Earlier this year we invested in Pantaloon because we believe it proves what modern publishing should look like, and what can be achieved when owning the player relationship is a strategy built in from the very beginning. Today we're excited to finally show it in action.
Pantaloon is an indie publisher at the forefront of thinking about a publisher's relationship with its playerbase. Not just around curation and discoverability to grow that playerbase, but around how to actively engage with players from game to game as the catalog grows bigger every year with new published titles.
Pantaloon shows what happens when a publisher gets the most out of our tools and shapes them with its own voice and vision. LootLocker provides the building blocks, and Pantaloon has combined them in a way that fits its own strategy. Another publisher would, and should, put them together differently.
Playbill: A Destination, Not a Settings Page
At the center of Pantaloon's strategy is the Playbill website and Primo, its premium subscription, both powered by LootLocker.
Playbill is the first destination built on Player Portal, an upcoming LootLocker product for launching a fully branded, player-facing destination on your own domain. Pantaloon has helped shape it from the start, and Playbill sets the bar for what it can do.
What makes Playbill special is that it's not simply a place for players to update their email address. It's a destination. Somewhere to send your players and engage them outside of the game, on a channel that, for once, you actually own. Player Portal can surface any LootLocker feature, such as Triggers, Friends, Rewards, Broadcasts, Progressions, Unified Player Accounts and Platform Keys, as well as player game session data, which keeps players informed of the games they haven't played yet and suggests ones they might want to return to.
This even includes subscriptions. Primo is powered by LootLocker's Economy system and our integration with Stripe, so Pantaloon doesn't have to manage subscriptions separately from player profiles. They're one and the same. Both monthly and annual subscriptions are configured in the LootLocker web console, with entitlements defining exactly what the player receives each month.
Bells: Loyalty Built on Progressions
Pantaloon uses LootLocker's Progression system to power its loyalty program, Bells. Bells can be earned in a whole host of ways both inside and outside of Pantaloon's game catalog: playing Pantaloon games, completing in-game achievements, solving ARG puzzles, and even linking other platform accounts like Discord or Steam to your Playbill profile. As players earn Bells, they unlock Discord roles and other exclusive rewards, putting their achievements across Pantaloon's whole catalog front and center in the community and tying everything together into one ecosystem.
LootLocker's Progression system is built on points, thresholds and tiers, with rewards set at each tier. Progressions can run per game or as a publisher-level system that each game updates separately. This flexibility lets Pantaloon define individual rewards (Discord roles and more) for each tier of Bells, while optionally creating game-specific progressions where needed. And since progression points are also a reward type, a game's own progression can reward points in publisher progressions like Bells.
Monthly Partner Games
Part of Playbill's core value is its monthly partners. Each month, free subscribers get a chance to earn a free game key, while paid subscribers get a guaranteed one.
Managing those keys, distributing them to player inboxes and giving players one place on the Playbill website to find all of their keys is another great example of how LootLocker provides tools for every step of the process, out of the box.
Under the hood, each month's partner game gets its own Platform Keys campaign in LootLocker. Pantaloon uploads the batch of keys it receives from the partner, one campaign per platform, and those keys are reserved for that campaign alone. From there the campaign plugs straight into LootLocker's Rewards, so a key can be granted like any other reward: guaranteed for Primo subscribers through the subscription setup above, as a chance for free subscribers through a Trigger, or manually granted to a specific segment of players through Reward Campaigns. When a player receives one, a key is pulled from the campaign, delivered to their inbox and kept on their Playbill profile, while LootLocker tracks how many keys have been claimed so no key is ever handed out twice.
And it's no longer just keys. Some partner games don't launch through Steam, so Pantaloon now serves the game files directly too. This month, Playbill players can download a game from Devolver Digital straight from their Playbill profile. It's delivered through LootLocker's file reward type, using one-time download links, so players can't pass them on to friends.
To close the loop between sending out keys and players actually playing, LootLocker's Presence system shows whether each player who received a game went on to play it, and for how long.
Inside the Games: The Pantaloon SDK
Pantaloon's real strength is how deeply Playbill is wired into every game in the catalog. It gives players a reason to play each Pantaloon game, while teaching Pantaloon more about their play habits so it can communicate with each player more effectively.
So how does Pantaloon connect with players in-game? It's all powered by the Pantaloon SDK, a white-label version of the LootLocker SDK, prepared with the integrations and in-game elements core to Pantaloon's strategy.
Every game Pantaloon publishes is integrated with LootLocker and ships with:
- Platform Authentication and White Label Login, so players can sign in and sign up to Playbill directly from the game
- Broadcasts for reaching players in-game with news and information
- Triggers for Bell unlocks
- Metadata hooks that capture what the player has done in the game, such as selecting a specific path, unlocking something rare or finishing a level or portion of the game, so each message reaches the players it matters to
That's Pantaloon's baseline. Another publisher might start with just platform authentication and broadcasts, or just store metadata, and build out from there with whatever mix of LootLocker’s features suits them.
