TikTok's LiveOps Enchantment

[Music] welcome welcome welcome everybody to the deconstructor fun podcast today finally we get to talk about live Ops Tik Tok and Q5 so so today's topic is liveop strategies for Q5 and we have two phenomenal guests to discuss this or not to discuss to educate me and uh first first and foremost we got Cesar the get bhy I hope I pronounced the uh surname correctly thank you uh head of emia for mobile gaming at Tik talk scissor welcome to the podcast great to be here thank you and we got the uh the returning forever guest Mr John Wright head of publishing at quali easy surname to pronounce welcome John yeah you did I mean you got mine right just so you know it's uh all right let's start off with we got a lot of things to cover about live Ops um but I want to start

with some of the definitions and the one definition that I need to understand is is there what is Q5 you keep talking about this in your PR releases and it feels like most of the companies are missing this quarters this is is this why Tik Tok is so successful because you want you have one more quarter than anybody else yeah exactly Q5 is the invisible quarter you know for many uh marketers you know across the world around the world it's a holiday season but for the gaming Hustle you know for us um it is the time after Christmas it is the time for growth it's the growth window um it starts after Christmas until mid January when people are typically on holiday or slowly back to work um but it is also a gaming time you know it is uh the time that the users are on their mobile phones and entertaining um you know their time during this holiday season and Q5 is

known for actually from the advertising side it's known for its efficiency with holiday driven user engagement and you know it is very at Cost um reduction that we are we are observing and it's actually an ideal period to build momentum for for the new year for this time it's 2025 interesting so this is when people get their new devices and plus they are not going to work and plus they might have get gotten you know some monetary gifts that they can be spending on on huh it was actually you know the smartphone deliveries you know back in back in time when they were quite High it and it was the most popular gift and probably it is still but now the main driver behind Q5 is you know all the big advertisers are actually pulling back and they're on holidays but you know as I mentioned our gaming folks um they are capitalizing on this opportunity with the reduced C PMs and also a gaming

audience that is more more online interesting John you've you've had a your past is in the dark at Tech world you you've known Q5 for a long time are you capitalizing on Q5 at quality I'm wearing Unity branding I should maybe should have changed my top but yeah Q5 from from my old world was as Cesar said it's a really important time for all of us to to make a lot of money I think you know the trends that you you see during the period are three weeks of weekend highs right so what we normally see is that from A supplier perspective a weekend is normally 30% higher than a weekday right I.E 30% more users are trying to you know play or playing more games viewing more content Etc because you know they're not at work they're not at school and because of that holiday period and people are away instead of having just two days a week with that 30% bump what you're seeing is free weeks of that 30% bump because people

are more accessible um and as sayar said what what you normally see is in some channels a drop in CPM because the supply is up right more Supply you know not the same demand equals you know cheaper uh ecpm um but for us it's an amazing time to be able to gain a lot more users right and and start off the year in a very successful Place normally that you know I think most gaming companies would would look to published their last game of the year in November in the buildup to Q5 right to ensure that you're capturing all of that it's like a two events a year summer holidays and Christmas those two peaks where you really want to have a gaming Market um and ultimately there's a lot more disposable cash because it's the holiday season people are a bit more flushed they're a bit more spending so um the number of paying users or percentage of paying users per game goes up right so all in all you're getting more scale higher quality and it's a

real window that you you cannot miss out if you really want to to make your year okay this is new so Q5 important to have a scalable game at this time but also important not to take these signals for real if you have a game in soft launch completely yeah I I personally disregard most of December if you like for a game in soft launch because it's very essentially the the data is not um as I predicted to be for the remainder of the year it's a it's a high period you really need to make sure that you're aware that this is an outlier rather than the trend okay but if you're looking for an investment I think it might be a good time to you know benefit from that well now now the investors know too so when your game Miracle gets better after Christmas it's not that your wish came through and Santa Claus came over with better kpis it's just just the market yes yeah you know people

