Jagex plays a winning game with data

Jagex Games Studio is a globally recognized 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 recognizable 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; they can also make in-game purchases, buying items, power-ups and other in-game wealth, a feature also available as a free-to-play model.

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

Jagex needed apayments partnerwith a highly technical, data-centric approach to complement its existing systems and help take payments optimization 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 optimization 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 and acquirer in the US and EU, which gives it access to in-depth transaction data, including insights into the reasons behind card refusals.

With this information, Adyen’s built-inrevenue optimizationsuite, RevenueAccelerate, gets to work, using machine learning to adjust payment requests in real-time and maximize 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 in the RevenueAccelerate suite that has led to significant uplift has been Auto Retry, an automated system 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.

Additionally, RevenueAccelerate’s feature Intelligent Payment Routing will ensure the best performance for every transaction by dynamically adjusting the route based on real-time data.  

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 authorization 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 behavior.” 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 authorization rates for recurring transactions.

Further, with Adyen’sDynamic Card Validation, Jagex can easily onboard new players by dynamically formatting card validations as $0 or $1, depending on bank compatibility.

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 ofchargebacks) 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.

Read next: 3 ways to understand customers with payments data