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Out of the Park Developments quadrupled sales in South Korea — the fourth-largest video game market in the world — by localizing its benchmark game into Korean.
I spoke to Richard Grisham, past COO of Out of the Park and current Director of Business Development at Com2Us — a Korean development company that acquired Out of the Park in 2020.
Stream our conversation below for insights into:
- How to successfully roll out a localized version of a game
- Running “microcampaigns” for better ROI on your global marketing efforts
- Cultivating brand ambassadors and future employees from your user base.
Learn more about how FastSpring helps game developers sell games online.
Full Interview: Audio Only
Full Interview: Video
For more insights into breaking into new markets and optimizing regional revenue, check out our 2022 Emerging SaaS Customers Market Report with a list of countries and regions where we are seeing high growth in software and subscription sales.
How FastSpring Can Help You Sell Software Around the World
FastSpring helps software companies sell around the world through localized web storefronts, branded checkouts, global sales tax and VAT management, and more.
Those quadruple sales in South Korea? Here’s where we fit in.
In most of the world, once a buyer reached the web storefront page, Out of the Park saw a high conversion rate. But the Korean version of the page had a much lower conversion rate than any other language — even after releasing the localized version of the game.
Out of the Park uses FastSpring for their ecommerce checkout. When a buyer is ready to check out, they’re taken to a web storefront hosted by FastSpring.
After some meetings with FastSpring’s customer success team, they figured out the issue.
“It turns out that the expectation of your typical Korean customer is that they’re not going to spend $40 for a game. And we never put the price of the game anywhere until the very last page of the checkout,” Richard explained.
When Richard added the price of the game earlier in the checkout process, conversion rates improved dramatically. Here’s Richard telling the story.
FastSpring partners with SaaS and software companies that sell around the world. Sign up for a free trial or schedule a demo to learn more about FastSpring’s localized web storefronts, best-in-class checkout options, and more.
Transcript
EJ Brown
Rich, thank you for joining me.
Rich Grisham
It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
EJ Brown
Awesome. So I, I just want to start by having you tell us a little bit about out of the park. And of course, I’m already out of the park gaming out of the park developments.
Rich Grisham
Sure. So out of the park developments is a company that for most of its existence was a very small independent video game development company. This is the 23rd year that it’s been in existence, they two currently we make three video games one is called out of the park baseball, which is a PC strategy game. It’s licensed by Major League Baseball and the MLBPA. We also make an app called Out of the Park Go and we sell a NHL-licensed hockey strategy game called Franchise Hockey Manager. So these are the you know, most people when you think of video games, you think of you know controllers and fast action and Twitch skills and stuff. And these are very much not that these are built for people like a certain age like me, for example, who I don’t have the stick skills that I used to have when I was a little younger. But I love baseball, and I love hockey. And I love setting a lineup and choosing a setting up a rotation and and playing out what matchups I think are interesting. And that’s what we do. That’s what we do. We’ve been making the game out of the park baseball for 23 years now. And we’ve been a fascinating customer for several years now as well. So that’s the short answer. I hope to you know what, who is out of the park development?
EJ Brown
I just want to shout out I love your background. Is that is that Hank Aaron?
Rich Grisham
That is Hank Aaron, one of my heroes. Above him, Jackie Robinson and above him Satchel Paige. One of the great things about working … and then there’s Gary Carter, another one of my heroes right there. One of the great things about working with, you know, a game that is licensed by Major League Baseball is that I just, you know, I get to be a part of my favorite sports every single day. And it’s, it’s there, you never learn enough about a sport that has the rich history and tradition of Major League Baseball. And, you know, it’s wonderful to be a part of it. And you just the more I learn about the game, and the more people I meet in the game, the more I love it every single day.
EJ Brown
So talk about talk about how it’s global. I would love for you to talk about both how the company is global and then how you’re realizing like big baseball has a global impact.
