The live ops power panel

[Music] [Music] so yeah welcome thank you so much for being here right now so we're the life ups power panel so this is not about power panel this is about live ups but yeah so I'm gonna introduce the people that we have here cheers by the way everyone who's not taking a beer oh yeah okay all right Cheers [Laughter] awesome so yeah so as I was saying thank you so much for being here so we have

the pictures of our guys so first Andrew welcome hand-drew so andrew is that Space Ace game it's been doing live ups or a bit more than seven years so he runs the live up strategy directly on eight games I believe and it did influence like a more than dozen one so a lot of experience coming from Andrew and then we have Danielle so on the left over here so since 2001 it's being in the gaming industry so in a while funk um I Oh interact Starbreeze King good game studio and now cyber gangs subway surfers as you might know so welcome by the man so thirty years of making games or participating in to the conception all the way to making them so from the free to play space expert consulting companies for quite a while now so I'll say like 12 years Council thing ten years okay so ten years so

we're talking about yeah get sugan or the sips of SIBO see bowl games as well Ubisoft supercell take clan player event planner Jaeger so Who am I missing so it's been pretty much all over the place right and so we've seen a lot and it's good to have you having on the panel so thank you for being here and then we have auntie auntie revealed ponen yeah exactly so CEO of up cloud I quality performance or at the cloud computing provider from Finland with data centers all around the world so he's a entrepreneur by heart and making sure that providing good services for all the clients and true to all different fields of technology so welcome thank you for being here and then we have Paul Paul from guest parks cloud-based department live ups platform for game developers so he works closely with the customers at games parks to make sure that they are successful bring live ups properly to the mainstream users so that yeah

certain passionate again about technology but the main thing today is about live ups and as for me marvel play fab live ups been doing that for a while and building studios for Ubisoft and also for a unity and whatnot but ok we're finished with the introduction it was already too long already sorry for that but I had to do it so first subjects for today game trans so we just passed Christmas so how was your Christmas and what did you saw in Christmas this year that was I was it different than the other years because I did I did saw a few things on my own which I have never seen before either on mobile or one platform consoles and whatnot and and I would like to to know if you guys saw something that was you know that fit your interest hello yeah I guess I saw a bit of a facebook messenger games sort of

surprised me towards the end of last year I was a bit skeptical about the platform when it was when it was first introduced early last year and I think it's it's seen tremendous growth and just some great great opportunities there and you know given given the platform that is on its it's got a very high social factor K factor and you know by by nature its K factor 1 so you know it's a they're usually two player games turn-based two-player games and so there's great potential there to to to spread the popularity of the games there but they're intrinsically different to you know traditional and native apps and there's shorter sessions they can't be footnoted with the sort of features that traditional apps have like you know heavy shops and live events so developers having to take a sort of a slightly different approach to had a approach live operations on facebook messenger games so yes ads monetize with

ads you don't have any in-app payment if you want to be promoted you need to include those as otherwise Facebook what she will not show you as much that's one thing we saw in our hand yeah and yeah cool yeah I agree do you think that that that we will have a European or North American WeChat saying I think I think they're in a tricky position because messenger at the moment is like a kind of a hodgepodge of different different different things they're just games there's chapters all these things that they've built in so they'd have to try and figure out how to sort of and take some of that away I think it's oh it's overloaded and but I definitely think there's potential to sort of emulate the success that we enjoy would you think about games and whatnot first okay in dominates daily life now if I look at at Central Europe the chat programs are used by entirely

different audiences so snapchat is a totally different audience than Facebook Messenger is a different audience and face what's up and then line and you you in order to be dominant as we chat with other services you need like one dominate service on top and let's face it you know a snapchat most of us don't get why that works and what for that is I guess so who's using snapchat here every day who's here ahem yeah thank you but you actively pose or you're just looking okay yeah see I had to ask my daughter why snapchat actually is like sexy you're working I I don't get that program but know that this is devices for you in terms of trends what I saw is that the the it's not a trend but I was really happy to see that there were two Russian match three programs beating the ass of king.com which is home escapes and garden escapes I was really happy about that because many of my clients