eggnog right like who knows you know they just people a bit more happy to spend money drinking new phone you got to download new apps start new Games Etc so that makes sense um so today we're not going to talk about Q5 though though that was interesting we're going to talk about liveops and I think the important part before we start talking about liveops and and Tik tok's new products for uh live Ops success I think it makes sense to Define what do we mean by live Ops because I feel like every company has their own take of what live Ops is some it's like the way they optimize sales the others see it as the holistic live operations and live Services after the game goes live so John why don't you set up on set up us on on like what do we mean by live Ops and then we'll refer to that as live Ops from now on oh man live Ops it's it's a real a term depending on who you're asking when you're asking them and you know who they are where they are where they work it can have multitude of things but live

operations in general is a company's ability or or strategy to prolong A Game's life cycle by whatever means right so that can be individual new features being added that could be time sensitive events that could be seasonality takeovers that could be Integrations with IP that could be essentially a number of different things but the goal very simply right is to prolong the game's life cycle to ensure that it maximizes its pure Revenue potential and for this to happen you need to have new content all of the time right and that is done in a number of ways that I've just explained that's that's the very simple way I look at uh and Cesar do you agree with this definition of live op 100% you know basically I am focusing on the goal here and it is to prolong the life cycle how you would keep your players engaged and also increasingly how you would stand

out and compete uh because it's ever ever increasing competition and if you don't you know do those um liveops or keep your game live and Alive um you know the life cycle is is going to lose against competition step into the future of game monetization with exola the premier partner for game developers seeking to expand their reach in Revenue exola provides a robust Suite of tools designed to enhance user acquisition maned subscriptions and streamlined Payment Solutions worldwide unlock new markets and maximize profitability through their customized secure payment architecture and dedicated support team exola powering game developers to achieve Global [Music] success and another point I was I was just opening up one of the graphs I

could actually show this graph here and then we can talk about why lops is so important so uh I wanted to show this slide that uh that shows a couple of things so one is number of new games releases on IOS app store and and the other one is number of games in the IOS app store and there's there's kind of two things that I'm seeing here the number of new games has been dramatically decreasing since 2016 uh to a point where we have less new games entering the market than we had over years ago and then when we look at the number of games in the App Store that has also decreased quite dramatically where the number of games is getting closer to what it was in 2012 and we're entering 2025 so uh first of all John I wanted to ask you like is this the reason why live Ops is so important because we just have less new games and less games in the market yeah completely dude like I mean I've been talking about this probably for the last 18 months and saying that it's never been harder to launch a new game

right like if you look at successful launches right with the current market conditions launching a new game again is is tremendously difficult for for whatever reason I'm not going to sit here and talk about you know ATT and everything else has been discussed a million times over the last two years but there's just been changes in the ecosystem that made things more difficult to do profitable user acquisition right and because things are now more difficult to acquire users and great cre profitability um increasing in in operating expenses as Studios you know more expensive than ever um that has resulted in the fact that you know Studios can't launch games profitably and thus it's ever more important to you know prolong the existence of your games you know I'll give you an example for quar our biggest game teaser simulator has celebrated his fourth birthday last week and that's our number one game it's four years old right because of prolonging the game doing very simplistic live Ops including

events-based you know um sort of um just specials like this is the way that you prolong those games so yeah every studio is looking for that new big Smash Hit right because that's where you see that big shark fin and and what move the needle most for a developer But ultimately your strategy or core part of your strategy has to be to prolong the success of the games that you know were successful previously so scar I assume that that this is well well known information to Tik Tok and you and and that's why your focus has been as a partner for for Publishers has been focusing on how can we help you and the and the publisher are saying like listen we're not really launching that many games these days not even one per year we need help with growing our existing portfolio and that's where you've developed the uh the tools and and the services to help with liveops right well I was going to also mention one thing you know we we talk about the number of games and you know how how it

is trailing but what's more dramatic I guess is the share of Revenue in the top 100 games you know the the share is increasing there so you know how you but the gaming industry is growing still after a blip how we can help you know the top and the longtail or midtail um you know basically everyone that has a good game to basically stand up and you know keep their um games alive for longer that is currently what we are seeing is actually the top 100 that are really good at you know running those liveops operations yeah they 100 100% And I also wanted to show another graph that kind of supports this so uh in this graph if you're not using YouTube or Spotify you can see basically the uh the games how much how much the uh the top games the revenue of all games divided

