Curated Panel: Giving New Life To Established Games - Live Service Strategies To Boost Retention & .

And next up we We have a mega panel of some amazing people. We've got Thomas from Rap is going to be hosting with Teimu from Meta Play, uh Fisty from Trail Mix, John from Turborella, Maya from Supercell, and Zorby from King. Come on up, guys. Hello. Hello. Hi everybody. Thanks for turning out in force um early on earlyish on Tuesday morning. Um as Oscar said, we got a a mega panel of types here. We've got a bunch of industry legends and also John Wright. Um, and we're going to be talking about

the indies.
We're going to be talking about how established games can make live ops, you know, a growth lever rather than a maintenance cost. Um, I'm Thomas Huxer. I'm a director from Raptor PR. We're a Londonbased B2B agency. Um, and yeah, I'd love for everyone to introduce themselves. I'm Felicity Gracie Hurst of Trail Mix. Uh GM of our uh lovely delightful narrative merge game, Love and Pies.
Hi, I'm Maya. I'm the GM for Heyday. I want to say thank you everybody for waking up so early to hear John talk. Thank you.
Hi everyone. Uh my name is Zorb. I'm a product lead for uh Candy Crush.
Apparently I'm John Wright. apparently. Um I'm CEO of Turrilla. We're an action sports casual games developer from Sweden. Um we've done 250 million installs globally, which is what Maya does in about two days.

Hi everybody. Also, uh co-founder, chief product officer at Meta Play backend platform working with companies like Supercell Trail Mix and welcome to our panel where we roast John Wright.
There is a theme today. There is a theme.
It's his birthday. Don't tell me that.
Cool. Thank you everybody. Um, so I think it's important, I guess, to start by acknowledging, you know, everybody knows that launching new games right now is is quite possibly the most challenging thing to do. Um, and that, you know, the charts are often dominated by titles that have been around for a long time. But actually, you know, that's not an accident. a lot of work and a lot of strategy and a lot of um you know a lot of um passion goes into making that happen. Um that said, you know, I imagine every game, even you know, very successful, long-standing decade old games, you know, do hit parts where they look like, you know, they may have stopped growing or, you know, temporarily stopped growing. Um, so I'd

love to hear, you know, an example from each of you perhaps of a time you felt, you know, we have hit a bit of a a kind of potential ceiling and how do we blast past that? How do we make sure it's just a plateau rather than, you know, the sort of peak um and yeah, anybody can grab that, run with it.
Okay, we practice this. No. Um, so I I guess my answer when we interview sometimes get the question a bit ahead and you start thinking about it. No,
no, never. Uh, so I was my first instinct was what ceiling and I guess that for me a ceiling means when you see your game starting to go down. So when the metrics are not going positive and things are not working as you planned them and as you thought that's when things needs to change because that's where either you stop believing what you're doing and that's the worst thing I think that can happen to a game you're working on. If you don't think it's going to be successful, your players are definitely not going to think it's going to be successful. Um, so I guess that's it's not that ceiling, it's that bump

you hit and then you need to recalibrate so you can keep on growing.
Yeah, I think you know, especially with older games like my games at a different scale. Um, but you know, you're not always going up and to the right, especially at year five, year 10, you're maybe not always investing for scale. You will have, you know, these ups and downs. I think less you know for us like it's more looking at friction points and we did have one actually last year um in love and pies where uh you know it was actually our economy that was you know limiting the growth of the game and I know this is a panel about live ops so actually that is how we discovered that we had this this limitation was that the live ops stopped working you know that they stopped moving the the needle and we knew we had to change something. Yeah, we're we're also sitting in a quite privileged position. Uh Candy being, you know, more than a decade old. These ceilings as I would consider them milestones for the game basically. Um we we see them in the data. You know, the

