The PlayFab Definitive

Guide to LiveOps

2 playfab.com
First Edition
March 2018

At PlayFab, we believe that LiveOps techniques are the single most important
reason why great games connect with players and earn money from them
effectively over the long haul.

This guide is for anyone interested in learning more about LiveOps, whether
you’re already a practitioner but want to brush up on some aspects that you’re
less familiar with, or you’re an expert. We hope you find the guide useful and
would love to get your feedback - or contributions - as we refine this guide over
time to highlight evolving techniques. Feel free to drop us a line anytime at
info@playfab.com. We’d love to hear from you.

“In three years our games have generated over $80m revenue. Depending on how
you account for it, Live Ops initiatives generated between one and two-thirds of that
revenue…Live Ops underpins everything we do.”

- Simon Hade, COO, SpaceApe*

This LiveOps guide has three sections.

1 Part I is a general introduction to LiveOps. If you’re new to LiveOps - or want

help convincing your executive producer about why you should be investing in
LiveOps - this is a good place to start.

2 Part II is a detailed compendium of LiveOps techniques. Here’s where you’ll find

an exhaustive summary, with deep-dives into particular techniques.

3 Part III lists all the tools and services that PlayFab provides to help you
implement the various LiveOps best practices as described in this guide. Of
course, we also have detailed guides, docs, tutorials, and videos that explain
things in much more depth; you can find those by visiting our website at
playfab.com and selecting “Docs”.

* tech.spaceape.com, DECEMBER 7, 2016

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 Table of contents

Part I: Introduction to LiveOps

The LiveOps lifecycle 7

Part II: LiveOps techniques

Analytics for LiveOps 13
You can’t get what you don’t measure 13
Segmentation 18
How LiveOps changes launch 20
Live Events 23
Case Study: Co-branded car launch event 26
Multiplayer 31
Leaderboards and Tournaments 33
Guilds (a.k.a. teams, groups, clans, or alliances) 35
Content Is King 37
Game updates vs. server-side changes 37
Pace yourself 39
Localization 42
Running experiments 44
Test early and often 44
Split testing 44
Monitoring player behavior and feedback 45
Community 47
Everything in moderation 48
Monetization 49
Free-to-play vs. paid 49
Advertising: The rewards are endless 49
In-app purchases: In for a penny... 52
First time purchases: Getting off to a good start 55
Game economy: The daily grind 56
VIPs: Having a whale of a time 57
Acquiring and maintaining your players 59
Player acquisition 59
Retention 63
Engagement 65
Support 67
Living on the plateau 68

Part III: Using PlayFab’s backend services for LiveOps

How PlayFab supports LiveOps 69
PlayFab feature overview 76

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 Part I: Introduction to LiveOps

Successful game studios today recognize and embrace the idea that games
have evolved into services that evolve and grow over time with new content, live
events, and frequent updates. While games must still aim to provide fun and
engaging experiences, the bar has been raised - to be successful over the long
term, games need to also understand and segment their players, develop deep
relationships, and understand and meet the needs of multiple player segments.

Collectively, these activities have come to be called “LiveOps”, and they are
most important for the rapidly growing market of free-to-play (F2P) games,
where games are monetized through in-game purchases and advertisements
as opposed to one-time up-front payments. Zynga was one of the first US
companies to adopt LiveOps techniques, and as Frank Gibeau, CEO of Zynga,
says, “growing our live services continues to be a top priority.”*

LiveOps has also made a dramatic impact on premium games, however,

including console, PC and mobile. Notes Andrew Wilson, CEO of Electronic Arts,
“our growing live services
have fundamentally
changed our business “We’ve applied our teams to developing
model, resulting in a more
compelling live services events, and this has
stable and predictable
cash flow, all year round.”** fundamentally transformed our business
model. Our live services continue to grow
Companies that adopt a our profitability and enable us to generate
LiveOps mindset focus on
making their games last
cash all year round.”
longer - turning them into
“forever franchises” - and - Blake Jorgensen (CFO, Electronic Arts)***
find that this produces a
far higher return on their
development and marketing investment than traditional game development and
marketing. For example, as of Q3 2017, live services represented roughly half of
EA’s net bookings, and this number has been growing at 10-15% annually.

To see the impact that LiveOps can have on game longevity, look no further than
the top 10 mobile charts for 2016 and 2017. Fully 70% of the games in the top 10
in 2017 were also in the charts in 2016 - and all of them are operated as services,
with a strong emphasis on LiveOps.

* ZYNGA – Q2 2017 QUARTERLY EARNINGS LETTER, August 2, 2017

** ELECTRONIC ARTS PREPARED COMMENTS FY18Q1, July 27, 2017

*** ELECTRONIC ARTS PREPARED COMMENTS FY18Q1, July 27, 2017
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 “New releases now only represent a part of our business, which is now focused on
long-term engagement with our player communities...Our players not only play for
more hours at a time, but do so over a period of months or even years. We are thus
able to offer them new experiences and content, thereby extending the lifetime of
our games.”

- Yves Guillemot, CEO, Ubisoft*

Top mobile games by revenue | worldwide **

2016 2017

1 Monster Strike 1 Monster Strike

2 Clash of Clans
3 Game of War
4 Mobile Strike
5 Pokémon GO
6 Clash Royale
7 Puzzles & Dragons
8 Candy Crush Saga
9 Westward Journey
10 Clash of Kings
2 Honor of Kings
3 Fate/Grand Order
4 Clash Royale
70% 5 Candy Crush Saga
Crossover 6 Puzzle & Dragons
7 Westward Journey
8 Lineage 2
9 Clash of Clans
10 Game of War

* UBISOFT ANNUAL REPORT 2017

** SENSORTOWER ANNUAL GAMING REPORT, 2016 AND 2017

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 “Across our portfolio, event-driven live services are enhancing the experience for
players – keeping them together with friends, extending the fun, and giving them
choice in how they want to play.”

Andrew Wilson, CEO, Electronic Arts

Planning for a LiveOps model has several important ramifications for your
studio. With LiveOps, you can:

Make changes quickly, which provides a fast and clean way to address unforeseen
problems that crop up after launch.

Segment players and make targeted communications or offers appropriate for each
segment to stimulate engagement and boost monetization.

Run special in-game events to keep a game from getting stale, or attract players to
come back and re-engage - often with dramatic impact.

Collect and analyze game data to provide insight into how to tune and improve
your game. Viewing performance in real-time can identify issues like a new update
causing a spike in errors, or a mis-configuration causing an exploit that might
permanently ruin your game’s economy if not quickly rolled back.

At a more strategic level, data - and in particular, real-time data - allows you to
build games using a “lean” methodology. In a traditional waterfall-style process,
a team typically develops a game for a year or more before getting feedback
at launch or soft launch, at which point it’s generally too late to make significant
changes.

A lean approach turns the timing on its head, allowing you to launch a less-
polished, less-fully-featured game way earlier than a waterfall approach, and
lets the game then continue to change and grow after launch based on the
data generated by real customers. This approach requires a significant shift
in mindset, but the payoff can be significant - you can start realizing revenues
sooner and know with confidence that you’re building a game that resonates with
your players. But to pull it off, you need the right tools - in particular, server-side
configuration to build tests, and business intelligence and analytics to measure -
so that you can build a build-measure-learn feedback loop.

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 The Lean Startup Methodology
allows developers to obtain
measurable outcomes much sooner

A tale of two games

The orange line shows the trajectory of a successful game that got featured in app stores
and got a lot of downloads - but had no LiveOps strategy. The gray line took longer to
find a big audience, but continues to grow that audience through its LiveOps tactics.

“Of course. LiveOps is hard - it’s live. With everything that is live, you break eggs.”

- Pascal Clarisse, CMO, Eden Games

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 The LiveOps lifecycle

Once you’ve decided to adopt a LiveOps methodology, you’ll need to make

choices about what to do and how to go about it. The biggest bang for the buck
comes from embracing LiveOps early in your game’s development, so you can
design your game to maximize the advantages you get from game services.

However, it’s never too soon to start: you can still get a lot of benefit from
adding LiveOps later in your development timeline, even long after a game has
launched. Furthermore, the experience of experimenting with LiveOps in a live
game will provide useful experience to help plan LiveOps in your next game.