by how old these games are and if you're looking at the graph you can see that games that are 5 years or older are taking over 64% of all inapp inapp purchase Revenue so not ads not web shops but just Ina purchases and that number is constantly growing and you can see at the same time that the uh games that have been launched in current year are decreasing except in 2023 hello Monopoly go yeah with a with a with just a shy of three billion we able to uh to uh to to change the uh the trajectory but this kind of speaks of the concentration of the market and the maturity of the market where games that have been longer in the store are sort of a not not dominating but but having their audience and then not letting that audience go no I was say like if you want to look at the gold standard right now mishar I

know and Cesar I'm sure you you've seen this well but supercell with brawl Stars a game that's 6 years old just went from 10 million to 70 million a month through liveops like 7 Xing Revenue at 6 years old like wow like hats off to the guys there you know they I can't even I would love to talk to the people over there and understand how they did that properly right I have a good understanding but you know it's it's crazy and and that's what you can do with correct live Ops right that's that's why Cesar and the team are prioritizing this is because that's the success you can get if you do it correctly super is a very good you know roll Stars especially is a very good you know case study and there's a lot to learn from that and I'm I'm also glad that we were able to work very closely this year and you know we were part of that growth and you know we built this capability to basically to support these

goals like how you would be able to engage with your audience your your your players when you have those moments that you you can more confidently go to market you know they behind their success of course there are improvements in their uh you know game overall new Futures so they had something to say we basically shouted for them yeah and and that's by the way like before we you know go into details of Tik tok's program brawl star is a great example of when when often times when teams think about live Ops we on the product side we only think about product improvements like the new balancing the new feature we did this we did that but brawl star is a perfect example of not only the product side improvements which there were many but also the marketing side improvements which there were plenty I'd argue even more on the marketing side you can see tremendous uplift in the uh in the user acquisition and the amount of new users coming in so kind of combining those two

is what you know successful live Ops in 2025 really looks at um but but talking about Tik to's live Ops like i' I've read couple of these different uh press releases that you had on on different platforms what is it in practice because I didn't understand from the press releases of what are the tool sets that Tik Tok offers it Partners to in the liveops program so the liveops program is our customized support for the Post launch activ activities to achieve the you know goals that we mentioned higher engagement retention but also favorability you know building this favorable um opinion on the on the gamers um and also improve monetization um to extend the games U or prolong the games life cycle and you know this year with that we actually grew like nine NX in this proog with the with the liveops program and basically clients invested in in millions but as you asked you know what's behind this we build a dedicated

team to support to provide you know real time support to live of strategies um and it has you know three main pillars in planning implementation and measuring so it starts with you know how we plan basically you know starts with understanding need the need is it a 10 pole moment what are we um actually trying to achieve and what what assets do you have do we have and based on that we support on the media plan side like what Solutions um to to combine uh creative strategy and also um you know overall how long to run and ongoing optimization um on the implementation side there are more details basically it is like you know when the campaign is live uh be actually before coming to imple implementation a very critical support is creative I think I should mention a bit more on this um because

creative is driving most of the success uh majority of the success we start with the ideation based on the goals and the assets we have what can we um also support with the ideation um production we support on the production especially leveraging creators and our uh Partners which we call the program Tik Tok creative exchange TTC X and also customized packages for again with Creator uh Le activities Buzz or Creator Le packages and um overall you know um of course there is a a followup with the analysis of the creat creatives so you know learning and then quickly iterating on on on these um and once the creative is ready media plan is ready then goes the um implementation part meaning you know the campaign is live and what do we do there it's basically you know there are there

is a you know Group B you know Army of people to to monitor take actions and you know optimize we have product uh group of support we have um of course the account managers creative uh side and also um to share some of the risk we also offer commercial in incentives um for you know for larger campaigns basically we share the risk to to see the results and then of course planning uh includes the measurement how we should measure the success and we end the implementation side with the uh measurement side and based on what the goals were how did we reach to a short-term and longterm goals which you know

