How in-game events can boost your monetisation, retention and gameplay variety

hi everyone okay so my name is Nicolas Pizarro I'm product manager pocket Gems and I'm gonna talk about events and events are funny because whenever I talk to anyone who's not actually working in games they get confused and they ask me like so do you set up like meetups or like tournaments I'm like no no no it's it's an in-game event it's a digital event so yeah so let's chat about how those work and and why they're important and how they can help you boost your monetization retention and gameplay variety so we'll start with just a basic introduction so I don't know about the games that you work on but for Dragons events are actually really key contributed to our revenue and we actually have a system that we built that exists outside of our client codes so we're able to be flexible and iterate

on our events and kind of change things on the fly if we need to which is actually pretty important for the nature of events we've found and yeah the final point is that running events isn't easy anything related to live ops is tends to be pretty challenging trying to balance all the different needs of your company in the game and also like what your community expects so hopefully I can give you guys some useful points on that so we'll start with gameplay variety so events helped a lot with gameplay variety because outside of like the regular content of your game you have a fresh new thing that happens every week or two weeks or whatever cadence you choose and and my opinion is that events actually bring abundance to the game so like because of the fact that they changed you can iterate on them they can keep updating them you can bring in new stuff you can bring in lore you can bring in new prizes there's all this exciting stuff that wouldn't happen otherwise without events and I should have an example from our game which is a an event called fortification frenzy which is where players earn points for

leveling up their buildings and spending lumber and we actually have a graph here these are lumber balances over a period of time and those two big dips that you see are actually the fortification frenzy event so there's this really cool moment before the event starts where everyone is like bouncing lumber between each other meaning that they're transferring stockpiles but while they're in transit they can't be stolen by other players and they're also like frantically waiting for the event to start to spend all their lumber at once before it just drops out from the economy and it got so intense that we actually decided to add in a little series of tweaks that run during the event that boost production so that people still have something to the scavenge for during the event yeah continuing on gameplay variety another great thing about events is that if you're a team that's heavily invested in the game you're probably going to be gunning really hard on the core loop but also on events and if you're a team that's maybe a little less invested or in a really tough league you actually have the option of choosing to like fight hard in events or in the core loop

or I guess do middle ground for both but it feels nice to win at something so part of that is yeah you kind of have a secondary objective that you can aim for so if you're struggling in your league maybe you don't aim for for matchmaking rating you aim more for event score and like placing high in your Lady another great thing about events is that since it's not like your core games this is something ephemeral it's limited time it doesn't necessarily have to come back you can actually try risky things so here I included a screen shot of an event which we called the high seas event and basically it's very different from war dragons and that it features permanent destruction there's content so you can continously you can capture there's like mines and you capture around around the world map and and like bring resources back to your base it's all very different from art from our core game but we were able to send it out to players have them play get a bunch of feedback and potentially we're gonna release it in a future version of the game now that's polished and ready to go but if we've done this as a client feature we probably would have had a

much different experience because like once it's in people expect it to say and then we'd be kind of stuck with this crazy huge complicated model that we can't necessarily change as much as we look as we would like to all right on to monetization so obviously monetization is very important if you don't have money and you aren't receiving money from your users eventually your game is going to die unless it's like a altruistic project but there's only so much you can do with that I actually included another screenshot here from our game which is our monthly prising so because events are eluted time we have the option of having really cool prizes that players can earn by getting points throughout the event and we built on that by creating monthly prizes so over the course of a month players who participate in each event throughout the month actually get special prizes that are even better than the ones contained within the individual event and so this makes it so that if your player comes back often and engages of the events and and competes at a high level you get like an even better award

at the end of the month and this this screenshot is showing a dragon called net Croft so throughout the events you're in fragments for necross and as you level them up you unlock prizes and then you can get like special portraits special tower fragments so you can only get through events that kind of stuff and players really love them the monthly pricing another great thing for events and monetization is that events create a different set of expectations so the thing about your core game is that it's sore like sentence stone they come in they play the game they level up and like things change as you're leveling but they sort of expect the game to behave in a certain fashion but with events since they come they come and go and they change over time you're able to sort of switch around parameters maybe add in new things maybe take away things and players don't find that quite as upsetting and also what we've taught our players is that when an event is running there's a lot of value there for you to get so for example our value packs which