lagging data shows you the diminishing returns as you're adding new things into the game. It's getting less and less impactful. The language within the team changes from uh adding and building new things to just growing. So the that that little shift in the the strategy these are like the small data points that we see but you know it's uh like like my flick said it's um the mindset that you have to have um there's always the next maxima that you can go after. So those are the things that we focus on.
Yeah. And I also think just because it's always been that way does not mean it has to be like a lot of us you know our newest game is 5 years old. Um when I came on board one of the things I I did was I rebalanced the economy. I say me like a lot of smarter people than me but we did that as a project and after you know four and a half years of thinking we found the top and we thought LTV was X we managed to increase that by 50% by just rebalancing the economy and this is not an easy thing this is not a trivial

thing this takes time and a lot of AB testing but just because it's again it's always been done a certain way does not mean that it's optimal or it's perfect I think all of us here should be evaluating our you know our long-standing heritage titles on a regular basis to prevent from that complacency cuz I think it happens in a lot of studios especially on your second or your third biggest game. Um unless you're like a GM of a title like Meer is, you know. Um but yeah, if you're if you're in a studio with limited resources and you've got like a portfolio of games, the second and third ones could be just sitting there, you know, losing money hand over fist and it's just because you're not spending the time on them to do these exercises.
Yeah. Yeah. And maybe kind of hearing what everybody is saying here, I think one thing we're seeing across like a whole portfolio is that the the older games tend to be designed in a relatively static way. Like there's a certain amount of content, certain core loop that repeats, certain economy, and that just gets boring after a while. And you kind of newer games and I feel like newer updates even to your games here, they they're much more dynamic, much

more likeentoriented or something. So you get to renew the game more without adding completely new systems or like transforming it radically. So it's like easier nowadays to keep the game fresh, right?
I think there's been also kind of like a big change in game design, right? Game design from 2012 is very different than game design in 2026 or above. And I think that's the first part. And then the second, and this is probably the hardest thing about mature games, not old games. Uh which is there's just so much uh content, right? We have so much in the game. We've been adding it. Like a game like like KD, it's it's more than 14 years old now. It's about to hit 14 years old. So, so for every year, amazing people have been working on it, adding more and more features. And I think that's probably the hardest part is how do you distinguish what is a right good feature? What should you kind of like take away and not hurt the promise of the game and still keep up to date with that promise and the the recent game design and what players actually expect from a game from today.

So, you need to kind of like be in that not awkward uh like an old person trying to dress younger. I like metaphors. I'm sorry if they make anybody feel weird, but yeah.
I also feel like um you don't want to fall into like the content treadmill fallacy, right? Like just adding the same stuff continually, you know? I think a lot of teams fall into this trap where they just keep adding more of the same because they feel like they have to and they're not really checking, okay, does this additional content actually mean anything to the user? They're responding to it. It's just something that the team feel like they have to do. Um and then I think you know for us we we started um in December for the first time in the country uh company's history we added mini games which a you know a lot of you guys have done for a long time but for us it was just like it was never on the road map you know adding in these mini like bespoke different uh core loops you know what people can play on a daily basis on a limited scale so like one to three times per day. It was all linked to a reward system and a way

to re-engage and you know just improve retention and the impact was pretty meaningful you know like double digits uh improvements across most of the metrics around session length and such and and like I said just because it's never been done does not mean you can't do it. No, actually when I had yesterday night uh 2 a.m.
What happened?
Somebody was actually literally saying that the way they broke through the the ceiling, the perceived ceiling in their game was that they stopped the production for months completely just like killed the road map so that they had time to actually make better decisions instead of being just super busy that they Yeah. Yeah. like the the they were just like spinning their wheels in the existing content. So it's funny that that can happen. Yeah.
Yeah. Completely. So I think it's you know a plateau in a way is a bit of a privilege because it means that you have had you know growth to reach that that point. Um and from what I'm hearing obviously there are uh lots of different levers to potentially pull whether it's

