Jagex plays a winning game with data

Jagex Games Studio is a globally recognised creator and publisher of MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games).

Starting in 2001 with its flagship free-to-play adventure game RuneScape, Jagex has created a long-standing reputation for crafting one of the world’s most recognisable online games.

With over 40 titles published to date, Jagex prides itself on developing hugely popular and accessible games for millions of players globally.

Jagex has two payment models: Players can pay a subscription to access the game and they can also make in-game purchases such as buying items, power-ups and other in-game wealth.

Data sits at the core of Jagex’s business and the company collects and analyses a huge amount from multiple sources, which it uses to combat fraud and increase conversion rates.

Jagex needed a payments partner with a highly technical, data-centric approach to complement its existing systems and help take payments optimisation to the next level. In 2014 it went into partnership with Adyen.

“For Jagex it is all about streamlining the payment process and making it as frictionless as possible. Adyen’s data-driven, analytical approach to driving optimisation made it an ideal fit for us.” Nastassja Gilmartin, Payments & Fraud Manager, Jagex.

With the right data it is possible to make adjustments to the payment flow and incrementally improve conversion rates.

Adyen acts as both a gateway andacquirer, which gives it access to in-depth transaction data, including insights into the reasons behind card refusals.

With this information, Adyen’s built-inrevenue optimisationsuite, RevenueAccelerate, gets to work, using machine learning to adjust payment requests in real-time and maximise the chance of an approval.

“With Adyen’s data tools we gain valuable insights into how transactions are behaving, which we then feedback into the system to generate an uplift in conversions.” Nastassja Gilmartin, Payments & Fraud Manager, Jagex.

One tool that has led to significant uplift has beenAuto Retries,an automated tool that uses Adyen’s data to retry transactions that failed due to technical errors.

“Auto Retries have been a great success. After several months it has had a 9.6% success rate on declined transactions. Internal development resources can be limited, and it is a huge advantage to know that Adyen is able to make impactful and beneficial changes to the business despite this.” Nastassja Gilmartin, Payments & Fraud Manager, Jagex.

With a high proportion of its revenue coming from subscription payments, it is imperative for Jagex that the re-billing process is frictionless and interruptions are kept to a minimum.

Numerous factors affect the success or failure of a subscription payment, which vary from country to country. In the US for example, the majority of Jagex’s gamers are paid bi-weekly, resulting in an uplift of successful payments at both the beginning and the middle of each month.

Whereas in the UK players tend to be paid monthly, and there is only one spike at the beginning of the month. In another example, Jagex experienced consistently low acceptance rates for BINs linked to one issuer in Canada. In a case like this it is up to an acquirer, like Adyen, to work alongside the issuer to rectify the problem.

“Retention is obviously our primary goal and equally the optimum outcome for that would be a successful authorisation on the first rebill attempt… But if you’re looking for one key metric to base your rebill strategy around, country is definitely the most important and where you’ll find the most consistent trends in behaviour.” Alastair Morris, Payments Product Manager, Jagex

Adyen’s direct connection to card schemes on a global scale provides Jagex with the granular data insights needed to track trends and make adjustments to increase authorisation rates for recurring transactions.

Increasingly, international markets are driving huge growth for Jagex, and US gamers are fast becoming the most active players on the platform.

When moving into new markets Adyen has enabled Jagex to support over 30 payment methods, which can be accessed from a single integration.  

Local payment methods also bring with them an element of risk. Even ‘guaranteed' methods (those with no risk of chargebacks) can have fraudulent behavior associated with them. Adyen has been working with Jagex to introduce risk checks to these localpayment methodsto help protect Jagex and its gamers.

Moving forwards, Adyen and Jagex will continue to work in partnership to further enable frictionless payments, no matter where in the world the player might be. The teams have weekly calls to track changes and review technical releases to ensure Jagex gets the most from Adyen’s feature updates. 

“Adyen has been a great partner in terms of taking onboard feedback and understanding the needs of our business. The team’s response time is excellent and regular, structured contact with our Account Manager helps to improve our processes and ensure we get the utmost most value out of the partnership.” Nastassja Gilmartin, Payments & Fraud Manager, Jagex.