didn't believe you could actually beat candy crush but they did and you know I'm sorry but it's also that the the mix genre right yeah but whatever they did you know it big is a mystery game with a kind of meta story around it yeah but the main trend I saw is that core games are here already they they arrived in the charts and there were some some really good ones as well you know a line it did you play line it which one Linnaeus yeah you know I've never 100 something you know I of course I'm there I played lineage to revolution I played last day on earth I played arena fella you know all these kind of core games which I'm making really good money there so so of course there and when when I talk to my clients two years ago that that like core will be here really soon I didn't think it's it was as soon as they launched so I'm really happy about that because core viable now because the audiences are too enough so that's that's power to game developer and you're what I see I see have something

to say about trends Andrew no nothing no during Christmas I was too busy making sure for games actually ran when everyone went on vacation look outside the company at all oh yeah good well I would say slightly similar to to Andrew there that I kind of make sure my kids don't do anything bad over Christmas so I have two kids and what I noticed is that they actually start picking up games like really really early these days and my five-year-old is leveling up in Minecraft really well wait which is pretty amazing so I'm kind of anticipating what what happens when the two-year-old grows up well I think I've been seeing a couple of things one of the most interesting things for us it's actually looking at how do we reach target audiences that we are aiming for I mean if you're looking at some of the younger demographics you know how do you reach them how do you communicate with them it's really different as you mentioned I think it's

influencer campaigns you know trying to reach in a different way performance marketing is like super difficult way to reach success and it's a really hard way to kind of gain that critical mass so I think for us that's something that we really are keeping a keen eye on because we really want to reach deep into our target audience and with them and so what is the channels that you used to get them I think we're seeing some of the influencer because it's like relatable relatable way to communicate but also we're seeing a more kind of real events taking place and then showing them that we're real you know and and creating these kind of and you know we for instance what we've been doing we made an event in Denmark with real skaters like so we really aren't there physically there I think that's really important that's something I see more and more of so that's we're definitely staying on top of that so and then do you have any advice where people are starting and like in term of game

trends I should look at it and say okay this this is gonna be easier for this year or next year or something like that I think for us we're starting small because we want to we see that it's like it can really become a huge money drain money sink if you want to go into those areas like what are the influencers you want to reach what kind of communication means do you want to have so we're probing a couple of different to see the results I think for us at least is too early to say a little bit what's the most efficient way and what are the trends when it comes to those things but we think we are reaching our target audience because we know our target audience and the games that we're making and how we communicate with them so it's hard to give advice I think looking at what your what's your core kind of gameplay and how does that really relate to the big part of your users and how can you really reach them through these kind of activities that they really engage with using yeah for my I didn't have my part but I saw way more multiplayer games than ever like especially on mobile it's like multiplayer everywhere and I think it's

just gonna continue to grow for the years to come and obviously for live ups it's super important to bring that community together so I'm thinking that the trends can I get even and I've order and more complicated especially in channel acquisition and all these things so we'll talk about that later actually so next subject so you can keep the mic we talked about Oh teams yeah so um so obviously like when you're doing live operation the way your structure your company is not the same as a premium title so so the question is more or less like how do you organize your internal team or teams and external development so that everything works together at best without having a burnout so this is something that I've been through many iterations of so it's always difficult to avoid burnout when you're working on live games from the perspective of you know you're doing the same content meal production every month you know you do as we do a lot of many different locations that makes it still exciting for the team but yeah you always have

this risk of having people just really get a little tired of the same old same old I think there's no easy solution what we do to keep team culture and passion high I think what we do is we we get new people who we hire into the old games they learn the culture and they refresh in the team fresh blood into the old old functional games and then we take the expertise from those games into the new ones to just maximize the potential of the new games we're developing I think game games go through phases you know you have the production phase even many phases within production but once you hit live you also have different phases when you're alive operating a game so I think it makes sense to just be super aware of that and just switch out team even leaders in the teams to keep it fresh to keep in line with those phases you're cool it's easy to say that you you're getting fresh people into the team but the problem there is how do you transfer actually knowledge how do you keep

knowledge of this life operations and the team specifically if you have a game which runs for years I mean subway surfers now six years old seven years old so you're running that for a long long time so all the learnings you did how do you keep that active so that someone you coming in can actually that he doesn't repeat all the mistakes you already did like two years ago the longest life ops game I ever was part of for seven years seven years or now still running well and doing better and better I second line or seven years pardon seven is it seven years mine has a game they run it for twenty years and they had their most successful year last year so just imagine that it's a twenty year old game they do Papa life operations it's a seventy people company and they had the best year last year that's that's how well love operations can work no because there's more users or because they just monetize better what they have no-bake is a market is calling everybody accepts free-to-play and there are new markets arriving meaning that more more markets have proper internet mobile etc