tech whether it's the game economy whether it's content. Um once you've kind of identified I guess the you know the plan strategy to kind of blast past that plateau um you know what is there to think about in terms of as Maya said kind of ensuring that you stay true I guess to the promise and the identity of the game and the established player base that you already have um in order to kind of continue growing authentically. Oh, change is hard, right? And I think all this discussion around content, the the word that comes to mind, I don't know if you guys know this word of enchitification like
Yeah. Repeat that. Repeat that.
Uh yeah, if you because this is something that that we were constantly adding content particularly in these older legacy titles and and you you sometimes have to take things away as well and that is very difficult to do without, you know, breaking the trust of players. I talked about you love and pie is revamping our economy last year. Like that is one of the hardest changes that you can make. Uh I think in a legacy

game um and and very risky. you know, there are lots of ways to do it without changing the economy as I'm sure you've also been through, John, as you referenced, like, you know, add a new currency. But we we went hard in actually changing our economy to the fundamental systems and the we had to do it, you know, with aggressive iteration, but also like full transparency, like very tight feedback loops, talking to players. Uh, you know, they were not happy at first and so we worked with them through it. Um, we were iterating like rebalancing weekly. We were very open with what we were trying to do and you know I'm I'm pleased to say it was a success uh story because we we managed to you know ship quality of life fixes alongside uh some of the harder changes to get to a point where players were actually you know happy with the change. It was a net improvement not just to monetization but also to engagement which I think is very difficult to do

with that sort of change and it was just purely through the iterative nature of working with the players not to lose their trust.
I think also like generally having a direct line to your players and actually getting direct feedback from the community. You know Discord channels and such is something that we use for our community very often. But sometimes I think as a business you can make assumptions. you know, you feel like uh we're going to do this. Like for us, we did um quite a big brand partnership with one of the the bigger sort of real world supercross uh you know, brands and they have like real life shows that go around the world and stuff. And we were like, "Oh, this is amazing. Surely all of our users cuz they play this motocross game, they must like motocross." And then what we found is most people actually don't like motocross, they just like casual games with physics. So yeah. So actually yeah because we we had sponsorship at some event in Stockholm meant nothing
but like it like intent matters right so when when you tried your Mina game you did the game economy the intent wasn't

just to monetize so that uh you know you grow the game or increase the revenue I think the players are much more forgiving when they see the intent and you fail uh then you have the wrong intent and you succeed. So when when we're talking about not breaking the trust, yes, it is the cardinal rule uh that we keep the promise for the players, I'm wary that uh this increases the risk of earnest um adversity in the team like they just preserve the status quo. They don't want to add anything new lest we uh confuse or frustrate them. But if we establish the right intent and they're they're aware of it, I think failing uh is is completely okay. And I think the you know silver bullets aoy but like the one thing that seems to work for most games for most teams for that right is having I want to say live ops event structure so that allows you to bring in a timeboxed system that can can have its own economy its own currency and you know and your players know it's going to be reset after that time. So then gives

you a license and your team a license to experiment a lot and get feedback on it and it's sort of change is built into the ex the expectation towards the players that if you have something like that then it's easier but if you don't if the game is very static then then yeah then you get all these troubles.
We launch new seasons every two months and every time there's a new season revenue revenue revenue season revenue revenue season revenue revenue season. Have you considered having more season
every day?
I'll be I'll be Look, I I'll be straight with you. One of the bright ideas I had when I first came on board was on, why are we doing it every two months and not every month? They're like, oh, you know, content, it takes a while to build, you know, we can't keep having all of these things.
Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe dad on on all of this, I agree with everything that was said here. I think at the end of the day, it's it's that trust agreement that you have with your players, right? They come to the the game, they play it, they expect to get an experience out of it. And through that, they give you this

trust capital. Now, it's all about what you're going to do with that capital. You can misuse it and and and focus more on on things that are not giving them the best experience and then and then suddenly you lose them. The other part, which I think is the really amazing part of this trust agreement, is that they're actually pretty patient if you set expectations right. So, I think this is where live apps come in place. This is this is where communicating with the players, explaining to them what you do. Like sometimes it's about adding a beta tag just to to make sure that they understand that you're trying to figure out something and then if it doesn't if it works or if it fails, you find a way to kind of come back to them and and keep on that managing expectations. Like we like to say that the players are the boss, right? We need to manage upwards and explain to them what it is that we're doing. And and I think that's where you have that time to iterate and and you can kind of like slowly build in and because rarely there's a feature that you will release and everything is amazing. So you have to also understand that these things take time and you need