At a high level, here’s a framework for how to think about LiveOps over the
lifecycle of your game:

Pre-production is the best time to think strategically about how you can
take advantage of LiveOps features in your game design. For free-to-play
games in particular, this is a great time to think through how you plan to
use in-app purchases; for example, building your game on top of backend
services can make it easy for you to configure your stores and update
inventory on the fly. That’s important because it reduces the risk and
overhead associated with several key activities: running live events, testing
offers to understand the impact on your game’s monetization prior to
making them widely available, keeping your game fresh by making limited-
time offers, and making segmented offers.

This is also a good time to think about the needs and wants of your target
players, since a big benefit of LiveOps is increased engagement with your
player community. What will get their attention? What will encourage them
to really dig in?

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 There are two modern strategies to development for live games. Many
studios still follow waterfall methodology, often taking a year or more to
design and launch a fully-realized, fully-polished game with most or all of
its planned features ready on day one. With this strategy, the more time you
invest in upfront development, the more you’ve got riding on a smooth and
successful launch - so don’t let the pressure to launch quickly cause you to
shortchange your game’s analytics. It’s easy to wire in the ability to capture
key data like player logins, purchase events, and custom events - all of
which you’ll need to have in order to understand and improve your games’
performance.

The other approach to development is lean methodology, as used by Fluffy

Fairy Games for Idle Miner Tycoon. They spent only 8 weeks in development
before releasing the game and starting to gather feedback so they could
make rapid iterations and improvements. If this is your strategy, you may
choose to capture fewer data points at first while you focus on finding and
pleasing a smaller base of customers - but it’s still critical to make sure you
focus heavily on the KPIs you decide are most important, since you’ll need to
be able to move quickly and you’ll want to make sure you’re focusing limited
resources on the right problems.

Content is another area where advance planning can save you significant
time once your game is live, particularly if you don’t plan frequent update
cycles. If you want to be able to keep your game fresh without needing an
update or doing dynamic gifting, consider creating your content as dynamic
text fields, images and other configurable content (e.g. Unity AssetBundles)
that can be distributed on the fly and turned on at your discretion. This
has two significant benefits: ease of localization and speed of iteration.
You’ll also want to think about automation early on, so that you can move
quickly to stop problems like cheating and fraud before they blow up and
potentially ruin your game for other players. So think through a plan for how
you’ll be able to take bulk actions as well as set and create triggered events
and scheduled tasks, even if you don’t plan to do these right at launch.

Collecting and analyzing your crash data and retention metrics is also a
must, even if you are taking a lean approach to development. “We mostly
focused on the game itself during development, because nothing else
would make sense if the game wasn’t fun,” says Fluffy Fairy Games’ Oliver
Löffler. “We did focus on crash analytics and basic analytics to measure

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retention, which was a key performance indicator for us. We also built
functionality to make sure we could make commits without breaking
anything. At the beginning we were aiming to make something that would
be fun for up to 4 days, and see if players would be engaged enough in that
time period to add on more content to sustain engagement over a longer
period.”

If you’ve invested many months of work into your game, soft launch is an
important way to de-risk your game’s launch. Pick a smaller geography that
shares the same language as your core audience (Australia, New Zealand,
and Canada are all popular options) and run your game for 1-3 months.
This is where you should be making use of all the analytics you wired up,
looking for flaws you can correct so your full launch goes perfectly. Smart
soft-launching saved Nvizzio’s Roller Coaster Tycoon Touch from falling into
oblivion. At the time of soft-launch, the game was seeing 65% player loss
on day one. The team dug into the data and realized that their tutorial was
too complex. So the team changed the flow of the tutorial. By the time they
released worldwide, the game topped the charts during release week.

At launch, your key concerns are around customers - your ability to attract
players, retain them over time, monetize them effectively, and scale to
accommodate them. The effort can be non-trivial, especially if you go it
alone - as Cem Aslan, CEO of ColdFire Games puts it, “Especially as a small

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 studio, it can be very time-consuming to maintain and scale your own
servers.” Launch is your first opportunity for the investment you’ve made
in your game to start paying off, but finding the right path forward can be
tricky. You’ll need analytics to help you understand your cost of acquisition
and your customer lifetime value, both critical to your understanding of how
much you can afford to spend on user acquisition. Wiring up your game
for analytics will let you understand which customers are profitable, and
how your sources of players stack up. That way, you can invest in the most
efficient channels and stop wasting money and effort on the losers, and you
can understand how different segments of players are performing and track
your efforts to improve your player metrics.

Once you’re armed with detailed knowledge of how your game is truly
performing, you’re ready to dig into running live operations (“LiveOps”)
to maximize its potential. This is where you get the payoff from the features
you wired into your game during development, so that you can make
significant tweaks to your game without needing to coordinate a full
update. It’s becoming well understood that running live events is one of
the most powerful ways to stimulate engagement with your game, but
many developers don’t realize that you can make a big impact with live
events even if you don’t have a large team devoted to this - as long as your
backend services offer the tools to make this process simple and scalable.
As an example, let’s look at how Hyper Hippo was able to scale up their use
of events on AdVenture Capitalist with a small team - and how those events
drove player engagement - by utilizing PlayFab’s backend services.

Hyper Hippo was able to scale its use of live events on AdVenture Capitalist by incorporating
backend services

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These events have helped AdVenture Capitalist remain at the top of the charts for years
(Source: App Annie)

“LiveOps has definitely increased the longevity of our game - it just keeps
people engaged way, way better in terms of keeping the pulse of the game
alive...Having new events all the time re-invests people in the game, it re-creates
the endorphin rush that players get in the first days of playing the game.”

- David Ecker, Lead Producer, Hyper Hippo

The most important thing is to set goals for your event based on what
you learn from analyzing your game’s data, and to structure your event to
address these goals - for example, drawing lapsed players back to your
game or convincing players who’ve never spent real-money currency to
make their first purchase.

In addition to events, other major engagement and monetization

techniques include:

Special offers and promotions to boost monetization or re-engage players.

Retention and retargeting campaigns to reduce churn and boost retention.

Paid acquisition campaigns - if your players typically have a high enough

lifetime value, this can have a strong return on investment.

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 Social features like a sharing mechanism can be a significant means of
acquiring players organically. These are typically designed to drive a high
number of shares through tools that make it easy to share, strong incentives
for users who do share, and well-designed contextual onboarding for players
who receive shares.

A smart LiveOps strategy can significantly extend your game’s heyday,

which has a massive impact on your game’s ROI. But even after your game
is past its prime, it can still be very profitable for you - if you built your
game on services. In the plateau phase of a game, you can dynamically
right-size your backend, so you’re not paying for unnecessary capacity. In
fact, you have a range of options for keeping your game alive longer while
reserving bandwidth for your upcoming titles - from leaving some aspects
of your game on autopilot with a dynamically scaling backend platform, to
partnering with a company like Deca Games that focuses on maximizing the
potential of games in their plateau phase.

Don’t write off your game without thinking through your options; Deca
Games has successfully used LiveOps techniques to reinvigorate games
they’ve acquired well into their plateau phase, such as Realm of the Mad
God. A browser-based game originally invented by two developers in a
2010 hackathon, Realm of the Mad God was a cult hit that was acquired
by Kabam in 2012. When Kabam shifted its priorities to mobile, the game
lost focus internally and was on “life support” when Deca Games took it on.
Deca grew the game without any marketing spend “by working with the
community and hyper-delivering on their wants and needs,” notes Deca’s
Ken Go, helping the game grow through word of mouth. As a result, 7 years
on the game has more active players than ever before. Investing in keeping
your game alive longer also presents a great cross-marketing opportunity
since you’ve got an active audience to which you can promote your other
games.

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 Part II: LiveOps techniques

In the previous section we went through a high-level overview of why LiveOps is a

key success driver for today’s top games. Now, we’re going to get into the details
of the disciplines that make up the LiveOps toolkit, with examples from folks in
the trenches and best practices.