short-term goals are everything is of course at the long term it's Ross we understand but what drives Ros uh is sometimes it's you know daily active users how how much it's increasing K Factor um arpu average revenue per user or average revenue per paying user you know how how the um activity overall media was effective in driving this and what sticks is also you know some some of the brand metrics which is I I think the most uh effective one is favorability like when people hear about the gamers hear about this game do they have positive feelings as as we know you know gaming is Mo mostly about psychology how we feel uh towards it John This sounds too good to be true I mean I'm really curious about

things elevate your game development with heroic Labs The Cutting Edge platform for building multiplayer games and you need an edge to be successful in today's gaming landscape their scalable namaa server empowers you to create compelling realtime multiplayer experiences effortlessly benefit from features like in-game chat leaderboards matchmaking and more all designed to enhance engagement and retention whether you're developing for mobile console or PC heroic Labs gives you the tools to bring your community together unleash the full potential of your game with heroic Labs where every developer is a hero can I can I take your seat for a second can I ask some question yeah yeah yeah that's that's why I'm that's passing the ball look Cesar what your what you're selling I'm buying all right I think that was a very good very good explanation but but from my perspective I think think the thing that's most interesting the thing I most curious

about and I think probably the listeners will be most curious about is the difference in the creative strategy so how do you like from say from the generation of the the asset the ad to the creative itself what's the differences between say a new game or what do you do differently from getting a new game user versus a live Ops user is it purely about the the the event the season you know like I would love to know a bit more about that because I think that's really interesting of course you know with livos the key message is is important and if you're going to a um you know new user um or with an existing user that you're re-engaging actually key message is not going to really differ like the the reason that you're uh inviting them to the game I think it is U uh either new or existing it's the same you have something to say so what that is um is is should be something exciting

for even broader than what you already have so it is in one way it is to expand your audience and Tik Tok actually is mostly effective on you know how you would expand your audience when there is a you know red ocean that you're competing opening up that um blue ocean um on the creative side of course um you know the upper funnel so to say you know and the creative that that makes a difference you know basically uh if you're talking to more emotions and you know you're talking about something that the your game your players are caring about it's more branding but what you are going for is not branding it's actually in in total this is a sale event sale activity uh but it it has branding effects so what we look at performance but we differentiate our goals with the creative style that um you know that we

present basically creators are tapping into those both sides uh are able because they provide the familiarity which brings trust like you're hearing this from someone that that's sharing the experience and it is entertaining or it is it comes with a with a storytelling it touches those emotional Parts but also you are um you are hooked into what the core element that you were saying like you have this new Fe new um you know content this IP collaboration Etc this is what um you know basically ex expands the overall reach and engagement got it further questions no the only other thing I was more curious about which I've seen is a bit of a trend and I don't know how it impacts Tik Tok is this like AI actors versus actual ugc because there's a big cost component from a developer perspective

of paying like actually a person right and especially if they have a large audience and you know what is it like the rumor of Kylie Jenner got paid like five million bucks to do what play tiad or whatever it was you know so I'm just I'm curious from Tik tok's perspective because you are The Originators of that ugc ads in my opinion like how do you see that do you see it as a trend or not so since you mentioned you know Kylie jenor celebrities I I have this kind of pyramid in my head that how you how how to basically approach so you know on top there is celebrities that has massive engagement if you want to expand your audience and you know catch attention you know that's very very strong but in the end what is I you know ideal is you want your own a players actual players to talk about you so from celebrity to influencer to Creator to user and what we aim actually is to

really uh make your users want to participate and expand um the overall impact so from celebrity to those uh your your players how you would drive a conversation because that conversation is going to drive the conversions and um you know not every campaign has to have celebrities but the you know there is also sweet spot and um the idea is the feeling that everybody is actually talking about it branded mission for instance that Tik Tok has as a solution is giving the community a a b a brief and they participate to the question or to the creative brief the way they want and and basically showcase their creativity around the game so this is one of the

you know sweet spots that I can mention and Tik tok's unique solution in how to drive crowds masses to talk and participate to to the game games liveops uh campaign I have a question and before that I need to do a correction it wasn't plka it was moonactive travel sorry sorry my confused I'm so sorry so so um like you you offer everything with this you got a media plan creative strategy production implementation creators analysis measurement commercial incentives brand metrics who is this for like meaning it can be for everybody like Tik Tok is probably has some kind of criteria of the partners that get the full Suite of course you know then it starts from the need who needs