Rich Grisham
Sure, it’s great question. So the company is absolutely global. So out of the park developments in has always been headquartered in Hamburg, Germany. And people are always asked me now wait a second, you’re taking basically the quintessential American game, you have, you know, the only licensed strategy game in the world. You know, you’re recognized, you know, along with MLB. The show, it’s just being you know, these are major league baseball games, but yet you’re you’re headquartered in Germany. And the answer is, yes, we’re headquartered in Germany, the founder of the company, Marcus Heinsohn, is German, but he fell in love with baseball at a young age. And he’s a brilliant programmer. And he along with his partner, Andreas, just started the company. And he just didn’t see a baseball strategy game out there that he liked. And so he built it himself. And over the course of three 510 1520 years, it turned into the mini global phenomenon that is out of the park baseball. And for again, most of its its existence, it was very small company three, four or five people. It was remote before remote was cool. You know, I’ve been working with him for about eight years now. And I’m based in on the east coast of the United States. You know, our lead developer is based in Canada, but he travels the world and he’s always working wherever he is. So it’s it’s in its in its first iteration. Prior to the acquisition by come to us it was already a global company, just a very small, very small global company but yet headquartered in Germany, but you know, we have people in New York and in Toronto and in Vancouver and San Diego, so global from the from the from the word go. And the game of baseball, of course, is absolutely global. You know, you have got baseball mad fans in the United States in Japan, in Cuba and Korea in in Mexico and the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. You You know, these are very different places, you know, in the common love of baseball is what can help a whole lot of people really enjoy a game, but they’re also extremely different markets that react very differently to the game and to marketing messaging and things like that. And obviously, when you’re a very, very, very small company with very limited revenues and budgets, you know, you don’t exactly have a, you know, an army of people who can who can help you customize that message in all those areas. But on the other hand, with thanks to technology and partners, like fast spring, we can, we can take some tools and we can customize them and at least make sure that you know, if you’re in Korea or if you’re in the United States, you’re gonna see the kind of messaging and language that you want to see that will make the game more interesting to you.
EJ Brown
, so you mentioned South Korea. Talk to us about the acquisition.
Rich Grisham
Yes. So in late 2020, a company called come to us, which is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, it’s probably most known for its summoners war game, which is extremely popular franchise, but also has several very popular major league baseball license games, they didn’t really have something in the PC space, and they acquired out of the park development. So I’ve worked developments remains its own business unit, but also now is owned by come to us. And my job actually changed. I went from being sort of the dual role of Chief Operating Officer and Chief Marketing Officer of out of the park, to where I’m now head, the head of business development for come to us, while also maintaining a role in the operations and the marketing of out of the park. So it’s a very interesting role for me, and my global requirements have now stretched from just being based really concerned with the combination of of Hamburg, Germany and New York, to now Homburg, New York, Los Angeles and Seoul, South Korea. So it’s been a very interesting, interesting ride. But one of the many things that happened with the company this acquisition is that this very small out of the park developments team really was able to make a lot of use of the resources of the larger company so that we could do all sorts of things that frankly, we had always wanted to do, but never really had the ability to do.
EJ Brown
And you’re talking about that as part of this acquisition, you were able to quadruple the sales in South Korea. Yes. Yeah. How did that work?
Rich Grisham
Yeah. So that’s probably the that’s probably one of our one of our proudest accomplishments since the acquisition. So one of the things I mentioned what we’ve always wanted to do with a game, like out of the park baseball, we always wanted to localize it in other languages, because it’s an English only. And being a strategy game. It’s dense, there’s a lot going on, there’s a lot of words, there’s a lot of text, there’s a lot of numbers, or a lot of charts, a lot of grass. And we always wanted to localize it in Korean, and Japanese, and Spanish and all of these other languages where there are really massive fan bases around the world. And just we weren’t, you know, we don’t have the ability to do that. So one of the very first things that we started on after the acquisition might come to us has come to I said, we’re going to localize this game in Korean. And there are more words in out of the park baseball than is in the Bible. I didn’t know that until we started our localization project, but it’s just massive. There’s just so much. And so it took many, many, many months of a dedicated project to do it. And we had to, and I’m not going to get too technical here. But we had to do some pretty significant separation of like the user interface from the system that’s serving up a lot of the stuff that appears on the screen. And thanks to you know, thanks to the resources have come to us we’re able to make that happen. And 2021 We debuted the very first localized version of the game in Korean and combined with a license for the KBO and the KBO Players Association. So those two very, very difficult projects were able to come together. And you know, in the two plus years now that we’ve been part of the come to us family, this sales of out of the park have more than quadrupled in Korea because of the localization. And it’s just, you have to be really dedicated. If you want to play out of the park baseball, you don’t speak English, it’s just it’s really, really, really challenging. And having a localized has opened up a whole new world to Korean fans. It’s made the game much more accessible to a very significant baseball crazy market. And and we’re only just getting started, we still really the game is localized in Korean, but we don’t see to this point yet really have, we haven’t fully realized what we want to do, which is to have a Korean community group, as well. You know, we are also we would love to localize in other languages. You know, again, I mentioned Japanese and Spanish are two ones as well. So not only did it help us, you know, forex our market and Korea, it also gives us some of the infrastructures that over the next few years, we could do more localizations and open it up to other broader markets.