Topics include:
• Analytics and segmentation
• Launching with a LiveOps team
• Running live events
• Tournaments, multiplayer and guilds
• Content
• Localization
• Running experiments
• Community
• Moderation
• Monetization - advertising and IAP best practices
• User acquisition
• Retention
• Engagement
• Support
• Plateau and sunset

Analytics for LiveOps: You can’t get what you don’t measure

Measuring and analyzing your game’s performance is critical for improving

that performance and increasing your revenues. If you haven’t already become
familiar with key performance indicators (KPIs) like ARPU (average revenue per
user), ARPPU (average revenue per paid user), ARPDAU (average revenue per
daily active user), Day One Retention (the proportion of of players that return one
day after downloading your game), or Conversion, you’ll want these elements
and more in your daily dashboard to monitor your game performance. But you
also need to be tracking these in real time.

The importance of real-time access to data in a world where customers respond

instantaneously to changes in your gameplay or errors that your game throws
off cannot be overstated. Waiting 24 hours or more to learn how players react to
a change or to discover issues like fraud can be a crippling blow to your game.
Notes Renee Ya, Founder at Tiger Byte Studios, “I believe it’s important to stay
nimble in a constantly changing environment where you are willing to pivot to a
new strategy at a moment’s notice based off of rigorous data analysis.” She

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 advocates for deep-diving into a game’s stats with key stakeholders, “reviewing
metrics and creating hypotheses with action items and checking back often to
see how we moved the needle based off of feedback.”

When Fluffy Fairy Games launched its hit game Idle Miner Tycoon, the team made
the decision to launch a lightweight version of the game as quickly as possible
and iterate, rather than building out a fully-featured game. This Minimum Viable
Product (MVP) model is becoming popular with cutting-edge game developers.
“The old game development mode was to lock yourself in for 5 years before
going to the public - some developers still prefer to work that way. But these
days, more and more developers use the MVP approach,” says growth and
strategy consultant Sebastian Knopp. “You don’t need a full featured game
to start and to see if there is traction from its unique combination of category,
artistic style, and fiction.” Define the core loop, and then, “if there is traction, then
you take this MVP and develop it further, always developing very close to the
customer.”

Fluffy Fairy took this approach to heart; rather than focusing on growing player
numbers through user acquisition or being featured in an app store, they focused
on building traction, focusing tightly on key metrics like early retention signals,
number of sessions, DAU (Daily Active Users), and ad monetization. In the game’s
early days, before there were large numbers of players, Fluffy Fairy’s Marketing
Director Volkmar Reinerth relied heavily on “player feedback, following the
company spirit to be player-centric.” Then, as the game found and began to grow
an audience of players, who in turn began to generate more data, the company
prioritized collecting more data for analytics.

Idle Miner Tycoon: focusing on customer traction pays off in the long run (Source: App Annie)

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At PlayFab, we’ve found the following to be a good basic set of KPIs for all games
to track over time:
• New players - as a measure of acquisition effectiveness
• Unique logins over time (daily and monthly active users) - to track engagement
• Total game sessions over time (most importantly, sessions per DAU) - to track
engagement
• Total payers and conversion rate (% of payers) - to monitor monetization
effectiveness
• Revenue - monetization measure
• Errors - ultimately, these will impact player satisfaction
• ARPU - monetization tracking
• ARPPU - to track monetization

Most analytics solutions provide at-a-glance reporting for these key KPIs, but for
in-depth analysis, you’ll likely want the ability to run custom queries across your
full data set as well. This requires the ability to store and access your raw game
data through a data warehouse. You’ll also want to slice these KPIs into cohorts
based on when a player first started; this will give you insight into how the game
is performing for longstanding players vs. newer ones.

Data visualization is an important tool for understanding the story your data is
telling you. Look for cyclical trends like weekday vs. weekend, track performance
over time, and get a feel for the impact that major changes - whether that’s your
live events or error spikes - have on your game in the short and longer term.

You’ll also want to be able to drill into your event history across preset or
custom event queries as a way to help you track and optimize performance
and monetization of your live events and benchmark your performance vs. past
initiatives.

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 Not all players are created equal, and one important tactic for making your
game successful is segmenting your players and finding ways to stimulate each
segment to behave in a way that benefits your game. Marketers need the ability
to create custom segments and then treat those segments differently (e.g.
customize messaging, events, inventory, stores, and more by segment). That’s
because every game is different - for some games, it’s critical to track which
players spend early (in their first few sessions) because players who spend early,
spend often. Other games report that one of their most important metrics is total
spend by Day 7, because this is a marker for long-term engagement and spend.
And obviously no matter what, you’ll want to be able to track ongoing spend
patterns of your players to make sure that changes you make to the game don’t
have unforeseen impacts. Finally, if you plan on using A/B testing to validate
elements of your game play, you will need to manage each group in your test as
a segment.

As you think about analytics, avoid the trap of focusing on headline metrics and
use your data to try to dig into specific problems and solve them. It’s useful to
know that a first day retention rate for idle games is typically over 50%, vs. over
30% for strategy games, so you can benchmark yourself against the norms
(though bear in mind that metrics will vary from country to country). But while
tracking retention is important, it’s not actually an actionable metric in itself.
Segmentation helps you turn a question like “why is retention stuck at 20%? What
can I do about that?” into a more actionable question like “how are my players
who reached level 50 different from players who left before level 10? What are
the behaviors that differentiate the two groups? And is there something I can do
to encourage the players who left to act more like the players who stuck around?”
This will help you design and test hypotheses - for example, perhaps players are
dropping off when they fail to complete an especially hard level. If the data bears

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that theory out, you can test potential solutions - e.g. offering one-off boosts or
other help targeted only to players who are getting stuck, to encourage them to
keep going while avoiding impacts to the difficulty curve for the other players
who found the difficulty of that level just right.

Analytics best practices

Monitor your key stats daily or even hourly to ensure things are running smoothly. A
real-time visualization of the data pipeline can be very helpful here.

Review key reports at least weekly with your team members. Ideally, you should be
able to access high-level overview and drill-down detailed reports on-demand and
send them automatically to interested parties via a regular email cadence.

Be inquisitive - run queries against your data warehouse to figure out what’s going
on inside your game, and to help design new features.

When customers have problems, analyze their event history to see what happened.

Think about the right “funnel” progression for players in your game, and design
segments to track players as they move along this funnel.

Experiment with how to motivate players to move through your funnel - in-game
messaging, external marketing, email, etc.

Compare behavior differences in players in segments you’re happy with, e.g.

“players who got to level 50” to players in segments you don’t like, e.g. “players who
quit before level 10.” Are there things you can do to encourage one to act more like
the other?

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 Segmentation

As your game gains traction, you’ll start to see player segments form naturally,
and your analytics toolset should make it easy for you to define custom segments
in a way that makes sense for your game (e.g. high XP players, currently active
players, lapsed players, players who have made purchases, whales…). Then, as
you run experiments and test your ideas, you can track how players in your key
segments react. When you do something that stimulates the behavior you want
to see in a key segment (such as a particular kind of promotion or event), make a
note of it and try other similar tactics to see if you can get that effect consistently.
Of course, you need to be thoughtful about going to the same well too often or
you can burn players out.

At a minimum, games should think about the basic “funnel” in their game. For
example, you can define some simple segments as follows:

• “new players” - anyone up to level 10

• “non-spenders” - over level 10, LTV = 0
• “spenders” - where LTV > 0 but < $100
• “whales” - where LTV > $100

Once you do this, it’s easy to track your progress getting players to move up the
value chain from one segment to the next through various tactics you try out.
Other common player segments can include your early adopters (players who
participated in your beta, perhaps), by platform (e.g., console versus mobile), by
country (especially if you think you need to tune your game differently in different
countries).

Once you have defined the segments you care about, you will want to be able to
treat players in each of those segments differently. For example, you might want
to show different tips and tricks to each funnel segment to encourage them to
move up to the next segment, or only show in-game ads to non-payers, or tune
your game mechanics differently in certain countries.

18 playfab.com
 “Following the machine learning trends, we are quickly getting to a world in
which we can’t keep track of all the player segments treated differently. While
in the past modelling a user journey around 20-50 key points in the game
(leveling up, unlocking specific content, taking part in game modes for the first
time, etc.) and putting some additional segmenting properties on top - total
revenue from a player, total engagement from a player, number of friends, etc.
was enough, it’s happening already, but will happen even more in the future
that we just define a lot of promotions and let the machine learning handle the
segmentation.”