to you know compete effectively and to create a differentiation it's for everyone because we it's not like you you will work with celebrities uh there is always a solution based on on on on the need and and the scale but what matters is there should be a a threshold that is going to basically Drive U the results so you know every Trend actually there's an 18% that you should basically touch and then it it breaks through so that is the minimum that 18% you should touch and how you would expand from there on on the bare minimum like bare bare minimum if you can call a a you know a a Content update in your game and then re have a retargeting campaign you can call it liveops but this is not the liveops that I would Define and I would suggest is it going to really you know Drive the results that you're

aiming for So based on you know each objective if you want to go really big to ex you know Drive favorability expand your audience this requires creative um differentiation something big to say um a a relevant media plan behind it and um moving masses like branded mission sometimes out of phone in the offline side to to participate that I'm asking because like you know um deconstructor Works deconstructor Fun Works with uh with a bunch of different Publishers that that have um some of their portfolios are a little bit long in a tooth like they're liveops games but they haven't grown in a significant amount of time and so a lot of Publishers are probably looking at their back portfolio profitable games and trying to understand whether they should in invest and see if they can grow those

games that you know are five even even older than five years you know running on a l quite lean of a live operations or should they focus on iida and just you know even further automating the live Ops on on on those on those titles and of course given the uh the recent market trends not recent but during the last couple of years most of the Publishers asking themselves can we actually grow some of these older games like look at brawl Stars 6X growth six years after so that's that's what I'm kind of thinking like like should Publishers who have games that have you know a profitable but have plateaued in their liveops you know how do they get in touch with Tik to like what's the uh what's the what's from that point of of like I have this game it's relatively you know it's making let's say one to two million a month can I get it to five to six a month like what's the process like with with Tik Tok I think the best example to mention here is if you remember Dumb Ways to Die a game that

became popular once again after 12 years you know once it's fun it can be fun again it's all about how you are going to Market and you know how you would create that excitement and Tik Tok you know was was the perfect place for them with the song that they had and there was outside of the game culture that they were able to tap into so it was something that you know worked for them as how they could revive their game it really you know should be customized uh based on what do we have as an asset and as a message and then we can work on that with with our you know dedicated team um we are working closely so you know if the only thing is the the objectives should be clear and they should want it we we ready to support what what material do I have to have uh or is good to have before engaging with Tik Tok

like you know gamer experience so they're you know when we are investing in it the the the the the retention and their overall uh feedback from the players should be there it should not be just the marketing you know success it should be also you know kept with their in in-game experience so there should not be bugs and you know the failures ETA if we're talking about 12 12 years they were you know still doing well but these are the hygiene factors of success so in in all cases games that are fun uh and you know what gives that that five rate star ratings in in app store and you know Google play it is what really matters John how could help in the you know further stage is of course you know um at at best IP collaboration so that they can tap into an audience that is already there so these are

marketing side of tactics that we can really um lever uh John how would you engage with like like let's say you you're working with a with a long and a two portfolio profitable I mean I've actually got a an actual perfect case so after seven years we've just relaunched one of our games called tens which the last six months we basically this game has had tens of millions of players over the last seven years a traditional puzzle game never ending puzzle game which was the you know the common sort of thing seven eight years ago um and we we looked at the the metrics we saw like you know day 90 retention we're still like up with single digits and we were like wow like there's something here like it's it's gone down because it's been so long but the team just spent you know six months basically changing the level structure adding in you know new features meta

game leaderboards you know all of this other stuff that brings it into the modern day era and and and what players are used to seeing and playing and essentially off the back of that we've been able to increase the metrics you know 50% on day 30 day 90 all of this other stuff and after seven years instead of rolling out a seal we're just going to replace the build with the the new build with the old one and so all of the original players will move move to the new build and then we're going to start redoing UA and then I'll be speaking to zesar about TI and uh but s years old man you know and it's it's it's miraculous that you know qu you're working on 10 to 12 new games anytime right any month I've got 10 to 12 games I'm reviewing and yeah the game that we have launched um this quarter is a game at 7 years old so again if you can um you know refactor the game and and update add all of the new sort of meta

