LiveOps Secrets Revealed: How Top Game Developers Drive Success

in today's gaming landscape it's become obvious that live Ops is a critical part of success this became really evident when we saw the success of games like brawl Stars Drive dramatic Improvement in performance last year remember the three pillars of success for games it's back to the old days game quality live Ops and user acquisition now with respect to liveops I wanted to find out what are the most critical capabilities required to Drive liveop success so I thought well if I could ask anyone in the world anyone in the world for advice on this topic who would I ask well maybe I'd ask one of the Franks from brawl Stars so I asked Frank Yan who was until recently leading design on that game maybe I'd also asked whoever was driving live Ops and monetization for the number one Social Casino game in the us from last year which is cpls

Jackpot Party Casino Slots so I asked daphna Ben on who is cpl's director of monetization for that game and maybe if I could pick anyone in the world to ask about live Ops capabilities I would also ask someone who's been at the tip of the spear in Innovation and sophisticated live Ops analysis working with many game studios now on his 10th year at Super scale the company CEO Ivan tronic folks do not miss this episode you want to listen to literally some of the world's greatest experts on liveops design and monetization brought to you by your dude so you're welcome so we'll kick it off starting with Frank Yan the dude who led design on brawl stars and was part of arguably the greatest liveops Revival in the history of mobile games what are the most important live

Ops capabilities coming at you right now all right the first thing is that to be able to react really quickly this means being able to push content uh whether that's an event um or a game mode out in like a matter of seconds or a shop offer and be able to do it uh very very quickly I would say the second thing is being able to update that aforementioned content without needing any type of client update or server maintenance and the third is to be able to segment players such that we can give specific players certain types of content or a certain offer uh because not everybody is the same everybody is at different lives in their player Journey so you have to kind of celebrate different players in different ways depending on how well they've achieved

uh kind of the goals that are set out on the game so I think regarding segmentation uh one great example is if someone hasn't spent in a while and you know they're enjoy buying the battle passes because of their prior history that you would offer them a discount on a battle pass to say hey we noticed you hadn't um played in a while or hadn't bought a battle pass in a while here's like a great deal off of it um and you'd be able to kind of set what percentage discount to give them I think another good example there is um be able to celebrate a player based on what Milestone you felt uh was really hard for them to achieve you know the best offers are some of the ones where you are able to celebrate achievement in a game because those are kind of the most meaningful moments where they H where players have emotional highs right and you want to you know not only give them free things but also so you know give

them a great deal on something because you're saying hey congratulations on uh achieving that Milestone there are two things that when we are thinking of what live Ops event we want to run we're asking ourselves first what what KP we're trying to drive obviously at the end of the day it's a business and so it's always Revenue but a lot of the times the answer would actually not be a spike in Revenue it it would actually be something else and for example it could be retention and so when we ask ourselves what is the kpi that we're trying to drive when it's retention um the tool or the test that we're um using is basically optimizing towards what is the right reward because we have found that higher rewards Drive in our game um Drive higher retention stickiness basically the the players come back day

after day more often when the rewards are higher having this be a business we can't always allow uh for an inflow of the currency to be in the game for sustained long periods of time so we use optimization of the of the am of the rewards that we give our players in order to allow for higher retention um and there could be a trade-off there of um um Revenue either not increasing as much or stagnation on the other side of the coin basically if the kpi that we're trying to push right now is a spike in Revenue um then we have found that in our game umping up the difficulty levels of what we are asking the players to do through liveops has really showed itself as a good driver for Revenue the issue is is that over

time we cannot run these events uh because the the downside of it is when the game becomes a little bit too difficult for the players they may choose to not come back so optimization between what is the coin amount basically the rewards that we give in our game and the difficulty of the live Ops events is the um the work that we do in to balance between all the needs of the game got it and so def it kind of sounds like what you're saying is that you have a set of tools that helps you op optimize for example rewards that are given to the players and that often has a big impact on retention and then game difficulty depending on how you tune the difficulty of the various levels in the game uh will then also impact revenue and just a question in terms of how that's done is it through some kind of multivariant test

tool or is it something that's like an that automatically tries out different kinds of difficulty and kind of tells you the answer or is it is it more directed like a multivariate test or is it something that's a little bit more automatic it's the first one it's the it's the multivariant tests um so we definitely have very segmented events and this all goes through a lot a lot a lot of scrutinizing and testing and understanding what is the best um ratio between the two elements that I just talked about for each player to try and understand really what is the tailored experience that would drive you to as a player to exactly what we are trying to to get out of you whether it's retention or Revenue so it sounds like you're pushing either on revenue or retention there's a balance as you're saying and then how do you determine what that balance is do yeah and I do realize why why while saying it that it