- Dimitar Draganov, Senior Product Manager, flaregames

Segmentation best practices

Make a list of the segments you care about in your game, starting with your key
funnels, such as your monetization funnel.

Ensure that your analytics tools let you view your KPIs by segment, so you can
compare performance across your segments. You may also want to view your A/B
test results by segment as well.

Design your backend tools so you can treat players in each segment differently.
The most common areas for differentiation include messaging, stores, game
configuration, offers and promotions, limited content, and events.

Consider investing in machine learning to automatically segment players into the

groups most likely to respond to various promotions and events. Over time, it’s likely
that we will move toward “segments of one” where individual players are receiving
individualized attention and unique game experiences.

“Consumers don’t really want lot of new ideas, they want the thing they are into
to get better and better.”

- Mark Pincus, Founder and former CEO, Zynga

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 How LiveOps changes launch

Since there have been games, there have been launches...and all the things that
can and do go wrong with launch. The advent of games-as-a-service makes it
easier for studios to dodge some of the most common pitfalls that have crippled
previous generations of games, such as failing to scale your backend and then
falling over when your game spikes in popularity after being featured. But savvy
developers know to start planning their LiveOps strategy well before launch day.
“With a LiveOps game, the real work starts with launch instead of ending there.
And that is a big challenge for game developers,” says growth and strategy
consultant Sebastian Knopp.

“Move fast and scale everything.”

- Pascale Clarysse, CMO, Eden Games

Well before launch day, you should have your LiveOps team staffed, trained up
and ready to go. Who’s on the LiveOps bus? Your core team should have people
assigned to the game responsible for technology (from product through QA),
user acquisition, monetization, community, and customer service. And these
people should be a close-knit team, working together towards common goals,
rather than a loose affiliation of representatives from various departments. It’s
very important that roles and responsibilities within the team are clearly laid
out, so that the group can make and execute on decisions quickly. Your LiveOps
team needs to be familiar with the game’s event and content strategy and have
a calendar in place for the first few months. They must also have developed
strong feedback loop mechanisms with players and agreed to a framework
for a decision-making process based on that feedback plus game data (along
with perhaps a dash of developer intuition) prior to launching the game. Large
companies like Supercell are known to pride themselves on not allowing teams
to make any decisions based only on “gut feeling” after a game is launched.

Ask yourself: does everyone know who is responsible for coordinating

new content to support themed events, creating customer segments and
generating (and communicating) offers to those segments? Do you have a
strong feedback loop from your community to your product and technical
teams, and a process to distill feedback into concrete learnings? Customer
support similarly needs to have a clear understanding of policy, and tools and
rules set up to drive compliance with that policy. Your engineers should be
ready to handle spikes in volume stemming from promotional and marketing
activity, regardless of how much notice you get (if any).

20 playfab.com
Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a dry run in live games. Determining if
your game is ready for launch is very challenging from a standing start - so if
you’re investing in a long development cycle prior to launching your game,
make sure to build time for a soft launch into your master plan. When designed
correctly, soft launches should give you nearly as much insight into your game
play and operational performance as a full launch, but at a small fraction of the
risk. Soft launches are a fantastic way to see if your game is connecting with its
intended audience, track if players are behaving as you’d expect them to, and
tweak monetization - without squandering the momentum you can get from a
new launch.

During your soft launch phase, make sure to put your game through its paces.
Confirm your operations are running smoothly: get your LiveOps team lined up
and have them start using their tools; put your CS team to work handling support
issues - and then keep an eye on how both teams are doing. Did everything
work as planned? How did customers react? Did your reps break anything? If
you experienced any surprises, consider how you might want to create guard
rails that will prevent those from happening again when the consequences
are greater. Server logic provides a quick, yet scalable, means of handling
unexpected or changing scenarios. If your backend doesn’t already support this,
you can still augment your existing structure with a backend-as-a-service product
such as PlayFab.

“What we have done [during soft launch] is via game analytics, monitoring
how long people play and how often, how many brutes are killed, etc.
Also watching the YouTube videos that people make to understand their
interactions with the game. A few years ago you didn’t really have that,
it’s a big help - you can literally watch someone go through their first play
experience. If they pick it up, whether they’re struggling or not. It’s really
valuable.”

- Andy Wiltshire, Director, Bulletproof Arcade

During soft launch, you’ll also want to confirm that you can update your game
without causing disruption to players - and make sure that if something goes
wrong with a deployment that you can roll back the changes to minimize impact.
Run retrospectives frequently and be prepared to iterate quickly to make

21
 improvements - because while a soft launch is a smart investment, the quicker
you can move into full launch, the faster you can start to make real money from
your game.

All that said, many smaller developers are starting to eschew soft launches in
favor of lean launches. Launching with an MVP gives you a chance to connect
with your natural audience and then tune the game based on the direct feedback
of your players, focusing your energies on building out the features and
functionality that are most likely to resonate with your audience. The trick? You
need to be able to adapt your game quickly.

Best practices for launch

Have you assembled your LiveOps team? Are they prepared to start meeting each
day to review the previous 24 hours? Do you have a defined process for making
decisions as a team?

Has your LiveOps team developed a calendar for the first few months of your game,
so you stay in sync with the development and roll-out of your content, promotions
and events?

Does your LiveOps team have access to the reports and dashboards they need to
monitor progress?

If your LiveOps team changes configuration of your game to run events, add
content, and make quick-twitch changes, do you have validation checks in place?

Have you rehearsed key LiveOps tasks like adding items to the catalog, adding new
content, and adding in-game messages?

Do you have a way to roll back changes?

Have you set roles and permissions so team members can’t make changes they’re
not trained for?

22 playfab.com
 Live events

Running successful events is perhaps the most essential LiveOps skill. A good
event has the ability to stimulate player engagement while also encouraging
players to step up purchase activity. A really good event accomplishes both
those things without burning players out. The key elements of successful events
include:

Limited-time nature - most events run for a week or less, though some games
(where it takes time to ramp up on how to play using the new content, or where it
takes time to assemble a team), might well run events for longer

Engaging theme and content - good events spark player curiosity, encouraging
them to want to check the event out

Attractive limited-time offers that stimulate purchase behavior

An effective means of communicating with players that can draw people who
aren’t currently playing into the game very quickly

A sense of excitement around the event, such that skipping it would cause players
to feel they’ve missed out on something special which their friends are doing

So what does that mean, exactly? In the abstract,

a live event is simply a temporary but meaningful
change to a game’s content. Holidays are an obvious
theme for events, both because players will generally
share some similar associations with the holiday
which can be reflected in fun limited-time changes
to the game’s appearance, and because holidays can
be times when players have more free time available
and offering them a reason to play can provide a
boost in engagement. Games like Clash of Clans and
Brutes.io make a practice of running major events for
Halloween and the winter holidays, for example.

However, events like contests and tournaments

can also run at a smaller scale than full-game live
events, requiring significantly less overhead, and
furthermore can be targeted to different segments to
help minimize player burnout. Space Ape and Hyper
Hippo both make a point of scheduling multiple smaller events in between their
periodic bigger events to avoid player burnout.

23
 Events can also run in parallel, not just in series. Clash Royale organizes daily and
weekly “quests”, in addition to special Gold Rush and Gem Rush events where
players can earn gold or gems. Events are a great way to experiment with new
ideas for your game to see what stimulates the kinds of player behaviors you
want to see. Just remember to track and analyze the data, as well as to keep a
calendar of your current and planned events to avoid tripping yourself up.

Events often have a “fiction” that masks the actual changes associated with the
event. The changes themselves can be something simple, like a higher drop-rate
on a particular rare item, or perhaps a new bundle for sale. However, the fiction
for the event might still be something dramatic like “Midsummer Night’s Terror”
with an equally dramatic description. Furthermore, while some types of events
require in-game work, others can be run entirely by looking at event logs and
analytics after the fact. For example, an event where players compete to catch the
most fish doesn’t necessarily require any changes to the game - you can just run a
database query after the event to measure who caught the most fish.