progression and everything that people are used to hard levels all of this other stuff that roic have made famous like you start doing that with some of the back portfolio and metrics start improving and then before you know it you're redoing UA and you're scaling right five actually is the best period really to to benefit because it starts from a very lowc cost base you know the old games usually has uh not as strong like not to speak generally but usually not as strong monetization um success if it is going to be quick I think cost side of U kind of Advantage is going to be helping a lot um and Q5 is usually what I see the you know the old games Reviving and coming as you know Nostalgia I see I see them it's it's not uh it's no secret why we launched it this week right like two weeks until December you know so yeah we we we're trying to sneak at another launch in the next two weeks as well to try and get into Q5 so again what Cesar is saying is

is very poignant you know developers are trying if anything you're cutting content to try and make the timelines and then pushing stuff back into the to the January Sprints right so yeah this it completely aligns with the strategy and what Tik Tok you know Cesar is saying about Tik Tok at the moment with Q5 this podcast is brought to you by apps flyer in today's Digital World understanding your apps Journey from Discovery to download is is more than just insightful it's essential enter apps flyer the leader in Mobile attribution and marketing analytics that allows you to measure the full potential of your marketing efforts making every ad dollar work smarter with apps flyer that's your new reality dive deep into Data driven insights that reveal exactly where your users come from and how they interact with your app apps sler where your app's potential meets performance damn uh and and are what what are the sort of a success metrics

that you use to evaluate the effectiveness of these live Ops campaign on the platform so you know of course at the business goal it is to prolong the life cycle but what you know and and the Ross but what drives that is is is something to to consider um what I would look at as a successful liveops is before and after you see a shift so and shift in you know basically daily active users are you reaching to more users and they are are they more engaged and are they paying more so these are the three things that you know the campaign overall is reaching to its goals not necessarily with only Tik Tok but from from Tik Tok side of course we would like to contribute to that um these are kind of things that you can observe in the short term also the Improvement in K factor and organic but the long term I I think the Strategic ones is um is harder

to see harder to measure so you know the organic and K factor I think is more uh more strategic and you know the brand metrics like favorability or you know being top of Mind these are also you know helpful for the long longer term the measurement side is how to basically see the long-term effects uh in the in the short term so this is another approach that we are basically looking at um how so to call so to say brand formance is in place while you're investing in you know expanding the audience Etc how are they going to um support the long-term um success and overall R um John I think you know if you can say more on this like how you would say a liveops campaign is successful but yeah look I I I completely agree with what you just said essentially what we're looking for is uh any live Ops like event in theory is

adding new content in some way or description right um and you know if we look at the again we looked at supercell example you've got New Seasons or new campaigns or something that goes live what you want to see or in same thing for us is as soon as that new content goes live you want to see a jump right you want to see yeah you want to see a step up you want to see Dow go up you want to see UA go up you want to see your base metrics go up you know what we normally see is that user Behavior around events or or again live Ops in general there is a peak or an increase in base metrics and that then Powers UA and scale and DOW and everything else is a combination or a correlation to those data points so ultimately every time we do something what you don't want to see is you've just spent a load of money on an IP integration of with Hasbro or Mattel and uh and then you don't see any any uplift right it's just it's just like stay flat you know that's what you don't want to see you want to see when

you jump up and as long as as long as you're seeing those those yeah those uplifts right and you're seeing those metrics improvements and there is a correlation to that then this is exactly what we want the the real question is what does success look like is it 5% uplift or is it 50% uplift and where do you you know meet in that area so how how the Roa calculation is because if you look at the just seven days the ROI may seem different than the 30 days to 90 days because the the goal is before and after there should be an after of course during the campaign period there would be an upside but when it comes back is it also higher than the previous base so it is to change the base I want to show actually one more one more chart with this so so this is um uh just a random game but this is sort of a stuff that um that I'd like to personally look at when when I see the

