Building Great Liveops with Javier Barnes

[Applause] okay what is this okay all right uh thank you thank you very much for um choosing this talk over the rest uh it was the right choice I will I will prove it to you um and uh congratulations uh well for the Google folks for having this fantastic stuff but also for you the audience to for having been able to find this place uh um yeah so uh today I will be uh talking about liveops uh it's only 30 minutes there are a lot of topics I've to

compress it as much uh as I can if you're not very familiar with liveops there will be a lot of things and but even if um you're familiar with it I'm sure there will be sites that that uh you will find that will be talking about the key factors on liop some tips on how to manage them as well as uh give you a quick example on and some best practices on how to build uh liveops schedule plan um jumping on the key factors um why because I'm not going to even enter into trying to Define uh liveops uh it's just an umbrella term and depending who you ask it can mean anything that goes inside of um of a of a live service uh game however what I'm going to uh do before jumping into into key factors is talk about some common misconceptions that I found often when

um dealing with liveops or talking with with people that maybe is not familiar I know it's not going to be you but maybe I don't know people watching at home um the first is that many people think that live Ops is mainly offers and just a way to hypercharge the game uh monetization but one thing to take in account is that it's not only that it also it's also an engagement and retention mechanism so if uh when designing uh liveops and planning about them you only think about uh how can they uh generate revenue or capture value from your users you're missing out on a huge impact that they can have on keeping keeping the pliers uh entertained and being content that pliers can also consume as well as uh the capacity that liveops have have on the ability uh of your game to acquire new users with specific themes that maybe are appealing for those users as well as reactivating your pliers another common miscon conception that I found

find very often is that liveops should be targeted only uh or mainly to late game players and that really depends on your game because if in your game there's a significant amount of daus at the beginning or in the middle of a game why would you Target only the folks that are in the end in the presentation I'll talk about some ways how you can optimize uh how your liveops performs with different stages but one thing you uh don't have to miss out is that beyond the just the activation and availability of the of the um liveops themselves there's also a key factor on personalization on triggering liveops to the right plier in the right moment uh some basic examples of that could be for example uh triggering retention calendars when you detect that some pliers have uh behaviors that are they are about to churn or maybe if a plier has not been uh spending on a a spender

you can trigger them aggressive offers to kind of reactivate them as a spender and even more recently we have seen very sophisticated examples of this Monopoly go for example it has a liop very short uh liop I think it's like 20 minutes or something like that which gets triggered when the player accumulates a certain amount of dice rolls so how this what this makes is that if you accumulate a lot of um a lot of dice rolls the game triggers a kind of time limited event that accelerates your ability to consume those uh those dice rolls so it's a very sophisticated way to use uh customization to expand uh liveops beyond the availability and last uh and this maybe uh I think most of you work on mobile but it's something that I find when I interact with people coming from console and PC and the way how uh HD platforms uh do lops is that many people thinks that liveops are something very

unique never to repeat um and in reality and we will see this later one key aspect in liveops is that uh you need to build templates with it first to optimize the effort that you have done in order to develop but to develop them but also because if you repeat templates of liveops you can learn from them and iterate and uh keep on improving uh them to become better and better with every activation and the last one thing that I don't know why a lot of people misses out is that you can use liveops to test features to test rules and changes in in the game on games where maybe AB testing is complicated because they have a uh uh competitive uh component no one example for example could be the two versus two mode in CL Royale where a testing the availability of that mode would have been very complicated at given that the

community is very strong and the game um has a a competitive element so how can you manage exactly having a feature enabled for some players and not from others and instead what they did was run a series of live Bops where they activated that mode on a Time limited basis they learned they saw if pliers appreciated and then they made it permanent uh but yeah let's start with uh the key factors of liveops uh the first key factor and it's relevant on everything that we do in games because otherwise you generate technical depth and then do even small modifications takes a lot of effort but on liveops is critical because the speed and the demand that liveops are going to require from your team and your cap capacity to ship is much bigger than for everything else so when it comes to technology I'm going to cover two different topics no one is the technology in order to operate the liveops to be able to schedule to be able to manage segment complex