24 playfab.com
Companies like Fluffy Fairy Games understand the dynamics of limited-time
events, and have hit all the right notes in their game Idle Miner Tycoon. “We do
event mines on a regular basis - at least one event mine per month and also
focus on special events, holidays like Halloween, Christmas etc. You can access
mines for a limited time period (3-7 days) and get specific rewards for achieving
specific obstacles - different from the normal mines. For special events, we try
to get new offers with specific items, for example a really good boost. We also
have limited offers which rotate - every second day or so you can get very special
items. We schedule countdowns and times on PlayFab,” says Oliver Löffler, Fluffy
Fairy’s CTO. “To prepare - first we have to prepare new assets with the graphic
teams, the game designers refresh the ideas and then bring it all together on
the development side. We have different channels to message players. Push
notifications have generated a huge increase in logins. In-game messaging -
pop-ups that notify players of events. Also all the channels - Facebook, Discord,
Reddit.”

25
 Case study:
Co-branded car launch event
When a new Italian car, the Pagani Huayra Roadster, was introduced at the Geneva Motor
Show, Eden Games released the same car exclusively at the same time in our mobile
game, Gear.Club. Three days earlier, we did a Facebook Live stream with YouTube
influencers testing the game and the riding in the car themselves.

We had the idea of a big launch event, a social moment that people will share. We
came up with a concept to take a fast car and a driver and put YouTube influencers in
the passenger seat while playing our game. And after a long search, we found a car
manufacturer to do the event together. After Pagani gave us the go-ahead, we had only
three months to focus our resources, develop a special championship, a replica of the
factory in the game, as well as the car and its handling. Three days before launch, Pagani
still changed crucial details on the actual car which had to be reflected in the game as
well. It was a challenge, but when you deliver, it’s so rewarding!

Games have come to this point now where they are the biggest entertainment medium
out there, much bigger than Hollywood. It’s only natural that we now speak as equals to
the automotive industry, Hollywood, sports industry. We are not the lesser product, we
are not the license, we are a partner. The market is mature enough that if you think big,
there is a market for it. We are catering to potentially 3 billion people now.

After a 20 minutes tutorial the special event would appear on the game map – players
could borrow the car for 2 weeks and drive 30 special tracks. If they beat all of the tracks
within the time limit, they could keep the car in the game. If they only beat 75% of the
tracks, they’d get a 75% discount on buying the car.

We used push notifications and retargeting to alert players that something special is
happening. Players could share the championships from within the game. We also did
what Phil Hickey calls marketing the marketing – we marketed the marketing day, like
they do on TV when there’s a big live event coming up. We leveraged all our social media
channels to prepare for the day, and we teased users about the car, even before we
revealed that we had it. We reached out to Apple and Google and gave them a detailed
concept two months before the event: 4 slides about what was going to happen in the
game and the marketing campaign to support it. This is something I always recommend
with Apple and Google. If you want Marketing through featuring from them, tell them
what marketing you give them in return. It’s a relationship, it cannot be one-way.

- Pascale Clarysse, CMO, Eden Games

26 playfab.com
Finding the right cadence for events is important, since you want to stimulate
engagement and purchase behavior without burning players out. “When we do
big LiveOps events we see a big spike then a decline back to normal or a little
below normal numbers for a couple days, so we pair LiveOps with client updates
every 4-6 weeks to raise the baseline higher for the peaks and the valleys and
people stay in the game longer than they would if it weren’t a living thing,” says
Hyper Hippo’s David Ecker. AdVenture Capitalist has found a sweet spot with
more frequent, shorter events: “We’re seeing that if our ARPDAU takes a little dip,
we can do a shorter event and it can erase the negative event. We’re trying two
in a week to try to mitigate those dips. Waiting 3-4 weeks is way too long. Now,
we’re condensing a 7-day event into a 4-day event and even a 2-day event.”

Pascale Clarysse of Eden Games notices similar behavior. “Rhythm is important

– every 4 weeks would be the slowest you can be, every 2 to 3 weeks is better.
You have to keep in mind that the week after the event there will be a bit of a
cannibalization effect. If your event is successful, it will increase monetization
but then it will decrease afterward. Your game economy person needs to be
part of the planning of the event, your marketing person needs to be part of
the planning as well to decide when to plan it.” Gear.Club also runs longer
events, “between 10 days for the more casual events and 20 days for esports
events to give players the chance to really compete and learn the tracks.” Also,
notes Clarysse, “with team-based events, you have to give people more time to
organize schedules than with a single player event.”

Running a live game can at times be like orchestrating a complex ballet of teams
working together. So it is essential to build and maintain a calendar view of your
live events that’s shared by all the departments that contribute to your LiveOps
team. Calendars are essential for planning the nuts and bolts of a live event,
including the required new content, localization and communication, as well as
the related marketing effort.

Calendars can also help you manage one of the key risks with running events:
player fatigue. As noted above, it’s normal for players to slow down their activity
somewhat after an event, and you’ll typically see this drop in playing and
spending activity reflected on your KPIs. But going too far - perhaps running
monetization promotions at the same time as an intensive special live event - may
fatigue your users in terms of their spending and/or their playing, putting them in
jeopardy of leaving. Maintaining a holistic view of all your events will help you see
if you’re getting the behavior you expect out of player segments and cohorts.

27
 Mastering the art of player communication is critical to the success of live events.
It’s important to be able to communicate with players via push notification if
you want to be able to let them know time-sensitive information, like that an
event is about to start. Both notifications and emails can be effective tools for
re-engagement as well. For example, the popular Facebook Messenger game
Everwing uses Messenger to notify players when others in their group are
making progress at defeating a monster, so they’re more likely to jump in and
help them kill it. Idle Miner Tycoon has “a social media team which engages
with our players, collects suggestions, and answers questions; we not only react
to our players but also actively engage them and start conversations to be as
transparent and communicative as possible,” says Fluffy Fairy Marketing Director
Volkmar Reinerth. “We post interactive content across various channels which is
continuously showing that we are player-centric and receives good feedback.”
As the game’s player base has grown, Fluffy Fairy’s tactics have become more
sophisticated and retargeting has become more of a focus. Now, “we use push
notifications and retargeting campaigns which present the newest features to the
users which didn’t play for a while; both are effective.”

Your ability to pull off a live event effectively is highly dependent on your
LiveOps team and whether the people on it can work together effectively. A
well-integrated Marketing function will be “informed of external events that can
be used and come up with concepts for them”, says Eden Games’ Pascal Clarysse.
“We all know the big events like Chinese New Year or Halloween. But sometimes
it can be a special event, like in our case with Gear.Club when we used a car
show in Geneva. It’s the job of the marketing team to be aware of these events,
develop ideas in advance, keep the development team aware as well, so they can
plan game updates accordingly.”

28 playfab.com
Live events best practices

Make a list of everything you might want to change as part of an event. This can
include new game levels or quests, unique in-game items, special event “stores,”
discounts or promotions in your normal stores, special event leaderboards and
tournaments.

Set up your game so that you can run events from the server, without requiring a
client update. This means exposing game configuration settings on the server so
you can change how the game runs during events.

Create a place in your game where you can list and promote current and upcoming
events. You want to be able to message players about events to get them excited.

Capture key game data in your data warehouse so you can report on and identify
winners of events after the fact.

If possible, design your game so you can have multiple overlapping events running
at the same time.

Give your LiveOps team as much flexibility as possible when creating new events.
You never know what they are going to come up with to keep the game fresh and
interesting.

Maintain an internal event calendar so your team knows what’s coming up and
when. Use the calendar to avoid scheduling too many “big” events on top of each
other - pace your events to avoid burning out players.

When designing events, consider both the “facts” of the event (e.g., what exactly is
changing), and the “fiction” of the event (how you communicate it to the player). The
fiction often includes the event name, description, and even graphics.

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 “Events should be enjoyable for everyone. Some games clearly cater their
events to their whales, but then the barriers of entry become too high for regular
players. The games that do it best have a big event and a smaller event in
between. The top players, which usually are the whales, consume the content
much faster so they get bored. The events are what keeps them excited.