the performance of a title like the first graph and this is basically so uh this is from uh from friends at pvx partners that are focused on UA financing but B basically what you see here is you see different cohorts that are based on month and you can see the uh the payback which is the uh the 1.0 so that's what you're trying to to reach and of course all the cohorts are net revenue and when I'm seeing that something has improved ideally what would need to happen or not ideally what needs to happen is not per se how fast you reach the payback because that you know is highly dependent on the market condition but it's really the uh the shape of the curve and in this case you can see a a title that has clearly launched probably in Q Q5 and every cord subsequently has been doing uh not so good and the shape of the curve have changed quite significantly where even if you would extend this to 12 months or 24 months you would likely not see it reaching roas and so ideally the way I

understand is is that that the success that you're looking at because you mentioned uh that there will be um there will be focus on on elements like uh ships and diu shifts in average revenue per paying users shift in probably Revenue retention so that you know the the payers are staying longer k factor and brand metrics all of these would be seen as the newer cohorts that are or cohorts that are coming through Tik Tok the uh the LTV the shape of the LTV curve is changing and it's changing towards that it's going up and up and that shows that not only are you having immediate Success With The Campaign but you're also having a longlasting success with the with a curve not plateauing so quickly and you can extend the payback and hence the uh the payback period doesn't matter that much did I get it somewhere uh right John can vouch for that yeah yeah sorry yeah yeah I mean from from my

perspective yes like as as you said like the the the payback is in you know is related to the CAC right so if the the cpis or whatever the cost is more expensive then that will fluctuate right but really what you want to see is your average revenue per user or average revenue per paying user you want that to see that you want the LTV curve to be above the base one right and that shows that there's been a higher adoption of either new users or existing users in in relation to your Revenue based metrics so if the LV curve um Remains the Same shape but is a level above that means that ultimately you've gained your RPD or your Revenue per user is better than it was before and if that is linked to a particular event or a live Ops um sort of event then obviously that means that it's been successful and so do you see when you when you work with with your uh with Publishers as a partner uh do you see the customer acquisition cost going down

or or like what's what's the uh sort of immediate effect of these campaigns so the immediate effect is actually the increase in um Organics and overall efficiency of UA because once you prime the audience it is also providing more signals to all channels in in that specific Geo so um you would create a a kind of um efficiency through that W wider exposure of course you know the the the key goal is to turn this into value and long-term kind of long-term value with the with the LTV so it it also depends on you know how we are onboarding them to the game and you know whether are you um complementing it in terms of your monetization in the game or you know overall what you're promising are you keeping it in the game and and what's the uh is there some kind of a balancing between the immediate campaign success

that you can get through Tik Tok and then those long-term player retention goals like how how do you track those two different things long-term retention you know John can share more on this it depends on many things what I would look at the short term is of course a jump in the Au are we expanding the audience and are we able to drive across the board a a user acquisition efficiency uh but the retention it is depends on I guess many things and the main driver of retention as far as I read from the reports is if the game is fun yeah for sure yeah I completely agree um the the thing with long-term retention very simply is you need continued content to bring people back and liveops is a way to inject content right so say for example you know a user has played through 30 days of content

and they've gone through all of the main sort of uh I don't know a thousand levels of something right and they've hit the cap of the old puzzle if there's no replayability elements then you have to make sure there's P versus P or some form of tournament base system to allow that right but ultimately at a certain point someone will get bored of that as well so how do you get people back you get people back and this again impacts long-term retention of you users and increases the LTV dramatically by re-engaging or having content or new things for that person to come back to engage with so as long as you're able to effectively do that then liveops in general will will continue to improve your long-term retention which overall increases your LTV and ultimately means that your studio beta is higher right which is what we all want of course of course um all right it seems like Tik Tok is is really offering a full suit for Publishers

to to Really scale their their live Ops games whether they are new or whether they have been you know for a longer time and kind of matured in in the market uh to kind of cap off this conversation like what what advice are would you give to the developers who are starting off with with live Ops campaigns on Tik Tok like what's the first point of contact now they've listened to this they're like this sounds amazing John is is buffing this up as well I need I need to get on this liveops train right now so where do I start so you know if this is a new start I would think of course with conversation we will we will customize this but um an ideal small start would be like this selecting a goo where there is a competition leveraging creators and thinking of a creative difference and measuring the impact basically you know select the Geo where you can also have a