and all that right so India just opened up a year and a half ago so you know there's a lot of more territories coming but the the one one funny side aspect which I wanted to talk to is that one unnamed client of mine when we develop the game and we went live asked me when can we have the team back so they expected the online game to be launched and that's it and they can have the team back and I told them no no that's not how going to work the team has to actually grow and it took took them a long time to actually realize that and whenever clients ask me listen we have 12 people on development how large will be the team on life ops and you know I said you know twice the size so that's something many people underestimate what you need you know the community mention our manager is a support the life of development there's more and more demands coming in for marketing from sales from Vista from events all over the world from all over territory so there's more more work coming into it means that you know we need more people to organize it and actually do it and that's difficult for some people of course you can scale their team by

success that's the positive side but don't be surprised at your life of teams actually too this is a new dev team Andrew tell me about race species so yeah previous companies I worked as similar I think everything would grow after you want live with space it we kind of take a very different approach so once we're live we we tend to shrink a little bit after we go from production alive just because we aren't making as many features and then usually about a year in we try to shed some more people because we at this point we've kind of identified the key features and we've made them and release them we should have a year or experience for our live ops content and our cadence and what we need and usually by then our relationship with outsourcers for whether it's our localization or writing or anything has already established so by about a year or a year and a half we actually like to you know bring the team down drastically so from maybe 15 people to like six or seven so right now the game I was just working on transformers earth wars we went from 15 and we're going towards 7 at the moment and I just finished kind of training my live ultra placement that took you know five six

months but the way we kind of transfer our knowledge is we just sit next to each other I'm like no yes no no yes remember that sheet that was really big and annoying yeah that one but also over that year we always take some of our sprint time and we invest in tools so after two years of working on the game the tool set is completely different so I have spreadsheets that literally do like half of what I did when I first joined the game so don't have to do it anymore so we like to shrink our teams and optimize especially with tools and automation and that's the big goal for us similar is to get people onto in dev game so right now one of the things we're bragging about is we have 75% of our employees on in dev games which is you know close to 80 people so we're about three months ago we were like 45% on in dev games so we've been and all of our games similar to on your 20 whole game we've had some of our best years so ya can go both ways and Paul you add something I'm not sure so I'm kind of I

have a bit of an outsider view in it because they don't work directly in a game team but more across many different games you saw something through all of these teams are working I mean it really depends on the team depends on the project there's no winning formula it really comes down to you know the successful teams that I've seen it's certainly ones that have been around for a long time and been true to process been cheated the treadmill and have sort of refined that over years and years of pain and tears to be honest so yeah I mean nothing really more to ask so what I can say is that I always see there's there's games that has you know 150 people working on the title to to make sure it's productive and profitable worldwide or whatnot by the same time you have those small teams are extremely agile they will be able to handle a lot but also outsource like translation and all these things and be able to to work along but still have ups is very dynamic so it means that things are changing all

the time after just all the time so obviously you have to be someone who's very motivated but the reward is great so let's go for next subject so game launch so did you guys had any game launch in the last year and if so how did it went and what did you do wrong and what did you do good I don't well we had one we launched Fastlane that game does a lot of social influencers that was kind of our live off strategy for that game was to bring in lots of influencers actually paint them into the game so they got their own MPC they got their own kind of custom event but actually that was kind of our least live opsi game so we actually kind of just created some templates for events and kind of static formats because the game was more of a single-player experience less multiplayer it was more about progression and had an offline mode which of course offered all kinds of issues and for doing a live ops event how does that work with offline mode and hacking and cheating so we didn't do too

much in levels there so I mean we have stuff in the future that's gonna be really intense on levels but I can't talk about it yet so so let's say you know how will you make your launch for that without cracking The Hague I don't know well I can talk about what we on transformers we basically we were in production it was coming down to the last minute I can't join the team like two months behind beforehand and me and my PM McManus or if we just sat down and created like a three month live I was playing with events for every weekend we came with what kind of you know loop boxes or kind of bundle is how we like our whole strategy in that two months and so when the game actually launched we already have a plan of like okay every three weeks we need this art every other week we need this text every two weeks and by three months we need this new tech and then by six months we need this new text so so tell me so how much forward is for example your artists game design in front of the developers that needs to do something or whatever well with the