EJ Brown
I’m curious, I know that there are companies that specialize in in game localization, did you work with one of those? Or did you do most of it internally,
Rich Grisham
it was a hybrid. So it was a bit of both. We use come to us resources, as well as services that they have used in the past as being a Korean Pasc as being a Korean company, they do a lot of localization of their own game, a lot of which are initially developed in Korean. So it was a it was a combination, but it was led by come to us, which was nice. Yeah, because they have a lot of experience in that arena.
EJ Brown
Right? anything surprise you about were there any hiccups in the localization process that, you know, that other companies should watch out for?
Rich Grisham
Localization is extremely difficult and is extremely detailed. So any, and again, like in a game, like out of the park, where you have hundreds of 1000s of lines of text, you’re going to have some misses. And the key is, first of all, the first key is messaging. When you first, say to a new market, we’ve localized it can, you know, hurray, we’ve got the caveat on license, and we’ve localized it in in Korean, you know, all your problems are solved. Hurray, right? What we said was, we have localized it for the first time, we we know that it’s, it’s not going to be perfect, but we are dedicated to making it as good as it can be, we welcome your feedback, give us a little time, give us your thoughts, give us your feedback, you know, we didn’t want to because we knew that no matter how many eyeballs looked at before it went public, the public, always find something that you missed. So we were very careful with the messaging, that this is the beginning of a process. And we’re going to continue to optimize it moving forward, which we’ve done, and that we welcome feedback. And we’ve taken a lot of that feedback and, and we put it in the game. And it’s it’s a constant loop of proper messaging and understanding, you know, that localization, no matter how good you are, you’re going to have things that you missed, you’re gonna have problems. And, you know, you’re never done, you’re never done. You start once, but you never finish it. Never finish it.
EJ Brown
So I know that a company like out of the park that, you know, the selling beloved games is bound to have big fans, have you done anything with like brand ambassador programs, in general, and especially tied to building local communities? Or localizing?
Rich Grisham
Short answer is yes, we have. And over time, it’s taken on different different things, because technology changes constantly, right? So once you figure something that works, then something changes quickly, right. So like, you know, for most of the life of out of the park baseball, the forums, internally, not the internal company, but like our forums we had was where we got 95% of our feedback. But then, you know, five, six years ago, we realized that, you know, live streaming was where a lot of eyeballs were going so and I’ll never forget, when I first started working, one of the very first programs I put in place when I started working out of the park is we have to have somebody live streaming our game, we have to have our own Twitch channel, and we have to have our own presence where we are live streaming our game. It’s a very tough game to live stream if you haven’t done it before. Because you know, they’ll Some of it’s just watching baseball players thrown around the field and catch but a lot of it is roster management and trades and free agencies, the kinds of things that it’s not like, you know, you’re watching somebody play Call of Duty, you know, it can be you know, it’s not your typical livestream kind of a game so we leaned heavily in the live streaming and it’s paid huge dividends. We also you know, Discord has has become, you know, a communication tool Will, you know, and is particularly, you know, highly used by a lot of people over the last two to three years. So we now have an official discord channel, which gets pretty rowdy, I’ll say, very rowdy, you know, unlike a forum, which can get rowdy as well, but a forum is kind of an, you know, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a legacy type of communication system. Whereas the discord is constant, like there’s just messaging and it’s, you know, there’s a lot going on. And so, you know, we have done a lot of things we use social media, obviously, as well, you know, we do a lot of little things to try to, to find people where they are, because everyone has their sort of favorite way to communicate, and their favorite places to go. And with baseball fans who tend to be a little bit older than your typical video game fan, we especially need to make sure that you know, we have a Facebook presence, we have a Twitter presence, we have, you know, we keep our forums, which are still to this day, very popular, we have a discord presence. And all of these are sort of local in terms of they meet people where they are, but yet, you know, we’re we don’t sort of just go all in on any one of them. Because when you do that 20 minutes later, the technology is going to change. And you’re going to be looking around like, Well, what happened? Where’d everybody go? Huh?
