards rewards, like Crypto Idle Tycoon by Ruleks Games, which saw its D30 retention climb by +355% and ad revenue per user by +124%.

Ben Cousens, Chief Strategy Officer at ZBD said:

“Rewards are proven beyond doubt to improve the value exchange between games and gamers, leading to powerful upticks in engagement, retention and monetization. With embedded rewards, we’re unlocking that potential beyond the constraints of rewarded UA channels. We’re using real-money payments to make a game more worth playing. And removing all the complexity that usually comes with payments to create a solution tailor-made for mobile game studios.”

Rewards powered by ZBD are always real money, not just in-game points. To facilitate this kind of money movement for amounts as small as a cent, ZBD uses the Bitcoin Lightning Network. But developers can choose whatever icon and currency name they want to show for the rewards, the Lightning Network is just the underlying payments layer that enables the transactions in real-time all over the world. ZBD has long offered a powerful payments API for studios to craft bespoke reward systems with custom logic, interfaces, and UX flows. The SDK builds on that foundation, transforming what was once an extensive technical integration into a ready-to-deploy layer that gets games live with rewards in less than a week.

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Last month, ZBD announced its payments technology had been approved by Apple to enable native Bitcoin microtransactions in the mobile game SaruTobi, making it the first iOS game to integrate in-app purchases using Bitcoin. Now, embedded rewards are making it easy for any game to send microtransactions to players and gain massive performance boosts.