sounds like it's either or I I I don't want that to be the conclusion of this we do find a really good balance to run it all um and and continue having players that are very very loyal players and monetize extremely well because we believe that the a positive experience a an experience that is tailored to what you need right now and what you can afford to put in the game in in in perspective of time is actually going to keep you for long in the game and keep you a happy customer so it's not either or but it's definitely an artwork in trying to find that balance and so um because we're such a driven data driven company we do test all of this and try to understand what is the right balance between them all and and and to your question there isn't just one formula it's just understanding what you need as a player right but also also sounds like

the other maybe a third capability that you're talking about is when you are driving towards a single metric that there's going to be an potential impact on other metrics so understanding the impact of all the metrics may be kind of the third key definitely we always try to look at the whole story and what all the kpis that we are measuring are telling us about the players because yes a lot of the time we see that there's a trade-off between one to the other and then there needs to be one a balancing act and also a prioritization Act of understanding what is what is the need right now for the game first and foremost uh it's important to uh to segment uh the stos and life cycles uh of their Journey that we're discussing because it's it's a different if you're starting and your sof launching first game and it's different if you already have games with audience and you try to uh incrementally optimize what's there uh so uh definitely start let's say the the first

like a earli stage if you're if you're a gaming startup which is uh maybe receive some form of investment or I know bootstrapping but generally it's approaching uh soft launch uh this is I think what I would say the most important capability is you have because you have limited budget you have limited resources you want to get as much learning per per spend dollar uh as possible so you can basically find out if the game is has likes if it has likes you'll get enough information so we can raise more money so absolutely 100% before you would spend a single dollar dollar on the UA or do you start some form of optimization of product itself you should have your analytics and business analytics set up ready uh so uh this this ensures that once you uh open your game in the First Market get some first players in uh you immediately start uh start getting the most out of your uh out of your traffic out of your

players out of out of dollars spent in UA uh so so without it I wouldn't advise to do uh to do much before um so uh so absolutely analytics and uh get uh what's more important um I would definitely advise to uh have even simple some some form of data lake so you do not rely just on a dashboard in a MMP or just what you see in stores that actually already start pulling the data uh in your own database in your system uh so that uh so that you can do some uh some anties around it and more importantly you can ensure the consistency uh of the data so so before this is done uh you you shouldn't uh in my opinion you shouldn't uh shouldn't rush spending uh any money or opening the market uh so when when this kind of a this kind of a basis set up this the part that's that's you already have some

data set up coming in you can trust the data because you know we Pro check whatever you're sending to UA to MMP it's right uh this is where uh you need to first and foremost figure out uh your CPI versus LTV uh Gap so so uh this is where uh start on one side start spending uh some money on the UA to get a feel from the CPI at the same time start evaluating uh retention once the number give yourself so for that uh for that you you would you should start identifying the Bott leg and I think this is the most important part uh focusing on the most important botle uh early on so is it is it a store conversion uh so you need to spend a bit moreo uh is it uh the adops side of things so you're you're way below the benchmarks on how much Impressions is getting and howay is getting or is it that your in a purchas economy is is really somehow broken and and nobody's

incentivized to spending anything or it's too hard so so there's no fun in the game so so this is the second capability after you get your your kind of analytics infrastructure in to just start making sure that you're focusing in your limited time and budget uh on the most impactful uh most impactful botton legs first before you start tling something which may bring you just incremental change so uh so this is early stage Alpha and Omega if you go to the second segment which I would consider hey you already have one one or couple titles life and kicking uh making some money uh I don't know let's say you know couple hundred thousands a year uh you already basically somehow stable uh hopefully uh and you already have some players you have some existing players you acquiring new players at some level uh this is the moment that you should start thinking more in terms of uh in term in terms of cap AB testing so any

kind of uh any kind of change you would make uh especially on the product side M it's one making sure do do you have some way how to roll it out for uh for certain percentage of players and compare them to the control group uh and uh the ability to evaluate these changes against the C set of game in a again in a robust manner uh I think this is what can get you to the next level uh at this phas uh and again you can start as simply as some some form of a stage roll out uh or you know some very simplified uh AB desting cic uh to go for uh but again you already have traffic so not not testing enough uh can can can get you behind and then and then basically you are if you're already in more you know let's say Enterprise or mid Market or Enterprise segment so you have a game which which you know start making seven figures seven eight figures uh and more uh obviously right now at scale uh it's

not just about the kind of ab tting or comparing to one experiment at a time with a control group uh now it's about the what I would describe is the experimentation machine so uh so you have you're maximizing the opportunity to test every step of the funnel and and you're not basically leaving some profits of the funel just because you are not testing enough right so so again making sure that your machine is working up to its potential I think this is the kind of a almost meta challenge for bigle games where where uh you make sure you're maximizing the amount of tests you do uh onl side maxim of uh additional uh creative test on the US side uh Maxim maximizing amount of uh AB as you're running whether it's for the pricing or special offers or or waterfall or bidding or metab Bing set up on adop side so so I think transition from from this Basics to simple variant control to multivar testing but focusing

on every segment I think this this is what I view is is the is the is the key process and infrastructure uh you should have in place and which ultimately uh determines the the level of growth and progress you can make at in any of these stages [Music] [Music]