segmentations to be able to manage the availability and another is a technology about uh of four creating the uh liveops content or the content the actual content that the players will see uh in the game and one thing that is also very relevant for everything but for liop in particular is having a good analytic St because otherwise you will be throwing liveops but you may not know exactly what are the impact that they are generating and particularly if you're thinking on setting them on a continuous improving um process you really need to be able to observe what's going on so when it comes to uh the technology when it comes to operating uh the liveops um to operate liveops you want uh tools that allow you to do very sophistic very sophisticated scheduling management and and segmentation very minimum things that you should look if you're thinking about building your own liveops tool which I don't recommend or selecting one is first you need to be able to change

game configs without a client update like if you need to do a client update in order to enable uh a liveop uh you basically will not be able to run it you will be not be able to um so you will not be able to distribute that on time for the activation you will not be able to uh react if something happens you basically won't be able to run liveops another important thing which maybe for some of you you take it for granted uh but you will be surprised on how many companies even companies in top grossing positions don't have that is the ability to schedule activations and deactivations of a specific configurations um beforehand no so uh otherwise you're your you will have to be there to in order to activate or deactivate the configurations which uh will mean that because a big part of the live Ops run during the weekend uh you won't have uh weekends

off uh another important thing to take in account is that it's easy to manage complex segmentations and multiple configurations because if you only have one line of of liveops let's say that's fairly easy but very often you are going to want to customize uh that liveop so it makes sense to make it appear on different stages of the game and so on and the complexity will become very very difficult to manage unless the tool is is really good and last uh I would look in my tool to have some direct CRM options such as the ab the ability to uh create uh reward gift popups which can also be used for compensation as well as offers because you don't want to have to put a lot of effort in order to trigger or to prepare uh an offer uh my advice is that you choose one of the many uh third party tools that exist in the market these are some that uh are out there however I'm going to give you two advises uh coming

from the trenches uh the first is that you enable that your game is able to retrieve uh a latest the latest batch of uh local configurations or maybe Runa default in case that the service isavailable I've heard lift actually a story where the service that I was we were using in one of the games I was working uh went down during Black Friday and you can imagine how much money we lost because we of course the offers were not of uh Black Friday we're not triggering no so have a plan B and then uh another recommendation is first obviously evaluate the costs that these Services have at scale because depending on what's the rpu of your game you want to architecture how many calls you do to the to this service in a different way in order to do not that many and not increase your maintenance costs and um half a way how to to disable

um this uh uh liveops calls automatically in case that you spam the server because of a book or something like that again I've Liv the story that uh we did a testing and that testing had a problem and we spammed the live Observer and that came in a nice um denial of service which also made us lose a lot of money um and then when it comes to technology is not only technology about operating the this this uh Lael but also the creation of uh automatizing and and making smooth the creation of content some tips that I can give you there because uh if you don't invest on this it's very easy to drown in your own liveop so then you cannot spend any time on improving them because you're too busy with just like scheduling them and and operating them is to build content generation tools that automate as many steps of the process as possible because if you your liveops need to be copy

let's say the configuration of your liveops need to be copy pasted manually from one place to another and you do that many many times eventually somebody's going to make a human mistake and that's going to be costly and the more liveops you run the more you're going to be drowning in uh turning off fires generated by this another um advice is that you invest on putting uh human error proof measures such as for example uh in this in this example this tool which is user- wise allows you to only set days and weeks so your ability or the ability of a human to put an incorrect value and mess it up uh the whole thing is quite limited as opposed as if your tool would would require uniqu times no where maybe I don't know you trigger you put a number that is very difficult to understand and then you trigger the liveop on uh 1979 um as well as uh

when your tool fits uh configurations that are problematic that have mistakes have a way don't make the game Crash please because otherwise you will you will have your game crashing from time to time and you don't know what's what's going on and uh invest on having that error making that error mistakes inform you on where the problem is otherwise you're going to have messages like like this no where yep like configuration is wrong but there are like thousand parameters there and you don't know what's wrong and that's going to make your team look lose a lot of time on uh trying to understand what was wrong trying to fix it and so on that's going to decrease Your Capacity uh to have buffer to think on improvements and just like spend more time on on doing steps that do not provide uh value and then uh another advice is uh have several and well structured config environments many companies only have for whatever reason two config environments QA and um in life and that generates a lot of