Geo comparison uh either synthetic or actual Geo that you can compare two GEOS apply you know this um audience expansion and overall exposure with create leveraging creators and a different creative that you you are going with the liveops key message um expose minimum you know um I think 60% of the target audience so there should be a a sizable exposure that it should mean something and measure and then learn and and if your uh your strategy is working creative and everything in the next one you can scale um this is the I guess the minimum start but what is needed is something to complement with within the game uh or a partnership that would enhance the message what you're going to Market and how

you're exciting and inviting the players that is something to be um you know I think essential sometimes actually I've seen that too creators are finding this so leveraging creators are really at the core because they find something that you you maybe even didn't think about your game and uh they can bring that story that's something as an exploration and it it it can work at a small scale in a in a selected GE but the goal is again measuring towards what you would call as success and are you able to compete also effectively gaining those UA acquisition efficiencies expanding audience Etc and and does Tik Tok help with selecting the right goo like do I start with tier tier three tier 2 do I go directly to tier one Geo like how what's the what's the typical approach so basically it should be something some Geo that we see okay

there is uh we are behind our potential here either there's a competition or they reach to a kind of a ceiling and the you you would see it from the UA cost increasing so how can we unlock this is is one of the objectives so this goo of course it's a it's a discussion with with the publisher so we should find find this together there are certain GEOS that Tik Tok is very strong also you know when the lios campaign can only go with Tik Tok and we can only see you know we can see the overall impact and you can also see on the UA channels over on in the bottom line how it is impacting so that you know measurement is much easier sounds clear John what what did I didn't what I didn't ask that I should be asking uh uh what did you not ask we we spoke

about live Ops in general in theory I think um one thing that we didn't cover off was more like culturalization live Ops so basically like you know how you tailor live Ops to individual audiences you know the prime example is you don't use the number four in China right because it's like sign signifies death right like there's all of these sort of individual trends that you need to uh you know you need to think about um depending on the location like like do you do something special in Germany around you know a select cultural event is it worth it is it going to move the needle that all comes down to the scale and DOW that you have and the partners that have the reach like you know Tik Tok are massive everywhere so that's not really a problem for them but you know there's that's I mean that's one sort of maybe like the sub layer that we didn't get into today but something people should think about of course the creative is is is is at the core and call cultural elements and the localization and what Tik Tok has as the

as the advantage and that's why I mentioned the creators should be in the the core is to solve for the cultural relevancy um the storytelling and making it you know also relevant to what is top of Mind in that Geo at that time so really surfing the trend so that that that makes a difference and also you know besides the creators uh um either through ttcc also the partners through T Tik Tok creative exchange these are all by the way under the new platform Tik Tok one so it it is becoming more streamlined and easier to to run these creative production and get get creative insights um for instance you know through there you would see what's trending in that certain Geo and it is going to basically fuel your your brief but you know most of the time creators are helping more than you can you can

imagine I've seen a few cases where they basically create a song for the game wow hopefully a good song yeah and a dance I think there's there's a lot of potential with the integrating Music and Sound into to those campaigns leveraging creators damn yeah and that that makes Tik Tok truly unique with the uh the Creator Network that you have and Auto automatically localizes and culturalized the ads uh because they're created by local creators H okay and you know boost up your live Ops with Tik Tok seems like a very interesting uh product very interesting offering can't wait to have companies I know that many companies we've discussed big companies are using Tik Tock live Ops tool sets and features because they're so big it will take a time before they can come out and talk openly about them but can't wait till they share their learnings uh with Tik Tok

but you know I know several very large companies that are using it so uh exciting product very much needed for the market and for the Publishers and um you should give it a go so thank you Cesar for for coming on the podcast explaining what you guys are doing thank you John and thank you John for uh for keeping this conversation Saint CU I don't know what I'm talking about and you're the Mr publisher here so uh so luckily we get the uh the right information so thank you John yeah look it was a lot of fun I enjoyed the chat all right thank you everybody for listening and um catch you next time thank you you did it you made it to the end of the episode as a fan of the show it would help us out if you subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice more importantly are you a member of the deconstructor fund slack group if you have 5 years or more of games industry experience go to deconstructor of fund.com slack and apply to join join

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