event features we were behind because this planning wasn't very great at that point so we had to first scrap together like the first three months were a bit scrappy after that we got ahead in like by a lot so once we had the the feature set built we built it so he could handle multiple event formats at once so it's by like three months after launch we had everything built in and we had the probably the whole first year planned out rough right now we have the whole year for transformers planned basically everything is set and but it's live off so we know it's going to change it's just I wishful thinking really I have four stupid happens to a question when you when you lay out a plan for like a year and how do you handle the the atok tapes you need to do because the community just like this feature we have to change that and you know this does work really well we have to add something to that I mean this is all stuff coming coming through data or through player feedback so we have to shift this into your one year plan I mean do we have space for that or you just shift the plan like agile normally

we just ship the plan it's it you know we we have to have an idea of what we're gonna use some content so we can decide when to start making it and if we don't have that idea we always end up being last-minute or we have a shortage of content so there's a risk of like Oh next month we might not have anything to use so we just plan it out and then we just you know yeah this is gonna change everyone everyone you're where this is gonna change every standup this is gonna change and you just keep hammering at home like this is gonna change and it just does so more or less it's just like you know try it and dive in right and if it doesn't work you just trash it so it's so so I guess for you it's more or less like a channels and communication and tell me about that ya know it's like yeah I think we will also work with a really tight plan I mean there's there's there's a plan always right and then the plan hits the battlefield and then it has to change right so I think for us an example subway surfers needs to have destinations many different destinations to arrive at and why are we doing it a

certain order I mean does it fit with some events does it fit with marketing plans you know there's a lot of things that need to be aligned and so there needs to be a really solid plan but of course it needs to be able to change in be agile at the same time so yeah that's I think it's really supporting what you said there I got a question for you is is subway surfers having different pace or gameplay for example in Asia versus Europe or it's the same everywhere you know so we have a Chinese Chinese version of the game that is a little bit different but the rest of the world has the same experience different so yeah there are there are a couple of things so the theme the world different destinations and stuff like that also some things in working I can't mention right now there's going to be very different also feature set of the game we're gonna try something else so when you launch it because different market right it's just different market then and they different features appeal to to them in a it's a different way you know then so we really try to be in touch

with that so but for the Western market it's it's very much the same so yeah good next subject so yeah let's talk about communities so obviously communities plays a big part in lightening operation meaning that you have to gather all the information of what your people are saying about but also you have to entertainment and you have to bring content that they like otherwise they get bored or at the same time you have to look if the if they're gonna burn out because they have too much to do in the game so there's a lot of of kpi's you have to get there's a lot of things you have to to bring to them so that they can create bonding between each other so let's talk about that a little bit and some ideas you have with some things you wanted that is proven or things that you would like to try I don't know well the the the first thing is said that I have to actually teach most of my clients that they need certain tools inside the game in order to actually talk to their

community it's very hard to mobile compared to PC on PC is much easier on mobile you you don't have general channels to reach them so the channels you have to put in your game yourself so you have to be able to know the news page which comes up is like default stuff right okay what's happening what do we plan there's a patch coming or you know then there should be some sort of feedback there should be some sort of in-game mail function where you can mail all your customer base and you can actually attach items to it you can collect so you can send out free stuff freebies to your community and you give them channel to actually reach out to you and that's kind of important and many many clients don't have that from the start they don't see the necessity of course this work it's it seems to be that that they don't want to talk to their people playing the game because there's so much work to actually answer and and and and analyze that data which gets back but this is much more worse than actually puke API is kpi's just takes assess it tells you one side of the metal right in order to really understand what the KPIs are telling you you have to talk to the people playing

the game as well and and putting this into your game is really easy and if you don't put it into your game or don't want to put it into your game yourself there are services you can easily hire and display a play stuff you can put it in there there are two or three google them you know I forgot the name I'm not a big fan of these services it's just for lazy teams who don't want to do that themselves but you know in in game a function how complex can it be but anyway this is like the the most important thing and and trying to always ask me you know what what kind of social function should be put into the game which is most effective and I always tell them depending on the game if it's an online game live chat like this is chat services like the number one retention thing you can put into a game if you gave us an online game the other one if your game is not an online game let's say like subway surfers you know all the new stuff and an in-game a stuff would be really important in order to reach out to your players and actually get the feedback going that's kind of you know free advice I can give and there are many many more but just adding chat won't