You need to have events frequently enough so that you can change the menu
every now and then. You will never have one event that your entire audience
loves. So, if a portion of your audience is disappointed with an event today, it’s
ok if in 2 weeks there is another one that they’ll like. They shouldn’t have to wait
6 weeks because they might have left by then. Everyone should get something
they like within a month. Keeping the rhythm helps you to fail fast and fail
without too much consequence. If you make a mistake it’s alright, because there
is another chance in 2 weeks.”

- Pascale Clarysse, CMO, Eden Games

30 playfab.com
 Multiplayer

Playing with or against other players adds a significant element of fun to your
game. The challenge of a real-time battle with a well-matched player can provide
a deeper level of engagement than playing in a solely computer-controlled
environment. Building a great player-vs-player (PvP) experience requires an
ability to serve up the right opponent at the right time, so it’s important to ensure
that your matchmaking logic is making the right tradeoffs between skill level and
time-to-match, particularly as the number of available players ebbs and flows at
different times of day. This may take some iteration.

As Cem Aslan notes, “For Evoker, a collectible card game, we first looked at
how long the players had been active in the game. That didn’t work really well
because players already start a game with different knowledge. You can’t just
assume that all the players who have spent, say, 2 days in the game are on the
same level. Then, we looked at how good their stats were and which cards they
had already collected. This worked a little better, but we also found it’s not ideal
to match players that are exactly the same level. Sometimes it’s fun to just win
easily, and sometimes it’s great to have an opponent who is really hard to beat, so
you have to put up a fight. In the end, we mostly looked at how often a player had
won and how often they had lost. Players who win a lot were matched with other
players that win a lot - and vice versa. For this particular game, this approach
created the best matches.”

While the PvP modality often garners the most attention, cooperative multiplayer
modalities can be highly successful as well. For example, Idle Miner Tycoon
organizes cooperative multiplayer events where players recruit friends to join
their teams; the bigger the team a player recruits, the more resources the team
gets. This is highly engaging and also provides a method of user acquisition.
IDreamSky’s Sky Fall offers cooperative team battles, meaning that players
assemble a team together and can then attack another team with an element of
surprise. Blackstorm Lab’s Everwing offers a cooperative multiplayer experience
where players can team up to defeat very powerful bosses. Forming a team with
friends in a multiplayer modality means that the game has an opportunity to
message others in the team to join the fun as soon as one player picks up the
game, which is a powerful engagement tool.

When building synchronous multiplayer, you have two different options. You
can build and host your own multiplayer server, then connect players to your
server to play against each other. This is the best solution when your multiplayer
game requires complex backend logic, such as a multiplayer online battle arena
(MOBA), but adds complexity in terms of scaling up the number of servers. Or

31
 you can use a multiplayer service, like Photon, to exchange messages between
game clients. This may be the best solution for simpler games, or for quickly
prototyping your multiplayer solution.

Multiplayer best practices

Look for ways to add multiplayer to your game, both competitive and cooperative.
This doesn’t have to be done up front - even single player games can have
multiplayer “meta games” added on top.

Consider both synch and asynch multiplayer - asynch is much easier since it doesn’t
require real-time multiplayer logic, and just requires ways to compare stats between
players such as with a leaderboard.

Experiment with your matchmaking algorithm. Sometimes the simplest mechanism

may be the best.

If you are building your own multiplayer server, make sure to avoid a common pitfall
by giving careful consideration to how you will scale up the number of servers your
game needs.

32 playfab.com
 Leaderboards and tournaments

Fostering interactions between players is a core component of successful live

games, as it injects a social element that helps keeps players hooked. The most
straightforward mode is of course 1:1 competition, allowing players to compete
against one another in a head-to-head fashion. This can be based on the players’
location in the game, as in Brutes.io, or via a matchmaking logic to pair players of
roughly equal skill. Games like Clash of Clans have invested in “2v2” play, letting
teams of two compete head-to-head against other teams in multiple modes
(draft, challenge, and friendly battle).

Leaderboards and tournaments give players a chance to show off that they can
be - and stay - the best. Filtering leaderboards by friends adds a social layer
where you are competing with people you know from social networks or your
guild or clan. For example, Arena of Valor uses leaderboards to shows rank
vs. friends as well as current progression tier, so players always have their next
objective set.

Regional leaderboards can also be effective, particularly since different

geographies will interact with your game in different patterns. For example,
Asian players typically have a higher frequency rate than Western players do, and
Eastern European players may be more likely to monetize heavily to stay at the
top of the leaderboard.

Other important multiplayer modes include players cooperating towards

a shared goal, teamwork between the members of an organized guild or
clan competing as a unit against other groups, and tournaments - which are
essentially competition-based events. With all these modes, it’s important for
players to understand how they are performing relative to their peers, and that’s
where leaderboards play a critical role. Most games will find that to be effective at
stimulating players’ competitive instincts, one leaderboard isn’t enough. Games
that have the capability to offer multiple leaderboards - for example, showing a
player’s status against their Facebook friends also playing the game, or against
players of similar ability - can use those as a tool to keep players engaged or
stimulate them to get back into the game if they see their scores are being
eclipsed.

Leaderboards that reset also encourage more engagement than static

leaderboards. Prize tables take this a step further by allowing a set of actions
(such as a notification to players or the awarding of prizes) to be performed
on a group of players based on their ranking in the leaderboard when that
leaderboard is reset.

33
 Synchronous multiplayer games, like Brutes.io, pit players against each other in
real-time match-ups. Support for synchronous multiplayer is a key decision in
how the game is built and played, so is generally incorporated during a game’s
development. Asynchronous multiplayer techniques, on the other hand, can
be added to virtually any single-player game to encourage more engagement.
This can be as simple as adding a leaderboard, or more complex, like having
limited-time events with leaderboards used to compare performance. Creating
an asynchronous multiplayer event, with a special prize for the winner, can be a
significant engagement driver compared to a leaderboard alone.

Leaderboard and tournaments best practices

Use leaderboards to create a sense of competition.

Reset leaderboards on regular basis to give players a sense there’s always a new
opportunity to win.

Have prizes based on leaderboard position to create more motivation.

Consider connecting these tournaments to events.

Design your game for synchronous multiplayer for the ultimate in player
engagement and retention - if you’re able to make a significant engineering
commitment.

34 playfab.com
 Guilds (a.k.a. teams, groups, clans,
or alliances)
Adding guilds to your game can be a powerful technique to boost engagement
and monetization among your players. Guilds go by many names in games -
teams, alliances, groups, or clans - but the idea is the same: a collection of players
who have partnered together to help each other out.

Guilds are generally considered most effective in competitive multiplayer games,

but can also work in single player games. They add depth to the interaction
between players, by adding a new level of guild-vs-guild competition, as well as
giving players natural allies when competing against other players.

Some games assign new players to guilds automatically. Other games make
guilds an optional component of gameplay, typically one unlocked only at more
advanced levels. Regardless, to support guilds you need to give players a way
to create a new guild, or apply to join an existing guild. Guilds often have ways
to customize themselves with artwork, names, and custom descriptions. Guilds
generally have a hierarchy of roles; at a minimum, there are members and
leaders, who can accept or reject members, and usually there’s some form of
guild chat functionality.

The real power of guilds comes from guild-vs-guild competition. This can be as
simple as having guild leaderboards, to show which guild is on top, or actual
guild-vs-guild tournaments or live events where guilds compete directly against
each other. Guilds boost engagement, by providing social pressure on guild
members to play to support each other. Guilds also boost monetization, since
wealthier members of guilds may gift items or currency to other members of
the guilds who are less well off. So don’t be afraid to give guilds communication
tools, such as internal chat, or giving a clan leader the ability to send a push
notification directly to teammates.

Guilds best practices

Consider whether your game would benefit from guilds. Generally any game with
multiplayer mechanics will benefit from guilds.

Decide whether to assign new players to a guild automatically, or whether guilds

will be optional.

Most games with guilds have guild leaderboards, comparing guilds on some
metric. You need to decide, however, whether this metric comes from adding up or
averaging player statistics, such as player XP, or whether your guilds will have their
own statistics, based on some form of guild-vs-guild tournament.