EJ Brown
Yeah, one of the things that I was thinking about, I had the pleasure of interviewing one of Wat pads, co founders, Alan Lau, who was talking about I mean, Wattpad is a is a global phenomenon as well. And he, the company would find the biggest fans in different regions, you know, turn them into these ambassadors, and then eventually they would become, they would hire them on, you know, and I thought that that was just such a smart way of, of, you know, expanding by, like giving people the opportunity to become a part of the thing that they love.
Rich Grisham
Well, we’ve done a lot of that, particularly in the live streaming world. So for our for, we currently have what we call affiliate, so live stream affiliates. So if you become an affiliate out of the park, you get Twitch drops, which means that when people watch you stream out of the park baseball, they get something out of it, they get digital card packs that they can use in our game. And so we that’s, you know, one of the one of the ways that we’ve done that is, is to do exactly that, because then when you’re an affiliate of ours, you feel differently than if you’re just somebody who’s live streaming something for the fun of it. You know, and I probably sound like, I’m giving ourselves a lot of credit here. But you know, we have several people in our organization who participate regularly in those live streams and who, who are there to answer questions and to help people out, you know, we’re, we’re a very small group of people. And we can only do so much, but we really try to support our affiliates as much as we can. And we’ve also done exactly what you said, there are at least four people that work for the company right now that started out as fans. And we brought those people in. And you know, I even I’m not even including myself in it. But I began as a fan of out of the park baseball and got to know the founders. And that’s how I came to work with it. But there’s there’s a number of people, including someone who just announced today, that they’re joining the team that are big fans of the game. And they come from all sorts of different places. This this one particular fellow who who’s joined us come from Fangraphs, which is very well known in the baseball community as being like the Bible for baseball statistics. So there that’s absolutely something that we’ve done. And, and we’re proud of it and you know, it, it usually works out really well for everybody meaning internally, for the individual for the community. You know, the out of the park baseball community, I say it all the time. It’s the best community and video games, but they’re very demanding, extremely demanding. They are very vocal, and they hold us extremely accountable. They give us a hard time when they feel like we deserve it. And they give us praise when they feel like they deserve it. And so there’s a lot of people in the company who started out as fans and that’s definitely one great way to continue to make your product and your company better.
EJ Brown
That’s great. So let’s talk about promotion or marketing. How how do you promote globally, in just you know, when you’ve got different audiences with different cultural perspectives, even different cultural perspectives of the same game or game me inning baseball. So yeah, what what have you learned along the way?