won't fix retention issues you have to kind of tie chat to to certain game mechanics that it's really nicely working but that's all things you can learn really fast which is white-label chatting smallest like everything is already written ok that's what I want to say some surfers if you like subway surfers is not an online game per se right but if you have an PvP game and you allow chat you the PvP match that's enough yeah you should be careful with this so there are certain rules you have to follow but I mean like of course like we know there's chat filtering and all this and you know there's obviously obviously there's a lot I can be sharing a chat right but such filtering doesn't work really well across languages so when you filter a lot of stuff suddenly normal words are be a words are being filtered out in your language which is really annoys to people doing PvP games

aggression at only is high meaning that there are a lot of swear words floating around but the main cost while you don't put like shed into a PvP game during the match it's actually cheating because people are howdy calls fringe to match how do you call that you talk about griefing yeah no no queefing you know we both play together and I just let you know you can win okay okay sure eSports yes so online games is much easier because as a community you can talk to so Becky the rule of community is you know the first rule is that you know established lines of communication both ways and with that you understand the players much much better and you get also rid of a lot of assumptions you have oh I know that oh my Evert age is 24 and I say you sure you know and then they fire a questionnaire to a million users they get like 20,000 feedback and sunny they see a ever taste every 42 and they say like oh

you know we we actually you know have the wrong influences you know we put marketing in the wrong channels and so on so this is a lot of stuff you gain in banking you turn the easiest thing you can do is Facebook Connect one thing I want to ask you guys sort of stepping in because all businesses value communities around them and while we we're not a gaming company per se but we we host gaming companies and their services and who naturally cook a community of developers is also valuable to us by looking at your industry what how do you guys see what's the biggest value or benefit from your business perspective of having a functioning community around is it like learning learning about the game iterating based on that or is it is it marketing or promoting the game how do you go about that so from our point of view the the

real benefit someone like a player community is just the constant feedback especially maintaining its level so we need to know what they're thinking we have like five different channels they can contact us in we respond to them and some chats we respond to them is you know emails we respond to them in one way when we do a stream every week to answer some of their questions but also as you mentioned kind of like the developer community oh we actually just hosted games first last week we had a bunch of people in London there we had our supercell partners over there come down and it was really great it's actually you know walking around and you know there's these CEOs that earlier you're like normally I'll be really impressed by you see them in the articles on the news and they're just chatting with people being cool and there's all these devs who have awesome games and cool ideas I want to share it with you so you know just walking around getting to know people seeing what everyone's thinking and doing I really like the whole gaming community I think Finland is especially good at this they bragged a lot about the Helsinki gaming community I think John my CEO is he

wants to have that here in London as well and they told a lot of stories about oh I used to work at this studio in London and there was a door and they wouldn't let us past it and it's like that doesn't sound that friendly so I think I like the open community thing it's so far you know you can't wait use what not to tell people if you've got a secret in your pocket but if you want to share and be open and seems like it just makes things better so did you ever bring some wells of subway surfers to your studio a question but I want to say something else first in relation to what's been mentioned you know from for us it's like communities for us it's what's the value add like we have a game you're having a lot of fun playing that game right is that it you have it you have a chat tool you talk to the users it's lots for us it's a little bit old-fashioned you know for us it's like this we want to see what can we give you how can we entertain you that's that's what how we see it you know that's that's the main thing here like if it's through a chat alright so be it we tried that out but what's the other thing hard will it

materialize in other ways and not limit yourself to how it currently seems to work or how it did have a year ago right and that's really important for us so that's why we're testing all these things out because we really really really want to be a little bit looking into the future what's gonna happen on how we're gonna really provide this entertainment so what are you testing right now yeah what I mentioned before and then some things we we really can tap talking about example like for us subway surfers it's not just a game right we're going into animation we're going into licensing we're doing a really huge push yes Brandon's right and it's a buzz the companies not just gonna be one game it's gonna be that doesn't know game right it's gonna be a network of games so you go there on your way or that's all I'm gonna say just giving you a little glimpse and feel where we're heading and it's really exciting and we really believe in that right what was the question I asked but more or less they come just continue it's great questions comes afterwards no Casey no