problems because that means that you cannot have multiple people or not easily have multiple people working uh at the same time in the environment often there are clashes of La Bobs because people are testing things and stuff like that so uh if you can have several um uh config environments you will save a lot of time it will allow you to generate contents more easily as well as if you can build inhouse uh mechanism uh in in the client or in the game itself to manage different sets of rewards that will save you a lot of time because the typical thing that happens when you try to expose one live up to different stages of the life of like early game mid game and so on is that some rewards that make sense in the late game that do not make sense in the early game and that already forces you to just to uh enable one feature into the different stages have to do very complex segmentations of the rewards if your

game can manage that automatically you will save a lot of time when setting up um liveops um going into this the and the one of the reasons why technology is so important is because key in liveops is having a good process and a sustainable uh Pace no in I have this friend that says that on a on a game on a live game everything can be late you can release late uh a feature and nobody dies just the feature gets enabled a bit later um you can uh release later and update and so on except for the liveops because if you miss the window of opportunity of Black Friday good luck like there's no way to um uh repay that back other than waiting one year right so there's a huge cost on being late on liveops uh that's why you need um process that is sustainable another topic that happens is that I'm not sure how many of you have worked with with premium games but on premium games you

can like do that effort uh release the game and then uh once it's released you can take a rest but on a live game that moment doesn't exist it's more more than a a Sprint uh a live game is kind of a marathon so you don't want to uh or you cannot maintain a pace that is burning your team on liveops what is key is that you have a uh not only a speed that is fast enough but also that you are able to maintain it because chances are if your game keeps operating for like 5 years um uh and your um your process is not sustainable you're constantly burning people and so on like your game is going to be mid a mid grinder and it's going it's going to be very difficult for you to retain the talent so um one thing that happens often particularly when the people planning the liveops are not those that are uh designing the liveops uh is that they don't consider the production cost um so

they request liveops as if they were free but they are not actually free no some tips that I have on this in order to better estimate what what is your actual capacity to do la Bops without burning your team is build a RTO plan for them no so if you want a liveop to go live in this specific moment when do you need to start uh QA when do you need to start the the implementation when do you need to start the design and do it backwards and you also want uh that liveops are finished weeks before they go live or as much time as possible so you so that you can have um buffer to react to unexpected stuff and make them go through QA because uh imagine that you launch them and then they are booed then you're are going to have to put extra effort to fix it and that's time that you're losing for being able to create the new batch of lops and our thing is try to have this kind of kyen model where you're constantly improving uh your process you're constantly doing

Retros and finding out how you can make your process more sustainable and more optimized to increase uh Your Capacity because here the main goal as I said is you want to to have your developers designers whoever scripts the liveops spend more time thinking on how they can improve those liveops rather than just uh executing them or setting them up which is not something that increases the value that they provide to to to your game um another topic that is key is feature versatility and this is very important when you're thinking about designing how to design games on a sorry how to design features on a game that has liveops and how to design liveops uh themselves no so for me what is very useful in this regard is Think Like all the game features are skeletons where or platforms to run uh live no so the more versatility they allow to change the

graphics um have customizable uh UI customizable parameters and so on the more tools you H you will have to customize that experience and create liveops around them one uh example here is from Monster Legends which is a game that I work on is that they have this feature which essentially it's a A system that uh collects points and gives rewards when the plier reaches a specific milestones and with that feature just tweaking the rewards and the conditions that generate the points they are able to generate very different features no they have for example they can generate a low intensity goal around just playing because every time you feed your monsters you get points but they can also create high intensity goals or even a feature that re gives additional rewards for spending hard currency know so it's one feature but very different experiences that they can they can generate with them one another example which Maybe you have seen if you have play if you play uh brow star is this

