Session: How to run Mobile Games as a Service for Decades? Introducing Beacon, Niina Ojala, Rovio.

[Music] carry on now we're going to now talk about how to run a mobile games as a service for decades and we got Nina here from robio come on up Nina hello welcome uh everybody nice to meet you I'm H Nina from roio I'm leading product management in roio's technology unit um called peon maybe some of you know about it and I'm here to talk about how peon can help run

gains as a service for decades so um it's actually I have so many stories and examples to tell you so I need my notes uh to remember to tell you everything that I wanted to tell you so firstly I would like to just very briefly introduce you to what Beacon is about uh and especially the technology suit that we have secondly you will hear lots of hopefully useful interesting examples how how to run games as a service for decades and how our Beacon can help with that and finally uh I I wanted to show you a a short video how one of our bigger games is is using Beacon and hopefully that will give you even more uh elaborated examples uh overall Beacon's mission is is really to enable our games to craft joy for our players players are

definitely in the center in everything we do so the technology stack of of beon includes around 50 interconnected services that helps our advertising teams user acquisition teams game teams uh business intelligence team analysts uh so many teams to to uh in their work so we have in summary we have uh services and and tools that uh to bring gains to Market we have uh tools to profitably grow games through user acquisition keep players engaged and live operate the games monetize within a purchases and AD monetization and of course ensuring safe gaming experience and and privacy uh privacy uh private handling of the player data I will use these game uh game life cycle phases in my presentation so let me introduce uce you first these

phases in the prototyping phase it's all about exploring and and innovating new game uh designs and developing different versions and and testing what works in the early audiences in the soft launch phase it's about testing the marketability and doing first in-game uh advertising monetization tests in the Going Global phase you want to start to scale and and and start in the scale Global and globally uh reaching the audiences and making the game available for different player segments and finally in the scaling up phase uh at scale phase you really want to optimize the player experience but also how you monetize the game through Ina purchases and and in- game ads so what matters in the prototyping phase what how our gain teams are using it and how Beacon can can support

you so we have uh really the player is in the center of of everything in in Beacon it starts with the player we have uh we collect and in connect with the player and and collect player data and and data throughout the throughout the player Journey so in the prototyping phase the game teams already get a a variety of dashboards and reports and and and player level data out of the box so that they can use uh that and analyze the early game versions We of course also have spent qu a lot of time carefully managing the player privacy of of the data examples of the outof the Box analytics include standard dashboards which include uh daily active user metrics retention metrics for day one day seven and so on we have inner purchases Revenue and uh and conversion

metrics we have ad Revenue metrics and uh behind the scenes we have a data Lake which includes lots of uh poniz player level metrics about activity purchases ad Impressions and and so on as well as cohort level purchases and attribution and user acquisition kpis and all these metrics are available within our sales service analytics tooling then in the soft launch phase um we have uh we focus on the user acquisition uh campaigns and first add monetization campaigns and in uh and optimizing the the monetization of the games the the user acquisition tools and and what our user acquisition teams and game teams are focusing on uh include marketing campaign optimization uh with payback model modeling with standard set

of kpis and metrics and also rigorous governance monitoring and reporting to inser the profitability of the the success of the user acquisition campaigns the the user acquisition and campaign level profitability we both consider the past performance of the campaigns but also we use data science and and data modeling uh to to predict the lifetime value of the players so that whenever we optimize and select the the user acquisition campaigns and the network we use we can ensure Optimal Performance also in the longer term so that we can focus and and get most of the spending players into the games during the soft launch you also probably want to start uh the ad monetization testing in Beacon we use and we have our own ad mediation uh which enables then granular optimization

of ads placements and player segmentation and and also monetization across the inner purchases spender spending players versus the non-sp spending players who just like to watch ads and get benefits by that one thing that is important in this phase we think is already to start uh enable remote configurability of the game so you want to insenser the best player experience within the game but if you every time you change something you need to deliver a new client version that slows you down so in Beacon we we support the tools so that you can we call it app configurations remotely configuring the app app uh settings and experience for the players so so definitely you would want to start with that already in this phase

uh in the global launch then you want to reach to the wider audience and it's of course still about making good player experience and fun for the players but it's also internally you you need to start more and more to look into the efficiency how you run your operations so things like personalization automating the personalization liveops events player communication and player support have already been important but start to be very important in this phase when you want to go Global for instance with the personalization you maybe want to uh consider what offers you give to the firsttime users versus to your more engaged users uh the game really also needs to Fresh uh feel fresh every day so that the returning players the engaged players you have that when they come to your game to to these kind of games that we have they really are expecting to get new content BAS basically every day but

it's also important that when you get the new players in so that they like any day of the week that they join in so they get the welcome events or or personalized for experience for the new players in Pon we also handle the Privacy regulations actually very very granular level and seriously we we cover about uh like tens of different countries specific rules for for data sharing to third party networks Ace limitations and uh and Vil limitations depending on on the different uh regulations in different countries around the world in the at scale phase um really the game start to be really complex if you have done everything uh I've talked about at least and uh and the audience also start to be very wide you have loads of players loads of different kind