but whales in the ends we actually don't look at the whales at all yeah I mean a big portion of our revenue speaking about whales it comes from ad revenues right and we're really happy about that because that means we can focus focus on engagement instead right not pushing you know a center center in the game but really engage the players make them come back and build on that so that really important but did you bring them to your office we actually did yeah yeah yeah we did we had a guy recently who came to our office and he was amazed he got to meet the founders the development team and you know it was really an amazing experience not only I mean of course the marketing part of you know look what we're doing but the team was so invigorated you know there's a fan that really like adores the whole IP the team and they so it works both ways right so so there is also like I'm come back to your question you also have like inside of the company where sometimes you have moderators and Chat moderators of like for arms and stuff like this and and if your game is very successful

you're gonna have like 40 50 60 moderators that works for free for you just because they live your game and then you can just bring them all of them one time a year to talk with the real developers and be part of the of the of the brand right and feel the vibe and obviously if you bring the actual players or people are playing your game with you it's like wow right for us it was rather who engaged the most with our game and bringing them in and kind of seeing hey this was we value so am very cool yes sorry I actually um we've invited a couple of players to our office as well and we invited ones usually who were really influential in the community so they were like the guild leaders and usually they're organizing a lot of things and managing the line chats and that kind of thing and they're it's really interesting because when you see all their feedback and like they can be really toxic and then you meet them in real life and they're just like the most delightful person you've ever met they're really nice they're kind not yelling at you know swearing they understand everything you say but then they always there one wee problem was really honestly you know

I completely understand but there's no way I can tell the people in my field that because they would feel betrayed by me and I'm like like okay that's really hard to work with but it was really beneficial we had like a nice hour-long talk we learned a ton about how they organize the things they really want in the game we turned around we started building some of those things got a really good feedback that way so I I'm the advocate of that just I don't know if I would invite like whole large groups but if you find someone who's influential who can give you really good feedback that's pretty much invaluable yeah we should never forget that Internet it's you create the persona right to create someone that doesn't exist and you know pulled that fashioned even further away so okay let's come to knew so you want to say something okay cool let's now we talk about KPIs so KPI is obviously what others many of them all right so some are we're looking at the session lengths on how many session and they some are looking only about the prediction of the LTV based on channel XYZ so we all F KPIs that are

interesting but really what are the three four five KPI is ordered an da u conversion rate and let's say yeah I accept these two like which KPI are you looking for the first are warning okay I did a hard talk about that you can google that in the internet on my youtube channel it's that when when kpi's take over your company and you only listen to KPIs you will fail so if you're purely KPI driven company you will be using at some point you know you going down the drain the the truth is KPIs only tell you what happens but not why so you have to find out why in any other means by asking community player analysis asking your dev team or you know your fans whatever there is so be be aware that if there's you know I hear that so often oh there's a publisher who says if you day one is below 40% you know we won't even look at your game I'm like what you know their games out there

who have a lower day one much lower what we have you know they have a day one or 30% what they have a D 365 of like 15 and you are you saying something is right in this game or correct then there are games who have 70% a one and you know if you look at a 30 of them that it's really bad so KPI is only only you know if they only take talk to you half of the time so be aware of this you know KPIs are really cool ii don't believe KPIs in the internet you don't know the definition they don't know if they want the same as your definition of day one no a lot of stuff you you have you have to compare yourself so ask other teams go to developer conferences ask the team and you know compare definitions and the if you really want to know the truth now many publishers and my clients ask me what is the most important KPI we have just this question annoys me totally because usually you have one two or three KPIs interacting with each other there's not just one which is great

right but you know as he will confirm the the number one KPI is retention if you have a really great retention you can fix everything over time because you have all the time to actually talk with the players if your attention is really bad you know you have less time but nevertheless I have clients who have bad retention games and they're making millions a month simply because they know how to monetize in the first couple of days so there is this type of game and the other type of game but it's easier to fix your stuff if your retention is great people do you look at the KPIs of the games on capes Park I do games parks we have like combined probably like 5,000 games plus our life yeah we all have a platform so so let me ask you do you have a game that has 20% day one is making a lot of money yeah we do you have a game that's 60% retention that is making a lot of money but you know we we have we have games right across the spectrum exactly different combinations you really do and you know coming from from studios where