Rich Grisham
Well, I’ve learned that as soon as you figure something out, it changes. And like, it’s, it’s it is. So it evolves so quickly, right. I mean, you know, there’s all sorts of different things. Right, you know, live streaming is a big part of our, of our promotion. But, you know, we’re reaching a few 100 People typically on a live stream, right. So it’s a very, you know, it has a long tail kind of a process. And, and that’s, you know, that’s one way, you know, and we, we, like, the variety of live stream affiliates that we have, we have some folks who sort of focus on different aspects of the game, we have a couple of folks who live stream in different languages, which is helpful in different days and times. You know, the real global promotion answer in 2022 is digital marketing. Right? And, and in digital marketing gives you a lot of opportunities to reach different geographies and different languages, but it also gives you incredible opportunities to make mistakes, without even realizing you’re making mistakes. And, you know, there are, even in two years, what was successful two years ago in terms of reach, and in terms of clicks, and in terms of conversions is not successful. Now. You know, we’ve had to change our digital marketing approach a couple of different times, because, again, we see, you know, what is successful one year was not successful, and in another year, certain, you know, certain Korean language promotions work really well, and other ones don’t. So, I’m not really giving you a concrete answer. But you know, we’re, it’s constantly changing and constantly evolving. And we have to really be smart with what we say and how we say it. And we’ve learned some things are of interest to people. And some things are not, for example, when our game goes on sale, that’s very interesting to a whole lot of people, they love it, when it goes on sale, you know, inflation is a challenge, you know, the economics of the world right now are different than they were even a year or two ago. And people are very cost conscious. And you know, our game is a $40 game. That is not an insignificant purchase, right? So when it goes on sale for 20 bucks, or for 30 bucks, you know, people are really interested in that other times, we’ve promoted, you know, interviews that we’ve done on our YouTube channel, or live stream, and people aren’t interested on it, sometimes we, you know, in a certain market will promote, you know, a particular matchup featuring a particular player that’s popular in that market, and we get a lot more people who are interested in excited about it, but other times we do the same thing, and it doesn’t generate it. So it’s, there’s no silver bullet, it’s constantly changing. If you’re not looking at the data on a regular basis, you’re in a lot of trouble. And also, we don’t have an unlimited budget, right, we have a we’re the business unit, you know, is is a, you know, it’s not like, you know, we’re not making billions of dollars, right? Like, it’s, you know, we have to be very smart with our marketing budgets and with our allocations, and it’s always changing and evolving. And we’re always looking to optimize what we do and how we do it. And you know, that sometimes it’s a little, it’s sometimes it’s a 10 second YouTube video, sometimes it’s a static image that is directed towards just the Korean market. For four days, sometimes it is a very broad, hey, the game is on sale for 50% that we broadcast around the world. There’s just a lot of different little nuances to it that we’re constantly learning about and changing and adjusting.
EJ Brown
So I’m curious what the, you know, you have an Asian market, and it feels, I’m pretty sure that the social apps that many Asian countries or Asian residents use is very different than the social media apps that would be used in the US. How do you how do you strategize that way?
Rich Grisham
Well, we that’s part of the part of the stratification that we do right is is we almost get into micro campaigns, right? Like Naver is very popular in Korea. No one in the United States knows what Naver is right? In the United States. It’s a lot of Facebook, a lot of Twitter, a lot of Reddit. So we have to understand that we have to direct our budgets towards it, you know, there’s not many big, there’s no big six figure marketing campaigns. They’re all very small campaigns that get localized and targeted. And that that’s exact I have to do it because in different places people use very different tools to, to, to find out what what, what is most interesting to them. And you know, another thing that’s interesting of this right like, out of the park baseball is a $40 PC game. It’s not a free to play app. Now we do have a free app called out of the park baseball go. But you know, as far as baseball, the PC game, that’s our bread and butter. That’s our it’s 23 years the company has been based around this game, it is an extraordinary ask to have somebody who’s sitting at their computer or on their phone, and they get served up an ad for out of the park baseball, it is an extraordinary ask to expect that person to see the ad, tap on a link, look at the description, see the trailer and then press the button to spend $40 on a piece. Right? It’s very different than if you’re just thumbing through your phone and you see an ad for a free to play game. Like it’s really easy to tap