feature which uh can be used to generate very different things no so for example in the lunar when it was the lunar uh New Year they had this calendar where players were getting a new well a gift every day that they log in uh for like well for during the celebration but then with the same feature they have been able to create this type of chained offer wall that if you play Royal match or Monopoly go you surely have seen where you buy something and then you unlock a series of of uh Rewards or then there's a set of re chained set of uh list of rewards which at some point require you to monetize in order to keep on claiming no so again if we think on what because they have a high versatility within this feature they are able to create essentially two different experiences with one single with one single Tech no and here there's a quick list of the many things that they

are able to change no like a Time Clock uh being able to put a price or put it free being able to change the background and so on and we are developers we know that this was probably one implementation or the second thing was built as an expansion of the technology of the first one but for the player it's very different it's maybe even understood that as two completely different um two completely different features right so that's the kind of thing that you want to do have versatility in your features so that you can generate different experiences uh within them another very important factor is uh communic Eng gain communication no um obviously if you have a feature uh liveop running and players don't know about it it doesn't generate an impact um which is something trivial but this can become very challenging when you have many uh liveops running at the same time and today for example some somebody was asking me the uh I think it was Stan

from App magic was asking me the question or like people asks him the question on when do you have enough liveops when there's the mo this moment where you have too many liveops and the player gets saturated and a lot of that has to do with the ability of the player uh sorry the ability of the game to communicate effectively all those liveops without saturating the player if all of your liveops require a popup then just with five uh liveops you're going to saturate the player because its experience is going to be popup popup popup very disturbing um while if the game is able to to communicate it in a much more much less uh traumatic way you will be able to run a high amount of them some good examples that I like particularly Royal match is not here but it's probably the best example is for example in Township or monopo the liveop information is structured around the main menu so sometimes they do have popups usually

when the feature activates uh or when it gives rewards but on a regular basis uh they just appear they they just remind you that they are active without disrupting your regular game experience in Royal match is even better because those widgets are quite sophisticated they have progression bars and they highlight rewards and stuff like that so as you keep playing you keep go uh receiving information that those liveops are going on without that disrupting uh your gameplay experience so they can run many liveops at once without that being overwhelming for for pliers but another aspect that we don't have to miss is particularly with thinking about the potential of reactivating or acquiring pliers is the element of communication that happens outside of the game no on what side uh liveops are more effective if they are coordinated with marketing materials that are able to capitalize that that um uh liveops calendars in my

opinion or at least in my experience uh are great particularly if once the game is a bit mature and it has a very established base of of uh features because that allows players to strategize around it and and so on just remember not to give them information on when you're going to be running offers because otherwise you are going to make that they um alter their spending in order to get benefit from the offers and supercell also is a great example as well because uh they have been able to establish a first party close communication with their with their pliers and through tools such as their creator uh Creator boost they have been able to create a big range of influencers that essentially act as ambassadors so whenever they announce a new thing a new liveop or something they have an army of influencers that are going to um talk about that and reach their Their audience and expand the capacity uh of those liveops to reach um

pliers now there are three other points that are very relevant when it comes to liveops but to me they are intrinsically linked which is length uh for how long uh liop runs uh how often it runs so Cadence and intensity which is uh how demanding or how disruptive it is for the from for the plier no um so when it comes to length in my experience uh uh what happens with um when a liveop any kind of liveop lasts for more than 24 hours um and this 24 hours because generally during the day players connect at different moments of the day is that usually the engagement or monetization Curves look generally look like like this no uh depending on the type of liveop some

hello hello okay thank you um the reason why it looks like this is because at the beginning of a liveop at the beginning of an offer or something like that there's a lot of players that jump in and interact with it very very early uh Spenders and high engagement users provided that there's no limit they complete the event very early on and then they don't have anything else and then at the end uh if there's an an offer is about to expire or a competition is about to to end there's this last push that people does so that's why it looks like that but this is not optimal because it means that a lot of the time in your live op like if you make them run for a very long time uh they have this kind of uh desert of Engagement in the middle no and it's kind of wasteful so first of all like try to if you you're suffering this kind of thing or you're seeing this kind of thing on on your liveops try to do shorter instances of liveops