to hear more and I think the maybe the superpower around this is the insights and the data team is how with them you hear the players and then you add to that the community team were able to kind of like help you with those communications. So I think that's really how you have to manage all of this to make sure that even if you continue to iterate like it it's on based on that trust agreement.
Yeah. I think also one one last thing sorry um there's also the we don't want to fall into another trap which is like the you know short-term gain long-term pain sort of fallacy which I think a lot of studios do fall in. We make short-term decisions that we think are impactful especially through live ops and then just because there's an initial like improvement on the day 1 37 does not mean that it's going to be you know counteract the day 30 day 60 day 90 and so as said the the data team having a finger on the pulse for long term is also super super important. So
one one second we need to share you know this is what it's like

women in the industry. No. Uh, kidding. Sorry. No, that
I forgot what I was saying.
We are We are gonna go about fight here. This is like what we what we said beforehand. It's going to be a fist fight.
You talk I forgot completely.
I was literally just gonna like double down on what John was saying about it. Like a live ops I think successfully successful live ops is about long-term relationship with a player. That's all. Maya.
No, I forgot.
Plus one. Just say plus one.
You can carry on. to to what extent um I guess in the example maybe of heyday for example 14 years to what extent is are changes in live ops kind of dependent on new tech and being able to do things that you maybe couldn't do 5 years ago um and how do you I guess maybe evaluate like what you should be trying based on what kind of tech
I also remember what I wanted to say so
so back no it's it's actually the answers to both but but I think at the end of the day especially when we're talking about live ops. I think um all

of us here who have experience in the industry and have been doing live ops or or or have been using different live ops tools and monetization tools, I think we grow to have this toolbox, right, of things that we know what they impact, what what they drive, what kind of mechanism they work, what uh player motivation they enhance. And now it's a question of how we're going to use them. And we can use them towards that short-term gain and maybe have the best day ever. But at the end of the day, it's not about especially when you're talking about live forever games. Like we want to create an experience where 10 years from now, our our game is still relevant. Our players are still playing it and they're coming back to the game constantly. And I think that's a lot around how we use this toolbox that we gained and how we understand how it fits into our game. So I think it's it's not really a technical question but it is a metaphorical kit of of what what features mean what is those live ops means and I think right now there's this really in my mind

this uh argument which is uh what is this live ops even about is it is it just short time events in your game that are constantly changing is it those uh um short um chases in the game like how do we define them in a way and does it differentiate between every game and then I think how does those tools come along for to support that. So I actually answered previous question and this one but yeah but I think it like this is what it's all about. It's how you use them and it and it's usually different per game per player per motivation per what you're trying to understand. So if you see something working in another game and you're like, "Oh, what drove this peak?" Try to not understand what what is that feature, but actually what is that what's behind the scenes and what drove the players to engage with it more and then think how you take that into your game and kind of like enhance on that experience if it fits with your promise. Like don't try to force something that doesn't because you said

that this is amazing in another game and somebody told you like this is the best feature ever. You have to go on and do this. So,
I don't
Yeah, very very rarely that works. The only time I've seen it work is um like mini games where it's just like onetoone. But what you got to focus on is the player psychology instead of the game mechanic. Um because that's when that's when you really move the needle for the for your own player base.
Yeah. So, I look at this from like a tech and tools point of view. So, doubling down on all of that um I think somebody described it to me as like if the game was a TV channel, then what is somebody needs to understand? Somebody needs to be the showrunner that understands what is the entertainment and how to pace that in the channel if you will and usually turns out that person isn't very technical right that they essentially like a content designer or like a creative person and from a tools point of view what like I spend my life doing is figuring out what kind of tool that does does that person need to be able to express you know how do we schedule the next 300 events or how do we pace this out or how do we talk