this sort of 40 2010 mentality sort of driven into what 2 minutes left [Laughter] where were they yeah quite enlightening to see across the spectrum and understand that you know ok I have 20 20 percent day one but you know I can make I can make a lot of money in this in it when in the first few days so they're covered they don't need to long tail you know and and and and the revenue over time so it really depends but I think I think it's really important to note what retention you know it's all well and good looking at at your day 1 retention but you really need to drill right down into you know what what why why why is why do I have 20 percent why do I have 20 percent what is what are the factors that give me this percentage right so it's very important to look at the success factors in your game so looking at different features where where pairs engage and looking at at those users and seeing what their retention is so

you see that you know some users engage with the metagame and they've got hired they one then then then users that don't then maybe you want to double down there and sort of try and bring those players who are not engaged with the meta game into the meta game and it's always sort of you know deep drilling that you need to do to really get to the source of what makes your your day one your day true your day day whatever successful yeah I got a question for the crowd okay we have like five minute left okay I'm just taking more minutes as well you show so we can either talk more about kpi's for five minutes or talk about two links and stuff like that by raising the N who wants to hear more about KPIs and tools two three okay cool let's talk about tools sorry for that we can talk about going global but you know let's talk right away about to link live events we skip that one too sorry we have like so much to say because live ups is huge it no one's speaking about it but tooling is the vast subjects right so tooling is extremely important from the backend to the monetization tools and whatnot so which which is the

tool has a live operation agent you need otherwise you die is the answer I guess game sparks yeah except we have a bunch of tools but the one that we rely most on is having every game being able to update live content so we have a CMS we can push the game and it changes a bunch of values we can turn features on and off we can change text we can change content without patching yet so it's all stream and we can also stream in a whole bunch of art assets and things like that so that's the number one tool with with just that basic tool we can run all of our games live ops it's brutally hard but we can do it so we always have more on top of that but that's the main one just saying like we offer those services but there's open source services that you can use as well there is a I think the OpenFeint stuff is available that there will run probably on up cloud and there is also a collapse that is making open source services they could try on

your own but obviously you have to fix it yourself which is a bit of a problem yeah I know for us it's a lot about what you said earlier about reducing the size of the teams so for us its efficiency as its creation tools you know a content creation tools that's really important for us aside from the absolute necessary ones that has to do with customer service and stuff like that so all right okay so that was a shorter than I thought so okay so you have time for one last question like like with one minute each okay cool so where do you think life is going in the year to come so for us like we look a lot about artificial intelligence how we can let let models and our neural networks to create content for you pricing and all these things to help you out to manage you know twenty different languages twenty fusing cultures and channels and stuff like that so you can get very optimized so what what are you looking

forward in X years to come yeah I think machine learning has a big part to play predicting LDV taking user churn identifying users before they turns that you can actively you know stop them from leaving the game to targeted push notifications or our content or whatever I think I think machine learning is a big parts play yeah big advancements this year I think I might be more a little bit more drastic if you start the game now and you don't design the game to be a live operations game for the future you don't have any chance to enter the top twenty anymore so we have to do life operations in order to be successful in the future Dessie I'm really a big fan of the machine learning but actually the thing we're looking at with our upcoming games it most is actually going back and just designing our live off schedule better so like we I've made hundreds of hundreds of ents that go once and in the future I'd like to make it so that if you're a new player you get to replay those old events something just kind of going back and scheduling and designing the game to take live house into consideration better so that I don't

have to waste all this glorious content I've made yeah I vouch for machine learning as well that's something we're seeing and I'm also testing out with a few clients as well so so for us it's like we have many many initiatives but for us it's really important to try to be efficient with the few experts and and super skilled people we have we don't want that to get stuck in operation and churning out content or stuff like that so for us it's really about getting a lot of the stuff organized and getting a lot of stuff efficient as possible so we can move the expertise to other games and our products so for us that live ops is not only engaging with the players the way I mentioned before in very new ways but it puts a lot of pressure on the marketing department but also about being super efficient with a few resources we have because we're trying to be very very small still so yeah fantastic thank you so much everyone for coming and

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