and install a free game. And then in two minutes determine whether you like it or not in deleted or not. That’s easy. Getting someone to spend $40 To buy a PC game is an extraordinary ask. And I will never forget when I first started running the marketing for out of the park back in 2016. You know, the people that I was working with were like, That’s impossible. It’s not you, no one’s going to do that. And I said, Well, that’s my job. So I got to figure it out. Thank you very much, right. So you know, you have to be really smart with your expectations and understanding what you’re asking people to do. And rarely will it be the first time might be the 10th time might be the 25th time, it might be because not only did they see an ad served up to them, you know, when they search for something on Google. But they also may have seen Oh, at the park baseball, they were the guys who did that’s that playoff prediction on the MLB Network. And I’ve seen their logo on baseball reference.com. And I know when I was listening to that podcast from Fangraphs, the guy mentioned out of the park baseball. So we with our very small budgets, we have to be extremely creative in reaching people in different places. And sometimes it’s spending money sometimes it’s partnerships and collaboration, like some of the proudest things that I’ve done are pure partnerships and collaborations where we’re not necessarily spending a lot of money, but we’re offering value to a partner, and they’re offering value back to us. So with with something like ours, digital marketing is only a part of it, you have to be in a lot of different places. And I give a lot of credit to our partners like baseball reference, like tops like Fangraphs, like these are organizations that over time, if you’re working with them for a year, two years or three years, you start to become part of the conversation. And that’s another way that Oh, when so someone does see that oh, 50% off out of the park baseball, I’m going to get that they’re never going to do it if they’ve never heard of you. But if you’re part of the daily conversation on the world of baseball, they’ll be much more inclined to give you a shot. And then our once that happens, the game has to be great to keep that. Right. And that’s the one thing that I know is the game is great, not because I have anything to do with it. But the game is great, because the guys that have been making I’ve been making it for 23 years, and it’s just it’s the best in the business. And that that’s our job once we get them into keep them and that that’s that’s really where the payoff happens.
EJ Brown
So I want to go back to localization. We’ve talked about localizing the game. You’ve also talked about basically running micro campaigns that have some localized components to them. Correct. And once again, are those predominantly done internally? Or do you have to work with contractors for localizing marketing campaigns
Rich Grisham
95% of them are done internally, okay, have absolutely done, you know, partnerships with agencies, those tend to be for areas where we don’t have expertise. Or four areas where we just feel like the spend is going to deliver the value. For example, when out of the park baseball came out this year, for the very first time we did a deal with an agency. And they signed up some streamers that were relatively popular streamers that had some familiarity with out of the park and they would just do you know, a sponsored ad read and play for an hour or something like that. That was the first time that we did that. Again, we have a pretty good streaming presence on our own. But generally speaking, if you’re watching an out of the park swing, there might be five or 600 people watching it, which 99% shooters in the world would kill to have five or 600 people watching their stream. But you know, we thought when the game first came at it, it would be nice for some people who are known for live streaming sports games, but not necessarily out of the park that might have four or five or 6000 people Are Watching them, it would be, we thought it would be a pretty good investment to give that a shot. So that’s an example of where we have worked with an agency, but most of our stuff is done internally. And that’s really a function just of, you know, the budgets that we have and the talent that we have.
EJ Brown
Makes sense. And because you’re a global company, you have expertise in multiple regions as well, which is useful. Yeah.
Rich Grisham
So like, when we build visual assets, like art, you know, we’ll always will first come up with a messaging internally, and then we’ll come up with the English language message, but then we’ll we’ll send the you know, the the assets to our Korean counterparts, and they’ll localize it, they’ll keep the spirit of what we said, but they’ll localize it in a way that they know will speak better to that market, and then they’ll use those. So there’s a lot of that that’s been happening last couple of years, which has been really helpful.
EJ Brown
Then the final part unless I’m missing something that the final part of localizing would be your, your website. And of course, fasting helps with the checkout process. But what what did localizing not just the game, but your the way that people purchase the product? How did how did that go? When you were low, you finished localizing in South Korea?