of player segments and they of course have their different preferences and requirements and you want to try to cater to all those needs as well as you can so to give you a few examples what we do in our games at Rio so for instance we really focus on personalizing the first time user experience the new new players that install the game they have or at least the ones that uh are coming by an advertising so they have seen an adver creative in an advertisement and that's their expectation for the game so for instance you could uh think of customizing the the liveops events the first event that the new player sees from this uh campaign uh that's based on the creative or maybe you want to uh personalize the the if if the creative included the mini game maybe you want to

uh personalize the the what what is the event based on that in the game that they see or from the monetization point of you maybe you want to select the price point what you offer uh what kind of in game purchases you offer to the new players and of course this requires close collaboration between the user acquisition team and the game team another example is really to think about holistically uh about the player experience in this at scale phase so you don't want to just do one tweak there or here and and and then think about that that this gives the best player experience but it's best that you think about across everything live Ops events player communication um different uh different uh content in the game so so that's what uh beon also offers tooling for finally one more example is about uh ads frequency in the in the games where you have in game ads so optimizing for

nons Spenders maybe you try to give them more frequently ads and then they get benefits in the game versus the Spenders maybe you don't want to interfere their gaming experience with so many ads and of course you can do this with manually selecting the frequencies for different player segments or you can also offers Automated machine learning models to do this optimization finally how it all works just before I show you the video um we have when when everything is integrated via beon SDK within the game client uh we have a web based web browser based dashboard where the game teams can and and use acquisition teams and at monetization teams they can configure settings um game game like experience for the players AP tests and other features um within the the game and what happens in the background

Also let's see if the video works so I I believe this will show [Music] you hey hello my name is Nikki and I am the lead product manager for angry Bir stream BL our game just like all R your titles contains robio game Tech platform called Beacon at its core and we use its powerful features for every step of the game life cycle we rely on Beacon in the development and Publishing process UA campaigns live operations and with everything starting from terms of service and a check flows to live operations AB testing and analytics Von has been designed at Roo from the ground up over the course of 10 years and has been an indispensable tool in our work I'd like to show you some of the powerful featur features that beon

offers to all roio game teams we have firsthand experience and deep understanding of the perfect set of ingredients required to grow the audience and create life time fans beon tools for player engagement play a big role and allow us to do just that for example Beacon includes support for in-game messaging and surveys that can be utilized alongside audience segmentation rules let's take a look in this example we configure a rule that allows displaying a welcome message to the first time users and a different message for returning users we could also configure a number of other services here such as the assets we deliver to a game client or the number of ads we display to users it is possible to define a specific schedule for the rule to be active and Target users on a very detailed level based on a number of criteria including player activity and purchases as well as plus device properties and any custom parameters

that the game sends so all rule configurations including sequences and priorities of rules are added directly into the view and we can launch the campaign immediately by switching on the rule once the rule is live analyze allows us to track stats and performance of the setup and we can adjust it based on the collected [Music] analytics with Beacon you can easily run user segmentation and experiments to determine what content offers campaigns price points or level difficulty works best for a given player segment or even for an individual player building machine learning makes it possible to create highly personalized experiences for each player catering to individual preferences machine learning engine takes previous player Behavior into account as well as user preferences across a wide range of touch points these models are learning constantly and improve their decisions to optimize as the selected game Target which could be

Revenue conversion or retention among others in this example we have configured an AB test delivering personalized gaming experience to different ler segments the parent rule defines the high level targeting there are two child rules one control variant which is created automatically and one personalized rule using retention as the business metric to optimize this rule automatically assigns players between the child rules gameplay personalization one and and two where I added game specific personalization parameters this powerful functionality allows us to deliver a fun and rewarding experience that players want to come back to over and over again let's take a look at the liveop calendar in Beacon it is another great example of how we bring our games to life every day with in-game seasonal events daily events offers to be scheduled on the fly across multiple times SS all configured in the beon

dashboard naturally all offers and content from the live of calendar are delivered to the game without a need for a client update changes to the event configuration are available to players instantly which allows us to keep the game fresh and deliver new exciting content and events in a very simple way events can be unique onetime offers we caring competitions seasonal content packs and any event can be configured to rely on any personalization bringing the power of segmentation and machine learning [Music] algorithms that's it any questions sorry it's difficult to uh try and avoid the speaker because I'm been told that I'm I'm having difficulty kind of um being heard because of the speaker position but I don't want to come behind because I won't be able to rush and talk to people so is anyone have any questions if you're wondering why I'm over the side that's why anyone got any questions

okay just uh I think the hand over here was the first thank you this might get bit technical soon but uh in terms of content uh how opinionated uh beon is in terms of the format of the content opinionated Yeah so basically I mean like technically like does it care what technical format I use for my content you use uh like no no I I mean basically if I understand the question basically in from Beacon's point of view we have Chason that you configure and and then however your game client then interprets the Chason that's your uh selection yes seems like it answered the question was there another there was another question I here yeah just one question for context uh because I don't know if Bon is like your internal tour or codevelopment tool and so on or is a tool that is available like as as a service for external developers and one it's internal uh

unfortunately I would love to offer it to you I mean it looks pretty cool huh it looks pretty cool yeah of course now that we are part of Sega then Sega games get to use it but yeah very good very cool yeah thank you happy for Sega any more questions it's a good job that there's somebody developing a tool that does some other similar things I'm not saying that I'm doing that oh wait I am the lights are so bright I have to do this is to e see the orst yeah exactly anyone else got any questions uh on that note I'm going to say thank you very much thank you it's nice to be here [Music] [Music] every

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