within the team about it like what's the workflow for that person because they're not going to be working in Unity, they're not going to be working in spreadsheets, so on. And I I guess that in itself is a very very game specific as you were saying that we can't just say like gambling works, so let let's apply that to every single game. But you kind of have to figure out how do you discover it as a team and who's the guy or gal that is now the vision holder for this game and what are the tools and people that need to actually execute and get out of the way. I didn't hear that.
Yeah. Question about ex example about where you got or didn't get the player psychology right in a game
pass.
I'll have in in just a few minutes.
Any pass, any battle pass, any form pass. I think I think that's exact like I didn't pass the question.
I genuinely thought you did. I was like, "Wow, this is the most entire thing ever." Wow. I was going to start

waffling.
No, no, no, no, no. I I think I think a pass is is a very interesting. It works like we we tend to think or early days we thought it's going to work around um on that kind of like motivation for pay like you want to get those resources out that things that we give you throughout the pass. There's a lot of engagement in it. There's a lot of completion in it. There's a lot of kind of like getting to the end. I I think the pass is is one I think it works in a lot of games. If you don't have a pass in your game, think why. Uh I think it gives that framework about like for for a time that you believe that is the right time to play for a certain period amount that has a start and an end and it enables you to frame that. So I think that's a really good example about a feature that when you understand why players like it and you understand how to implement it when it's more than just a monetization tool but actually an engagement tool and and and kind of like a a a journey a short

tail journey in your game. I think if that's a really kind of like strong thing to focus on.
Yeah. I think for us we actually have multi- like battle passes in most of our games. Um the thing I would say is having like one level or two levels I think is acceptable. We added a third level like in terms of the more expensive package and we uh were under the understanding that we thought because the additional value you know that we added uh a particular game mode that only you could get in the top you know ranking one the highest value one. Um, and in actual fact, what we ended up doing is not understanding our, you know, user behaviors and and we believed because of the additional game mode that it would be enough to get people to convert. And actually adding that additional battle like battle pass added no value. Um, and that was a time where we just got it wrong cuz we were going for depth and you know, you don't over complicate it too much.
You were going for price depth.
I'm all about that money, Maya. All about that money.

I think like I think I can give an example also of getting it wrong. Um to also tie it back to what Zor said earlier about intent and high intent live ops. I think everyone knows the um the model of Gossip Harbor and like a 100 events a month and you know particularly relevant in the merge genre. Um I I think we we tried to go after like wide variety in our live ops uh earlier last year and and overlapping events and we were not getting the impact from those until we started thinking very intentionally about how each event uh served the user progression. Um, you know, I could talk about the success story that we got on the end of that, but I don't know if that's gonna jump onto your next question. But
no, I mean, the the next question actually or the next kind of topic was to continue, I guess, with the the toolbox analogy is kind of what are things that you have found really work and then also what have you thought was going to be brilliant and you've ended up chucking out of your toolbox and

saying, "No, we're not, you know, that didn't work for us at this time or or this title."
Yeah. So I can say like just chasing did not work but focusing on on explicitly what our users wanted and and what role that played in the kind of the live ops harness for the core. We ended up stripping back and removing some events. Um we removed an older collection feature as well and we launched a new um timed collection feature at the end of last year that was very in tune with what our players want. We know in love and pies they're more about the delightful art and the story. So instead of doing, you know, your classic AI generated content, we started working with like independent illustrators for each season to have very different, you know, sticker collections. Um, you know, time we added on top of that a daily accelerator event, you know, using um not Meta Play sadly because we are we are an older older stack and we don't, you know, currently have the scope to migrate. Although I think Metapplay has some very similar awesome tools, but we're using a thirdparty tool called Kinoa to serve some uh fast daily