Rich Grisham
So the short answer is it didn’t go very well, at the very beginning. Okay, that’s because not because of any problem or any any, anyone not, not doing a good job, it’s because of the way that people purchase computer software in Korea is different than the way that they purchase it in the United States and in Europe. Okay, I remember distinctly working with, you know, some of some of your counterparts at FastSpring, we noticed that, you know, we had very, very high, like, once you reach a certain page and FastSpring, you know, your the conversion rate was very high, because people, by the time they get to that spot, they’re there, they’re gonna buy, right. And we try to reduce the number of clicks from when someone expressed interest when they purchase, but we noticed that the conversion rate for the Korean language version of it was sharply smaller than it was for all of the other languages. And we’re just trying to figure out why that is. So the good thing is FastSpring brought that to our attention. We had some internal meetings, we realized we needed to change the language and not just localized what the English was. But we needed to customize that localization, to better explain, because it turns out that the, the expectation of your typical Korean customer is that they’re not going to spend $40 For a game. Right? We never put the price of the game anywhere until the very last page of the checkout. Gotcha. And that is not how, you know, most Korean consumers tend to buy software, they, they they’re much more of a mobile first market. So we had to modify the language on that journey, the short journey, but on the journey to improve those conversion rates to to let people know what they’re getting into. Right. This is not a free game. This is not a $5 game. This is a $40 investment. And we saw the conversion rates go up materially when we did that analysis. So that’s an that’s an example of how digital FastSpring has directly helped us with a problem that we didn’t even know that we had.
EJ Brown
That’s great. Yeah. So I’m curious, did you did you do any optimization? Do you do any regional optimizations of prices? Or is it just whatever the equivalent of 40 US dollars?
Rich Grisham
Yeah, the short answer is we do not optimize pricing by region, because we have a lot of stakeholders licensors. You know, as a licensee of major sports leagues and their players associations. We don’t have necessarily as much freedom to do that if we had our own IP, but I don’t view that as a negative quite opposite. I view that as a positive, right? Like, yeah, we’re not going to have people who are going to use VPNs to try to trick the, you know, the store into thinking they’re in a region that has a much lower price, and they’ll buy a bunch of them and sell them and things like that, right. So I view that as a positive, not a negative. You know, and again, I don’t have this comes across, but I view out of the park baseball is a premium product, you know, the best in its class. And we feel like that when someone spends $40 They get a lot more than 40 dollars of value for the game. It’s got the entire history of the sport in it. Hundreds of years of baseball teams and baseball players and the ability to create your own universe if you want to it’s got to live competitive an online component like we strongly believe that $40 is not only a good price, we think it’s an incredible price for what you get. We also recognize that as our base, well, it’s not for everybody, right? And people who want a free experience will probably not be the right people for this game, because, you know, it asks something of you, right, it asks you for your time and your thoughts. And and we just, we, I think, even if we weren’t officially licensed, we probably wouldn’t. But, you know, having those those partners that we have, and you know, the relationship that we have, you know, goes a long way towards us really just making sure that it’s price is a premium product, a comparable price by every region.
EJ Brown
No, I love that answer. I, I think that there’s a different mentality to baseball fans than many other sports. There’s a, there’s a dedication to not seeing it as game per game, but how every player and every season fits into the legacy in maybe a unique way. So I love hearing that the game fits the the game ties into that legacy in in a meaningful way. I want to end just by asking you if you have any other advice about building global partnerships or community, because it feels like that’s really where why out of the park thrives that it’s able to do both, or the partnerships lead to the or in or nurture the community, etc.