35
 Games often support guild banks, where players can transfer items from their
personal inventory to the guild so they can be redistributed to other members. At a
minimum, though, you will want a way for members of the guild to directly transfer
items or virtual currency to other members.

Members of a guild will need a way to chat with each other. You can support this
in-game, with chat or some other mechanism, or you can support an external
messaging service like Discord.

36 playfab.com
 Content is king

Today’s games - particularly mobile F2P games - can amass a large audience
quickly if they resonate with players. But keeping that game at the top of the
charts is a different matter. Using new content strategically is a crucial technique
for keeping games fresh so that players remain engaged. It’s important to note
that new content doesn’t just mean new levels or new game mechanics. It can
also mean new items for purchase, new playable characters, new tournaments,
new bundles, or virtually anything that would encourage a player to come back
and play more. Notes Hyper Hippo’s David Eckert, “People only download so
many apps, to have a game
that is constantly updating
with new features and events
“With games-as-a-service you have to
means a lot to people. It
keeps them engaged with keep players engaged with new content.
your game. It turns them into There cannot be an endgame.”
a loyal fan that sticks around
on a platform where people
are onto the latest and - Pascale Clarysse, CMO, Eden Games
greatest week after week.”

Because content is something players notice and care about, investments

in content can have outsize impact. For example, simply involving players in
your content decisions can become an opportunity for building community.
Bulletproof Arcade’s Andy Wiltshire says of Brutes.io, “For new costumes in
the game, we’ll do a poll and encourage people to vote on social media, and
whichever costume wins is the one that we make.”

Knowing your audience well is a key element of designing and delivering

relevant content - how old are they, where do they live, what do they care
about? Mapping players to affinity groupings can help you with this exercise.
Tiger Byte’s Renee Ya observes that “Social Casino games often times will attract
women in their 50s who live in Southern states in the United States. Depending
on the regularity of their session times, preferred day of the week, and play style,
content should be catered to nudge any one of those metrics by at least 20%.”

Game updates vs. server-side changes

Updates - new challenges, characters or attributes, or other elements of game

play - are a great way to tweak the game and make it feel fresh. Both quantity and
quality are important, and successful game developers often exploit timely events

37
 like holidays for creative inspiration. For example, in September and October
2017 alone, Crossy Road launched a Space update with 9 new figurines followed
by a Halloween update with 3 more figurines. During the same time period,
Temple Run 2 introduced updates including Fall-themed Global Challenges; a
Fall Jungle Map; new coin skins; Halloween-themed characters and skins; and
Halloween-themed Global Challenges, rewards, and villains. App updates are the
most straightforward path to make significant changes to your game, but they
involve real risk and overhead as well. Server-side updates are way more flexible
because you can make changes at any time, with no delay, that affect all players
instantly.

Configuration changes can provide a lot of flexibility for reacting quickly to

make content available (such as new items or bundles for purchase) without
needing to do an update. For example, games that are built on services can
offer temporal items, which exist for a limited time and are automatically
removed from a player’s inventory after expiration, from virtual goods catalogs.
In addition to virtual goods, there’s a wide range of content appropriate for
events to consider, including event-specific stores, monsters, dungeons, items,
consumables, contests, leaderboards, currencies, re-skins, and other art changes.
Creating a narrow window for players to collect limited-edition or event-specific
content creates a scarcity effect that will naturally increase demand. This leads to
improved player engagement and monetization for you - if executed well. But to
make full use of server updates, you need to build your game to support them.

If you have a practice of doing small, frequent updates, then it may be easiest
for you to use those to refresh your content. If, however, your practice is to do
bigger, less frequent updates, or if your developers and your LiveOps team don’t
always have the ability to work hand in glove, then you may find it helpful to
build content updates via configuration changes into your game design. Using
your backend to make these changes means that your operations team can turn
smaller content-driven events on or off, or easily activate/deactivate promotional
inventory, without needing to distract a developer from other tasks.

PlayFab “allows us to get a lot more visibility on what players are engaged with,
what they enjoy and don’t enjoy...we can really get an idea of how much the
high players are engaging and what they value, and can tailor rewards around
that.”

- Phil Larsen (Managing Director, Prettygreat)

38 playfab.com
Pace yourself

Choosing what content to update and what to

leave alone is both an art and a science, and the
right answer for you will of course depend on
your game. The goal is to maintain or increase
player engagement and monetization without
burning players out. Segmenting your players
and targeting different segments with different
updates (if you have the resources) is a best
practice, but timing your content updates
thoughtfully is another good approach if you’re
resource-constrained. Another thing to consider
when it comes to updating content is how often
to make changes. Again, this comes down to the
nature of your game, and experiments in this area
should follow similar principles as those focusing
on what and how much to update.

The conventional wisdom is that for games with light levels of daily player
engagement, such as idle clicker games, significant changes may disorient
players who haven’t been back in a while. On the other hand, games with a
highly engaged community (like shooter games) may have tolerance for major
updates. Start with a strong hypothesis based on your analysis of how players
interact with your game - and always measure the response, as your game may
behave differently than you expect. One important caveat to bear in mind is that
content that significantly changes the nature of game play has the risk of turning
off players - potentially your most valuable players. Consider focusing instead
on rare but cosmetic items like skins, things that show a kind of status but don’t
change balance of play and can either be earned with great effort or bought.

Games with a long development cycle may choose to frontload their content
production as well, but faster-moving studios may not have the ability - or desire
- to plan that far ahead. Many experts recommend investing in no more a few
months of forward-looking content by launch, and maintaining a focus on new
content creation once the game is live. Cem Aslan, CEO of ColdFire and formerly
a developer at flaregames, recommends preparing around 2 to 3 months of
content in advance for new games. “As a small indie studio, you don’t have the
money to do user acquisition for a soft launch. So you just go ahead and publish
the game. With Idle Space, we went live and released the content we had

39
 immediately, to get a first glance at how users are playing the game and if they
like it. And then we tracked engagement, and A/B tested a lot while the game
was already live.”

Renee Ya, Founder at Tiger Byte Studios, suggests working on a rolling-quarterly

basis, and planning for the subsequent quarter at the same time. That way
you can stay about a month ahead of release, while “actively planning new
monetization mechanics and limited time offer sales, sometimes releasing
new ideas within the same week, often times making the monetization events
intertwined with content releases.”

Regardless of how often you do game updates, it’s important to think about your
content refreshes in a strategic manner. Per Ya, “it’s a good rule of thumb that
new game content should come out at least once a month, with regularity that’s
predictable for your players without having to hand over a calendar of events.
And typically doing content releases either at the beginning of the month or
in the middle of the month and aligning it during your player’s paydays, may
encourage them to increase their average spend.” Successful games try hard to
put real customer benefit into each and every game update, while also evolving
and improving their underlying infrastructure based on current needs. Fluffy Fairy
Games’ Oliver Löffler tries “to release a new update each week, and we always try
to get something for the user in there as well as bug fixes and reducing technical
debt.” Similarly, David Eckert of Hyper Hippo notes that “Our client updates focus
on general game features and monetization improvements, but we are always
evolving our Events system through client updates too.”

Content best practices

Make a list of everything in your game that could be considered “content,” and then
decide how you plan on updating that content over time. Types to consider include
in-game maps or levels, in-game items, quests, events, achievements, and playable
characters.

For each type of content, decide how you will update that content. Does it require a
client-update? Or can you update entirely on the server-side?

If the new content involves in-game assets, how will those assets get down to the
client? Client update? Unity AssetBundle? Download via content delivery network
(CDN)?

40 playfab.com
Think about offline mode - if you depend on the backend for updates, make sure
your game still runs (for a while at least) even if it cannot connect to the server. This
requires some form of caching or storing content on the device.

When planning content updates, consider both limited-time content that eventually
goes away, as well as permanent content updates that stick around. Limited time
content is most often connected with an event.

Consider targeting new content to specific player segments, at least initially. The
most common example is offering new content to your VIPs or whales first.

“You look at everything that’s going on in the market - what other games are
doing wrong and avoiding those pitfalls. We’re focusing on using purchases to
accelerate things that people were working towards, not on changing the game
play - skins, costumes, emblems but also power-up skins. Players want to look
different. We also have gold skins - but they’re only something you can grind for,
you can’t buy them. That makes players feel cool.

