Didomi Launches Its Unity SDK To Facilitate Consent Management For Game Developers

The fast-growing startup, specialized in consent and preference management for brands like Newsweek, PeopleDoc or Rakuten, is launching its Consent Management Platform (CMP) on the cross-platform game engine Unity. The objective is to allow game application publishers to better monetize their apps while complying with increasingly tough privacy regulations across the world, which require them to collect explicit user consent. To educate Unity's community about data compliance, Didomi launches a 4-part Masterclass series.

Paris, June 25th 2020 - Privacy regulations like GDPR (in Europe) or CCPA (in California) are profoundly changing the marketing and advertising industries, by placing an emphasis on personal data protection and transparency pertaining the usage of users' data. Organizations that don't comply risk a fine (up to $20m or 4% of their revenue), as well as massive brand damage through negative press.

The Unity development platform is a centerpiece of the gaming industry: 50% of games on PC/mobile/console are powered by Unity, as well as 60% of AR/VR applications. Over 23bn ads are served every month to users in games that run on Unity. With that type of scale, the gaming industry has become a growing concern among Data Protection Authorities as most games rely on a freemium model, mainly financed through personalized advertising or data collection and selling.

In a privacy compliant game under GDPR, none of these activities can happen without the user consenting in a valid way. Most game developers realize the legal risk, but frequently underestimate the reputational risk of a privacy backlash for their reputation. They prefer to focus on their user experience rather than on compliance.

The Gaming industry has always been at the forefront of User Experience. For years, Game developers have put tremendous resources in their user onboarding and first steps, realizing that the value they provide needed to be delivered in an organized fashion to their new users to create engagement. In this context, few game developers have managed so far to incorporate complex privacy frameworks such as GDPR into their games as they lacked a correct way to adapt its principles to fit into their rich environments.

Few games still gather explicit consent

Consequently, akin to what is increasingly done in traditional marketing, data compliance best-practice would be to ask users' consent before serving them ads that use their personal information. Yet, consent and preference management is still a relatively new subject for many gaming studios, partly because there are very few solutions to gather consent from users today. Only the world's biggest gaming and entertainment companies today have a structured approach to compliance.

Too many games still rely on standard End-User License Agreements, or non-compliant in-house Consent Notices to inform users about the usage of their data. Few actors of the ecosystem have offered gaming publishers technologically adapted solutions to collect, store, manage and share users' consent on their preferred environments.

This is not only dangerous in terms of data compliance, but also risky for user retention, as it can lead disappointed players to lose trust in the game and its applications. It can also be a major hindrance to good marketing investment, because privacy regulation may soon also require consent for analytics tools such as Adjust or Appsflyer, causing marketers to have only limited visibility on the return of their advertising spend.

Didomi launches its CMP with a Masterclass

Didomi is the first actor in the field of Preference and Consent Management to offer gaming publishers who develop their games on Unity a dedicated offering to get explicit player consent. The company is launching its Consent Management Platform (CMP), which is used by major brands and publishers across the globe, as a Unity-compatible SDK. Already available for traditional web pages, for mobile apps and for mobile pages (AMP), its Consent Management Platform will now be available in Unity's technological environment.

To bring its CMP to market and co-create better consent management with the Unity community, Didomi is organizing a 4-part Masterclass Series in which the company offers to share its expertise in collecting, optimizing and using user consent with gaming professionals. From gaming studios' Data Protection Officers (DPO) to Product Managers (PM) or Unity 3D developers, the Masterclass' aim is to allow professionals to get familiar with the importance and implications of better user transparency and data compliance.

• Unity Masterclass #1 (July 6th) - Why Managing User Consent is Important for Compliant Monetization

• Unity Masterclass #2 (July 13th) - How to Set-up Didomi's Unity SDK in Your Game

• Unity Masterclass #3 (July 20th) - How to Optimize User Consent Rates with Didomi's SDK

• Unity Masterclass #4 (July 27th) - How to Increase ROI of Consented Monetization with Didomi's SDK.