Rich Grisham
Yeah, I mean, those are the two most important things to out of the park is our partnerships. And our community. And they go hand in hand I prior to join out of the park, I worked for a number of companies in the financial services area. And frankly, a couple of them were not interested in partnerships that just wasn’t part of their, their, their way of doing business. And I’m certainly not saying it’s wrong, not at all right, because they were successful companies run by people who knew what they were doing. But in the last few years, when I was working at the company, I was before I joined out in the park, we were able to create some partnerships, we had some leadership that had some different ideas about partnerships, and I was able to see firsthand the value of when you have value, you can offer a partner and they have that or they can offer you and it’s a true win win situation. No one’s trying to extract something from someone else. It’s just I do this, well, you do this? Well, if we combine our efforts, we can raise ourselves together. And that’s my proudest personal accomplishment and out of the park of the partnerships that I’ve been able to help foster and I credit Major League Baseball a Major League Baseball Players Association because you know, for for helping those as well because you know, those partnerships don’t happen without their blessing. But you know, I mentioned baseball reference, it’s known as the Bible of baseball, right? Like we work with them in a partnership way to promote each other and it works beautifully. The tops, organization tops baseball cards, we have established a new partnership with them this year, or Topps baseball cards are now an out of the park baseball, you know, we’re exchanging value for them with them, as well. You know, we work with MLB Network, we run simulations for them, they don’t have to put those simulations on their on their program, but they do because they think that their fans will be interested in seeing that. And then it gives them a little additional content. That’s interesting. You know, we’re working with Major League Baseball clubs. You know, I’ve met with multiple managers in general managers who use our game, so that they can just have practice with their, with their, you know, with their staffs and understand the entire organization, what other organizations look like and run simulations and things like that these these kinds of partnerships lead you to places that you would not be able to get on your own. You just, you just wouldn’t and none of these partnerships is like a silver bullet that Oh, because of this partnership, we quadrupled our sales. No, they all work together. And the best part about them is when you establish a good partnership, and you get those good relationships, those partnerships continue and they just build on each other. And over time, you reach places that you never would have gotten and then you mentioned the community. I’ve said it our base our community is the best in the business. Many of the people in our community had been with a company for 1015 20 years. Ever since the beginning. They are loyal they are dedicated they’ve seen every version of our company, you know, the there that they’ve been through thick and thin. You know, not every single year is going to be the greatest year ever. You’re going to have ups, you’re gonna have downs. They absolutely, always hold us accountable. They love what we do. They don’t always love everything we do and how we do it. They tell us we accept it. But again, without that community, we wouldn’t have anything. So the partnerships in the committee are the things that I’m probably proud to stop at out of the park.
EJ Brown
You mentioned value a lot. And here’s an assumption, or a guess is that part of why you’ve been able to successfully win many of these partnerships is by figuring out what the value, what the ideal value would be for each of these companies or organizations? Does that sound like a superpower that you have?
Rich Grisham
I don’t want to say that I don’t want to say that I just know, as someone who has been targeted as someone who’s wants to partner with me, as well, as somebody who has targeted organizations to partner with partnership means you both have to have something to offer each other. And I, you know, there’s partnerships that I’ve tried to establish that that didn’t happen, just because there wasn’t enough there, they’re like we couldn’t do exactly enough for them that they will be able to do for us. And that’s why when you do get a good partnership, it matters. But I’ll never forget, you know, one of my old bosses just said, you know, it’s a phrase I’ll never forget, he said, you have to bring a partner something of value. And that’s why I keep saying it, and the value is different to different partners, right? It’s not always the same. You know, sometimes, you know, when we when we did a partnership with a with the Toronto Blue Jays in the Boston Red Sox, we, in order to be a partner with them, we we said, All right, well, every single one of your season ticket holders will give them a copy of the game. And that was valuable to those clubs, because it gave more value to their season ticket holders. And it was valuable to us because our logo is now associated with the Boston Red Sox and the Toronto Blue Jays you know what with tops, the value is different, you know, we we are sending our fans to their app with some in game value for them. And then they’re sending some of their fans to our game with some in game value for them. Right. So it’s easy to say, but it can be incredibly hard to define what that value is. And it’s different. And you know, it’s not a superpower. It’s just, you know, frankly, I’m old, I’ve been around the block a few times, right? So, you know, when you learned some hard lessons in life, but when you sort of have a core understanding of I don’t want to ask somebody to do something for us if I’m not gonna be able to do something for them. When you understand that when you internalize that, it makes those conversations easier. And it also makes it easier to say, look, if this isn’t worth your time, that’s okay. There’s no hard feelings. It’s all right. Right. When you were when you’re able to have those legitimate conversations with people, it just goes a long way in in making a partnership work or not work because of partners doesn’t work. It’s okay to write not every not every situation is going to be is gonna work out best every time.
EJ Brown
I think that’s a great point to end on. So this has been great. Thank you so much for your time.
Rich Grisham
My pleasure. I’m happy to be here and happy to talk with you anytime. We’re big fans of FastSpring. We appreciate your partnership very much