accelerators and saw you know plus 20% net rev uplift from from the just the combination of those two additional events. I also some think that something we don't talk about a lot at these sort of things is the you know the third party tool providers a little bit of shilling for Meta Play over here but I think you know especially for a small studio um we do not have the internal capabilities to develop tech like all of my developers are focusing on developing the games and obviously if you're a much bigger studio and you have more resources you have an internal team that's building this stuff but I think Again, a lot of times small teams, they try and do it themselves. They over complicate things. They take away from what they should be focusing on, which is improvements of the game. Um, and this is ultimately one of the reasons why I'm here at PGC is to meet with providers and understand to how we can improve um our games without having to to spend needless time on doing what

we're not good at because ultimately at the end of the day, we know how to build games. What do I know about building a live ops SAS technology? you know.
Yeah. And actually um thank you for the kind words also. I agree by the way but um
shock shock
I also kind of I was thinking about the the question about like what when it goes wrong and so on and um there was a time when for example like everything goes in trends and as the chief nitification officer right like my job is to go to a conference come back and be like guys I read Miska's blog and uh they said leaderboards are like the newest thing so guys let's add leaderboards by the way I met with Meta Play guys and we should add their leaderboard into our game and like it doesn't just fit at all. So like the the real question not that this ever happened. So the real question is always like ah is let's say is competitive career mode right like do we want to have like long-term competitive goals in the game and if so how would we

structure it in our game and if so is that even a generic thing that we need a tool for? Maybe, maybe not, as in let's talk about it, come to a booth. But um but often times, honestly, like on on top tier games, it also tends to be mostly internal because it's like so bespoke the what the right thing is. And then the generic level is a bit lower. Like I'll I'll talk your ear off about like distributed programming. But you know, it doesn't matter unless you have that vision for the thing that fits. Um, I think you got you got to be problem obsessed rather than solution obsessed. So when you what you're describing when you see what happens works in another game and then you take it, you're like, "Ah, this is a great solution. I'll just take that and I'll implement it and it's going to work great." If you're problem obsessed, if you're worried about the players problems for your specific game, that creates way more opportunities than you think. Um, I'll give you two examples of one that didn't work, one one that worked. Um, we obviously at Candy we

have tw over 20,000 levels at this point. It's uh a daunting daunting experience to get there. Like if you start now, it probably you won't be able to finish it. Um, and we always thought, well, why don't we give players something on the side, something that they can progress towards so it's not as daunting. And uh, we realized that what we should have done instead is just make that progression, the main one, way more meaningful. I won't get into too specifics, but basically the the sides the the the added different boards or um levels added more friction than we thought they would add benefits and we just needed to focus on the players playing the uh the real game itself.
That's that's really interesting. I I play a lot of uh Kingshot for example and they're really smart in terms of you know you start the game and you're basically play within your server and then you you get to the point you're like I'm I'm a big dog in the server now and then suddenly they're like there's all these other servers to fight against now and you're like oh my god I'm I'm I'm a tiny fish in this pond but what

were you going to say Maya? Yeah, I I think kind of like back to the conversation around tooling. I think whenever we try to release a new feature, we would want it to be like a spaceship, right? We can we can segment it, we can play with it, we can uh uh kind of like tune it uh from from the back end. All of these things is amazing, but at the end of the day, they cost time. They cost people's resources and and I think we are all scarce and development time or developers. This is why I'm here. But but I think we all like development time is is very expensive, right? Like we want to make sure that we focus on the right thing. And I think in live ops that's always kind of like that question is what level of of flexibility do we want to release a feature or anything at its first iteration and then once we kind of like understand that we actually want to improve it, it's we're always late. So it's like you're always you're always kind like I should have done that to begin with. I should have been more flexible to begin with. be able to test more. But I think it's that like if you

build that spaceship to begin with and you work so hard to release something, even if you have the strongest conviction that it will be successful, that's I think where you're probably going to be the like you have the highest chances to be wrong. And also being wrong there is that's when it hurts the most because that's a very expensive lesson for you and your team and it's very frustrating. So I think it's it's using those tools trying to find a way to kind of like mitigate between and balance between those things. I think that's that that allows you to actually make mistakes and successes and and probably not to have that huge impact but have that small impact that they will later have a bigger one.
Um question time is normally tumble weed at these things but I feel like hopefully there are some questions. So maybe Oscar if we could open up a bit earlier than normal.
Okay. So, does anyone have a question right here? Go for it.
Hey there. Um, we've got a game that's in year six now. And
congratulations.
Thank you.