One Twist Per Game
From there, the team at Pantaloon adds a unique twist to each game, powered by one of LootLocker’s many features. Each twist drives more engagement around specific milestones in the game’s launch.
This is something we care deeply about: LootLocker has to add value for the publisher, its developers and their players at the same time. The publisher gets a connected view of its players across the whole catalog. Each developer gets ready-made features like leaderboards, progressions and user-generated content, with no backend to build, and their game plugs straight into a catalog players already follow. And players get rewarded just for playing, with loyalty points that carry over from game to game, exclusive in-game items, community perks and even free games. All in one product.
- BOXROOM: Given the strong focus on props in the game, BOXROOM uses LootLocker's Asset system, Reward Campaigns and Claimable Links to give players incentives to play. For example, players who played the Steam demo were rewarded with a glowing yellow lava lamp.
- OFFBEAT: Look out for an upcoming release where players will be able to easily share their musical creations through a web interface, using LootLocker's UGC and Player Portal features. Sharing custom tracks will be as easy as it used to be in the MySpace days.
- ROLLA: The top 100 scores from the Steam demo, from players who had also created a Playbill account, were locked in. Using Reward Campaigns and Segments, each of those players received the game for free when ROLLA launched this October.
Doing this pays off.
"Thanks to LootLocker we were able to convert over 70% of players who played the demo to buy the Early Access, as they wanted to get access to the limited edition lava lamp."
Jamin Smith, Founder of Pantaloon
We're excited to see similar and even better results as Pantaloon continues launching its next batch of games.
Beyond the Screen
But it's not just in-game that these activities take place. Using claimable Triggers, Pantaloon takes its creative campaigns into the real world.
At Gamescom, Pantaloon debuted its first sticker campaign: six stickers, each with its own QR code. Find and scan all six and a random game from Pantaloon's catalog appears in your inbox. All powered by LootLocker's Claimable Links, White Label Login and Rewards.
The whole scanning and claiming flow is handled out of the box by LootLocker. Scan one of the QR codes and you're taken to a Pantaloon-branded login page where you can sign up with a magic link. Every step is branded and customizable.
From One-to-Many to One-to-One
Most email newsletters are one-to-many. Thanks to LootLocker, Pantaloon can communicate one-to-a-few, or even one-to-one, because every game, campaign and Playbill interaction feeds back into a single picture of each player.
All together, Pantaloon has created a vast, targeted strategy, inside and outside of its games, around building and owning its player relationships. Relationships built around value and curation, where every form of communication is crafted as specifically for the reader as possible and includes some kind of engagement or value-gaining opportunity for the player, should they wish to engage.
Through LootLocker's Segments, Pantaloon can group players using a growing number of conditions:
- Player properties: the platform they play on, the accounts they've linked, the other games they've played and their playtime
- Time: when they joined, when they were last seen, and the server time or their own local time
- Metadata: any metadata key or value, such as the path they chose or the rare item they unlocked
- Entitlements: active entitlements and the assets they own
- Playtests and surveys: whether they've completed a specific playtest or survey
- Leaderboards: their score or rank on a specific leaderboard
- Progressions: their current points or tier in a game-level progression
These segments can then be used across a variety of LootLocker systems:
- Triggers: reward players who have reached a specific playtime threshold
- Broadcasts: show platform-specific news to players on Steam, Xbox or PlayStation, or reach returning players who haven't played in a while
- Reward Campaigns: manually reward a hand-picked group of players in one go, like ROLLA's top 100 demo players, either straight away or on a schedule
- Surveys: send a survey to a specific group of players
- Limit Access: restrict who can play a game, for example to players on a specific platform or with an entitlement
The Future of Publishing
Pantaloon has defined itself as a forward-thinking publisher. It has the tools to build a value-based relationship with players that can weather the industry's uncertain future. And we don't expect it to be the only one. We believe this is where publishing is heading. More games are being released, platforms keep shifting, and everything is getting noisier. So it’s worth every publisher asking: How do players see our label? What is our voice? And what corner of the market, big or small, can we make our own?
Pantaloon’s approach is one way to do it, and you can sign up for Playbill. to see it from the player’s side. Your catalog, audience and voice will call for a different mix, and LootLocker is built to fit. Recognize your players with Unified Player Accounts and Segments. Reach them with Broadcasts and Player Portal. Reward them with Progressions, Platform Keys, Files and more. Then get in touch, and we’ll help you find the mix that works for you.