um but some tips in order to improve uh this Beyond just do more increase the Cadence and do shorter lops would be that you can uh create time limited goals within uh the length of the liop one example could be Marvel snap Marvel snap they have this monthlong uh season but what they do is uh they run on the weekends they run time limited challenges which make that pliers uh need to monetize and need to do that Spike of Engagement in order to acquire it and if you have you know typical collection event that last for two weeks or for one week try out this thing try out adding a Time limited goals that run for a specific time uh within the event and you will probably increase the engagement and and monetization another tool that is quite common is uh to make the event progressively unlock or at GES that are time based and generally this is more

used for uh engagement first features such as uh battle passes and stuff like that uh one example could be fortnite that they progressively unlock the um the quests so engaged pliers cannot come and the first day deplete all the quests of the of the entire month that means that those even high engaged player uh yeah High engage players they are going to come back regularly to complete the set of missions that are um being unlocked and those that join later in the uh in the event uh they will still have a lot of content when they join um when it comes to cence and intensity three things to take in account is first in order to be effective liveops need to have this kind of um I can miss it out um component so you don't want to have the same uh liveop running too often with the same exact experience and and rewards that's where versatility comes in but also you need to take in account

that if you are constantly running very high intensity liveops it can depend on the game and the type of of players it can but it can burn uh the players no so uh often it's good to give them a rest uh but I'll explain how exactly because one thing that you should try to avoid is having situations where there is nothing running in your game other than the core than the core game this is a discussion I've had many times with particularly console uh developers because when they go into Mobile they say like oh well but maybe after a big event that maybe we should give pliers a rest for like one week where they don't have that many stuff to do so that they kind recover but in reality what that means is that uh players that are highly engaged are going to not have content and probably you're going to suffer a very high um churn and very high um hangover effect when there's nothing to do so some tips that I can give on on this regard is

that all liveops should think about liveops on how they can have a cycle where uh very high intensity live up they won't come back after a until a certain amount of time has uh happened while if you have low intensity features that are not that as demanding you can make them run with way more uh cadens and the key of that is to try to intercalate high intensity with low int City know so for example after you have an event that takes a lot of effort that makes people spend a lot of money and and all that instead of having one day where players connect and there's nothing going on in the game what you can do is have an event that is maybe more passive no that maybe makes player enjoy the content that they just acquired or uh grants progress for two players just by doing regular game actions um another uh advice that I can give you is to avoid giving everything everywhere because if all your liveops giv the same exact things that takes

away the reasons for players to engage and on the other hand if uh different liveops give very different uh rewards uh you can make the two liveops that are quite similar feel very different because the objective that the player is pursuing is very is very different um you also want to be on sync with uh game economy uh because uh you want to plan that if there is a liveop let's say an offer that is going to inject a lot of hard currents in the game then put put it next to another liop that is going to drain all all that and as I said before uh exploit the versability the versatility of your features to increase the sense of variety so players don't feel that the uh liveops are repetitive um there's some quick tips that I'm going to give you on uh guidance and intensity in offers um because one thing that I've seen a lot of s happen is that uh if you run a very

aggressive uh strategy of of um of offers you can make that your pliers do not spend unless there is an offer so some tips on how to deal with that is instead of discounting or doing offers on hard currency try to limit that and try to instead discount the items themselves because then that's going to give you a W uh wider range of things to Discount and when pliers do not buy this item that is discounted it will take they don't know how long until this uh item will be discounted as opposed to giving a discount on hard currency where uh they you are discounting everything and it may take a lot of time for the player to deplete that their inventory in order to spend again uh link offers to seasonal stuff so it's exceptional that's why it's the price is slower don't expect it to happen often um if you run very aggressive uh offers particularly targeting on hard

Kacy limit the amount of times that they can buy it uh because otherwise pliers can spend all or spend everything that they were planning to spend during the month in one day and then the rest of the month there it's not able to um you're not able to monetize them and um yeah like I said Team time the offers with liveops that sync the resources that you are injecting you're injecting no so if you're doing an offer that requires a lot of currency put it next to an event that Demands a lot of uh demands a lot of currency and one thing that happens often is that liveops uh create this magic button where when the revenue of the game is bad that day or that week uh you have a set of emergency offers that you trigger so try to avoid that that's the red button sometimes you need to press it but don't don't do it often because uh that's a patch no and if for example the problem why you are generating so B monetization is that uh it's