Um, and the panel talked a lot about from a product perspective and also from even a technology and toolkit perspective. The perspective unsurprisingly as a dev director I'm interested in is from the team. How do you go about making sure you have the right roles at the right time that you swap people out, keep them fresh, particularly if you end up on that, as John said, the content treadmill. Um, particularly where I find it challenging is programmers where they're it's not exciting, it's not sexy what they're working on and that they can see the new game over there, the other team working on it, and they're doing, you know, you know, multiplayer technology and they want to be over there. How do you manage that to make sure the team are always at their best to deliver for the players?
Yeah, this is one of my number one issues or say problems or things I focus on being CEO. Um the team especially, you know, again, our newest game is 5 years old and there's some of the games

which are up to 14 years old and quite frankly some of our developers have been at the company for over 10 years and they're not working on new core gameplay. They're not working on sexy exciting stuff. They're working on meta adjustments and economy adjustments and quite frankly these are creative people, you know, they want to have the creative purpose and they want to explore. Um, we actually do a uh one day a week, sorry, one day a month for every six weeks game jam and we shut the office. Uh we basically set a you know an idea for the day and we get the guys to develop something within the you know the 8 hour window and then we have pizza and we have drinks and we uh have a um like a rating and a a competition at the end and there's always a little prize. Um because quite frankly we we don't have a new game in the works right now to put them on but we still need them to be able to be somewhat creative and do something different. And uh yeah, the monthly game jams is something that has

really really helped. I know it's like taking the team away from a day or a month or every six weeks, but we always find that the week after the game jam, people are just much more invigorated. So that's something that we implemented about four months ago, five months ago, and the team are really responding well to it.
Yeah, I think I can tell you like I share your feeling. I think especially when the part of your company is sometimes a bit more exciting, right? like if you need to choose between heyday and and Clash Royale especially today I I think I think it's it's around there's a lot around how the experience being part of the game team and I think this is the most important part for leads is how do we make sure that we are creating the best environment for the people in our team to really feel inspired and to feel engaged and to feel heard I think maybe that's the most important people want to have impact if we tell people like just do this and then kind of like more directed really tell them exactly what to do. I think that's where they want to that's where they start kind like shut down. I think

to keep them engaged like you have to make sure that they're part of the conversation, they're part of the solution. They feel like it's their game and then I think everything becomes much more exciting because everything you do you can really translate it into impact. And I think kind of like at the end of the day it's if people don't believe and get excited about what they're doing, I think that's where you need to kind of figure out ways to get them excited. And I think that's the most important part that we can do about it.
Yeah, I agree 100%. It's all about mission and culture. Um, yeah, I mean, we do a lot of game jams, too, but when it comes down to it, people want impact. Although, I will say on legacy games and legacy tech, some of the gnarliest technical challenges I've ever seen in my career are are in those in those games
built tools are always entertaining, should we say.
The the mini games that we launched in December came from one of our game jams. So, we had a game jam dedicated to the mini games and then the team obviously developed those new modes and then they implemented them and obviously that was like a great feeling for the people that developed that, you know, to have

something cured by them put into the game.
Yeah. Maybe also like two more angles to it. Like first of all, classic mushroom management. Keep them in a dark room. Don't let them out and they don't they won't know of anything better.
Don't they know anything else? That doesn't work.
That would never happen in Finland. You would be in jail right now.
Only in the winter. But also then from a sports analogy point of view like you have to know what your winning condition is and in the beginning the winning condition is about being creating find nailing the right systems and coming up with stuff from scratch all that and those people will not be as good in the next winning condition which is optimizing those systems further and I had um for example I'm actually really really happy for a lot of teams at Supercell internally where the culture is such that it's okay and expected that it's not the same team that manages the live game fundamentally then that create it that the the change in staffing is expected and planned for just because it's basic psychology. So I