is what we have like our bundle died a piece together during events they run and they have a much higher value than they would otherwise so players know that like when an event starts it's a great time to buy value packs and those value packs also coordinate and are optimized for the event so it incentivizes them to fight in the event and then as are in the event they're doing stuff that that benefits them in game levelling up their dragons like fighting other players leveling up their base but they're all starting points that then give them rewards so it creates this like super rewarding engaging scenario where like they really feel compelled to participate and they very much enjoy and actually because of that high Mantes monetization potential we can include like really exciting prizes and this is something that we do that's a little different from a lot of game is that we have custom portraits custom statues those kind of things that we make for our players so we started this with the great contest in December where over the course of the month the top teams in the Diamond League which is our best league they fought and based on their event score they were like ranked accordingly and so the top team which was called dreadnought and they got to

design their own statue for the event island which is really cool so when the event starts there's an event Aylin that comes up and there's a special statute that they designed themselves so everyone has to see there's tattoo until it changes and then they also got to make a custom portrait so that's a picture of their portrait and then we're building on that in 2016 with something that we call seasons so we have season 1 and we have seasonal rewards and those rewards are different leaderboards that you place on based on like individual team performance and then there are different rewards associated with that so like if you're again if you're the top team in diamond you get a special statue if you're one of the top 100 teams globally you get special monument on your base and if you're in the top 100 players globally you get your middle building on your island its gilded like gold or silver or bronze depending on your placement so on to retention obviously retention also very important especially for your elder players so as your players get older in terms of like game days they become more valuable to your game because they're more engaged they spent more they're invested and events helped a lot with boosting

retention for those elder players also for for the younger players but the way that our events we tend to attract the elder players more so so we found that events that require high coordination and complexity really appeal to our veteran players and then the more kind of simple events helped bring our new players into the game and that helps with retention across the board and another really fun little anecdote is like for our top players and teams placement in events is like really highly contested and prestigious and we saw this unexpectedly when we introduced the global team leader boards before between leagues teams didn't know like how they plays but with the global leaderboards everyone saw like how they placed on like a global scale and some of our like lower league teams in platinum or getting more points as a team than teams in diamonds and so they were like making fun of the diamond league teams and being jerks and like have discussion with some of our diamond players and they're saying how much they hate like these specific teams because they always give them a hard time so

it's fun to see that sort of joking spirit here I've included a screenshot from our forums and basically it shows just how engaged people are with events so like whenever an event comes up we'll have a ton of questions people discussing strategy may be complaining about drops from the armory wanting to change things giving feedback but it's really great because like even if the feedback on the forums is is kind of negative or maybe they're not entirely happy the fact that they come out and talk to us about it shows just how passionate they are about the game and events yeah so that's the talk in summary events help and are vital to the success your game by adding gameplay variety so limited time plus unique objectives creates a change of pace that's different from what you would usually experience they also boost monetization so those exciting prizes just the fun of participating the event and the competition between teams creates another area of the game to invest in that maybe you wouldn't wouldn't invest as much otherwise and

then also help by lifting retention so there's lasting challenges new experiences with new events and changes to events and team cohesion creates continuously compelling and captivating content yeah so does anyone have any questions yeah that's a great question so we've actually been exploring that a lot right now we're on a weekly cadence which kind of works with like people's schedules you know though we have the events happen over the weekend people tend to like that fits with their schedule but in terms like the sweet spot for like how often an event is held I think it depends on the event so we did an experiment actually back in December where we had what we call major events we had two major events running back-to-back and those are what I mentioned is like the high complexity high intensity events and we actually had a lot of feedback from players they felt that that was too much it was demanding too much of them so now mostly we have a minor event which is sort of a simpler kind of core loop event building

up your dragons building up your base and then we have a major event which involves like a lot of fighting a lot of complexity a lot of strategy but we're still doing experiments with like certain events to see like how often we should run them like how often should a breeding event happen how often should a a building event happen because you see those dips in the economy right so do we need a balance to build up or not so I mean I honestly don't have any definite answers on that we're still figuring that out but I guess it's important that you do like experimentation and see what these different configurations do so like if we hadn't tried the two major events in a row we might have been missing out on a lot of revenue potentially but we found that like people like felt it was way too much and we did see a little dip in revenue anyone else it's so bright so I guess I didn't really mention in detail but so the the monthly prising we actually so before we had just like based on the points you earned in the events but then we changed it to be like the dragon and

you earn fragments for the dragon and level up the dragon so I guess that would be an experiment introducing a new currency so like every month there's a new dragon a new fragments that's urine and you get fragments through the event prising and also from the army which is like a Gacha system and we found that to be really successful because that way players can choose to like fight really hard in the events but if they don't want to they can just go to the armory the Gacha and roll for fragments and get them that way but everyone can participate was depending on you know how much they're willing to contribute