um the the hardes is players have too many hard too much hard Cony if you put an offer you're going to make it uh bad um getting to the end sorry for the overtime uh yeah another issue is is with reach no in dups reach is very problematic because uh because of their time limited nature pliers uh you're not going to have this thing where like oh you're low engagement but with enough time you're going to be able to achieve everything no the the liveop is going to expire so some thingss that I can give you in order to improve the reach of your features is first if you do something marketing oriented um enable it to all players and Grant easy access to at least some of the exclusive content don't make them like play 100 hours until they can get to the event that was why they downloaded the game another tip is that uh when you're managing the rewards try

to create different Milestones of rewards within your liop so that they can become targets for different uh levels of Engagement from from pliers no so the newbi can reach a milestone of rewards the high engage players try to get everything and last uh try to segment the balancing for different layers of progression so don't balance it only for the late players try to present a balance that is customized for the different stages of the game that that way everybody will be able to um engage with your event um I'm going to go very quick on this sorry for the over time um um yeah so uh very quickly how to build an effective liveops plan there are four tips first you need to try to understand the natural engagement and spend cycles of of the game if the game is live try to see when your players naturally spend more and when do they spend less yes uh if you have competition Benchmark your

competition try to understand when they are running the key events and so on imagine this example no in this example we have a strong weekends especially the first and the third because that's when money uh comes in for a lot of people in the US and we have very low performance in the mid of the week no so then when we're we're going to try to establish a repeat repeatable schedule of liveops no first by adding elements that are procyclical that try to improve the the positive things that we see no we saw that um uh there's a lot of Revenue coming in the weekends particularly on the 1 and the third so what we're going to do is put drop a lot of events uh there no we're going to put uh new characters on the first weekend of the month uh a big offer in the third one uh we are going to have instead of a 30 days battle pass we're going to have uh two 14 days battle pass so we incentivize the behavior that is natural

you know players naturally spend on those weekend so I'm going to try to make them spend or engage as much as I can on those days but then you also want to do the other uh the other way around no like okay we see that the performance is quite low in the midweek so I'm going to try to counter that and we are going to put events like for example rotatory discount so that players can need to monetize every day of the week or they they can find reasons to monetize as well as a series of events that make them engage on the on the days where they would not be as um where they would not be as uh as engaged no so positive but then once you had that template don't just apply it you need to uh look at the specific period where you going to run it and then customize it let's say that it's February no in February we find same Valentine so instead of just applying the uh liel we would customize it adding

this thing on top no like maybe adding a some Valentine's gift gift calendar so that we improve the retention and we make pliers come back and so uh pliers uh there's a very high the by the time that we drop a very important very big uh discount and and so on no so yeah you want to adapt that repeatable uh template to the period where you're going to run it and what is very important and probably if you need to take away one thing out of this uh topic is that um you're not going to get it's impossible or at least to me to get the perfect schedule of calend uh perfect liop schedule it's impossible to get the perfect design of a liop what is important when it comes to liveops is to think that it's a marathon and therefore what you need to have is a continuous Improvement that's why it's so important that you are able to deliver things

smoothly because that's going to give you a lot of uh spare capacity to think constantly think on how with every iteration you can improve your live by running different experiments on how the liveops are how they are scheduled and and so on uh for example one example would come from travel town where they have done several activations of this type of offer but with each activation they are trying something different no like the first one the idea was that you buy something and then you get some an extra and that incentivize you to to uh spend but then they did another activation and as you can see they increased they decreased the amount of the offer but they increased the amount of the gift to try to give it more value and in the latest experiment they have added you buy once and you get two other things so it increases even more the effect that they are trying to do where you buy something and you get the impression that you are get getting more for from from the purchase and in my

opinion what even if you're very good at guessing even even if you have very good first bets what uh makes something go from just good to Fantastic is this Con this constant experimentation and this kind of subtle changes which keeps on uh improving your uh lops so they can become they are always in the path of becoming perfect um so yeah thank you very much for your attention so sorry for going over time and uh hope to see you uh I'm not going to do questions because I spend that time but if uh you can reach out to me later uh I be glad to answer anything thank you