think if the if the team can kind of buy into that then even if you have I don't want to call it layoffs but like literally people leaving or joining that's okay
but it's different skill sets so of course it's okay.
Yeah. I love that question because I think it focus on teams, right? There's a saying that if you have a great idea and a bad team, it's going to probably be bad. But if you have a bad idea and a great team, there's more chances of it to be successful. And I think whatever we think about and all these conversation and toolboxes and everything, which are very important, it's I think there's so much weight into having the best team and people like really engaged and and excited about what they're doing and that's how you get it right.
One more.
Uh yeah, go for One more. Oh, we got Oh, I think I saw your hand go up first. I'm gonna come over here. No, no.
Oh, no. We're together.
So, one of the interesting things that we constantly uh at Kabam are trying to balance is the push and pull between acquisition and maintenance of existing

users with live ops. I'd be curious for the panel, how do you try to strike that balance between trying to use live ops to draw in new players versus trying to keep existing players uh excited about the game.
Can I pass now? No.
I mean, ideally, you want to do both. I mean like I I know live ops is more is thought of more as a retention feature but I mean why not like look into ways that your live ops can serve uh both purposes like there's some great social live ops uh you know references out there and I think it's a rich area to explore um but yeah I agree on a lean team you sometimes need to focus but and go in phases between acquisition and retention that's part of the game
yeah I I pause because I I I also struggling. I I don't think they're super exclusive or it's best case

scenario if they're not exclusive so that you can you can do both a good live ops that would retain the players you foreshadow so that players come back or uh you know infrequent visitors and then you get platform featuring uh hopefully that you acquire the new ones. So in best case it can do all of it. Maybe maybe we can look at it like how could it negatively impact each other and I think I think maybe sometimes I usually try to focus on the positive but here try to make sure that it doesn't create a negative impact like sometimes we try to use these tools to with UA which can send kind of like the wrong message or something that is misleading and not truthful to the promise of the game. I think that's the balance as long as you're thinking about the positive impact and there's healthy correlation between both. I think that's kind of like the right balance to strike it, but it's a constant conversation how to get it right. But I think the question need to be how do we get it better?
Yeah, I mean I agree with every everyone

said the only example I've seen of more uh say new user focused live ops is around IP integration. And so like Supercell when it did the Harland campaign, it was doing that for a purpose, right? It was trying to tap into a younger audience or a sports fake can normally do. I see that as part of a live ops live event, unique character systems and all such like that. But quite frankly, I don't think they're exclusive. You know, it's not new and old or retain and new. It's it's all kind of uh different side of the same coin. You know, you're trying to effectively do the same thing.
Yeah. Maybe I'll also add that one of the exciting thing about having a mature game is that a lot of time like these actually bring in players who left the game. So kind of like turn players come in through this and this is also another type of of of user acquisition that we need to really be mindful of.
Phil, I just want to chuck in on this. I think I agree with you guys entirely. I think the problem is we often think of games as movies when they're actually soap operas. And the problem we're making, the mistake we're making, if

we're thinking there's a difference between a new user and and an ongoing user in terms of how we maintain and sustain their interest, we've made a fundamental mistake. Because at the end of the day, we are creating a living experience. And we've got to sustain and engage people simultaneously with the delight of what's coming next. We don't have that predictable surprise, that predictable delight. Why am I coming back tomorrow? And I think that reason to come back tomorrow matters to everybody. And and I have to wrap up. So, thank you very much, guys. But um but as I do, I've just reminded you guys have just reminded me why I'm doing what I'm doing right now. So, I'm going to do my shield, which I never do on these things, which is we're building a platform to help live studios make better decisions where we take information like the guys at Meta Player are doing, which is amazing stuff. So, you the stuff that you're building and why what impact it's having on players. So, if anyone wants to talk to me about that at some point, please do. But genuinely, you guys have been amazing. Thank you so much. Please give them a round of applause. Thank you.