Don’t do things that would box you in or alienate players - in Brutes.io, things
that you can buy are cosmetic but don’t make you stronger. And of course you
can always just play the game to get ahead. Acceleration of content rewards
is another thing we do. You can get a costume by killing people who have
that costume, but small purchases to accelerate the work people are doing by
grinding work - if it takes 20 kills and you’re halfway there, it’s a small amount
to get there faster, and people will go for it. We’re also being thoughtful about
credit packs - we’re going to have a slider that lets you configure how much you
want to buy so you don’t have to overspend.”

- Andy Wiltshire, Director, Bulletproof Arcade

41
 Localization

You never know where your game will find its audience, so it’s smart to be
prepared to localize your game. Take it from Fluffy Fairy Games’ Oliver Löffler:
“We support more than 20 languages. In the beginning we didn’t localize, but
then a lot of players messaged us that we should translate and were very happy
that we did.”

Localization will do more than make your players happy - it also encourages them
to spend. Some estimates are that up to 50% or more of online users will only buy
when presented offers in their native language. Localizing to English, Chinese,
Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, Russian, French and German
gets you up to 80% of the online population, vs. just 25% for native English
speakers.

Localizing in a live game is especially challenging, because the content is

continuously changing. This is especially true for your in-game events. It’s one
thing when the only thing you need to localize is your game UI and tutorial. You
can localize that once, using an outsourced vendor, and not worry about it again.
But when you are running continuous A/B tests, or launching new events every
week, you will have a continuous stream of content that requires localization.

This calls for storing as much of your in-game text on the server as possible,
where it can be easily localized and changed. Don’t forget that internationalizing
a game goes beyond language; time/date formats, fonts, currency formats, text
direction, and images with text on overlay should all be tailored to the player’s
location and should be taken care of at the code level. So, the earlier you plan for
localization, the better your game will perform - and the less technical debt you
will amass.

Localization best practices

Store all of your in-game text on the server, where it can be easily changed.

Pick the initial target language from the game client, but let the player override their
choice of language.

Give your localization team or contractor direct access to your string tables, so they
can edit the text directly and ideally see the results in your game right away.

Build a “refresh” button into your game, that forces the game to download and
display the latest localized text. This allows your localization team to tweak text in-
game and see the effects immediately.

42 playfab.com
Make sure all player communications can be localized - not just in-game text, but
also push notifications, emails, and the like.

When localizing your game, don’t forget that your game also needs to fit into the
regional culture, so research your launch regions to avoid finding yourself in an
unfortunate situation. Touchpoints like the use of alcohol, food, symbols, hand
gestures or affection displays are all little things that have the potential to offend.

43
 Running experiments

Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman has a great quote about making

movies: “Nobody knows anything...not one person in the entire motion picture
field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if
you’re lucky, an educated one.” It used to be that making games was similar - you
had to guess what your audience would like, spend months or years building
to this vision, and then launch and hope for the best, with little room to course-
correct if you got things wrong. If you’ve read this far, you know that it doesn’t
have to be that way anymore. But how, exactly, do you figure out what is and isn’t
working about your game, and adapt it over time to build on the elements of the
game that are working and de-emphasize those that aren’t?

Test early and often

Many games run into a chicken-and-egg problem early in their development

cycle: they want to test their biggest assumptions before they have really
committed, but don’t have enough players to reach statistical significance. So,
they feel stuck. However, while split testing is an important technique, it’s not
the only tool in your toolkit. In fact, you can get lots of useful information from
“scrappy” testing, and your inherent creativity as a game developer can be a
significant asset. For example, you can get valuable data on the appeal of a
game’s concept and basic mechanics from running surveys or focus groups
very early on, before you even have a real product. You can also test your
design concepts before you need to put them into your game - for example,
by measuring click-through rates on ads you buy that are identical other than
showing different art styles. Sebastian Knopp notes that “successful games test
everything. Game developers should always consider this before building things,
and ask themselves if there is a test they could run to decide whether to build it
or not.”

Split testing

Split testing, or splitting your users into two (A/B) or more (multivariate) groups
and measuring which variant has the best performance, is often considered the
“gold standard” when it comes to running experiments, because you can get
statistically significant results that paint a clear picture. If you have zillions of
players, you can run even a subtle A/B or multivariate test for a reasonable period
of time (typically at least a week, to measure fluctuations between weekend and
weekday players) and measure the effect in a statistically significant manner.
But if you don’t, because you’ve just launched or your game hasn’t yet become
massively popular, then you’ll need to measure a big effect in order to be able to

44 playfab.com
be certain that it’s real and not just random fluctuation. The same goes for how
many tests you can run simultaneously - unless you have enough users to be able
to separate them out completely, you’re stuck running tests in series rather than
parallel (and even if you do have tons of players, remember that you can only
match players from the same bucket for multiplayer experiences).

Your goal with testing should be to run as many tests as possible. Since you never
know in advance whether a test will produce an actual signal, let alone a positive
one, the more tests you run, the more chances you have for success - it’s just
math. ColdFire makes it a practice to run many sorts of tests - everything from the
look and feel of a game to the game mechanics, tutorials and stores. “Recently,
we did a successful gameplay A/B test: before you get to a boss you have to kill
some kind of minions - so we reduced that to see if there was a difference in day1
retention,” says Cem Aslan. “It was around 7 percent points better, so we went
ahead and deployed the change. As it turned out, getting to the boss earlier
was more fun for the players than spending so much time on the level minions,
so we just gave the players what they wanted.” Establishing a test-and-learn
mindset within an organization is not a trivial endeavor. Sebastian Knopp often
sees “teams that are willing to test things in theory but when it comes to building
them they get stuck in endless discussions...Failed experiments are an important
part of the process to learn, especially for the team running the experiment. The
companies that learn fastest, usually win.”

Monitoring player behavior and feedback

It’s possible to treat every change you make to your game as a kind of experiment
if you are thoughtful about the approach. If you are constantly monitoring
user feedback on channels like Discord, Facebook, and email, you can use the
feedback from these channels - carefully! - to gauge player reaction to changes
you make. This approach is less scientific, and has the risk of giving your most
vocal players too much influence, but can be a good way to go, particularly early
on in your game’s lifecycle (i.e. soft or limited launch) when you have little by way
of player data and few resources. You’ll want to augment this stream of data with
careful analysis of your player behavior, which you should be tracking closely in
your analytics toolset. What happens to your key engagement and retention stats
after a change? How does this vary by segment, for example players who make a
purchase vs. those who do not?

Another way to gather player feedback is with in-game polls. These are especially
helpful to evaluate qualitative factors that are not easily measured with analytics.

45
 The best time to pop up a poll question is between levels, or at the end of a
game. Avoid asking more than one question at a time, though - more than a few
seconds and you may interrupt the player’s flow.

Testing best practices

Test your gameplay early in your lifecycle. It’s harder to run tests on core gameplay
once your game has launched and players have strong expectations for how the
game behaves.

You can also use limited-time events to test changes to gameplay - players are much
more tolerant of gameplay changes when they’re called out as events.

Tests are most effective when you have a clear success metric to gauge the impact
of the test. That’s why messaging and promotions are especially easy to test,
because you can easily compare effectiveness.

Consider limiting your testing to new players, to avoid confusing existing players.

Test more qualitative factors by asking questions to players with in-game polls.

46 playfab.com
 Community

A strong community can act as a force multiplier for your game. Dedicated fans
can help promote your game, becoming a valuable marketing channel, and
generate useful content. For some games, that means actually building out
aspects of the game, enriching the experience for many players and helping
extend its longevity. For games where that’s less practical, it’s still very possible to
benefit from community engagement. Says Bulletproof Arcade’s Andy Wiltshire,
“User generated content is not something that’s particularly easy for us to do in
Brutes.io as it’s too hard for users to build. In fact, even a profile picture can be
challenging because you need to moderate them. But we still get the community
involved - for new costumes in the game, we’ll do a poll and encourage people
to vote on social media, and whichever costume wins is the one that we make.
The greatest thing for us community-wise has been having the social buttons
on the site - if you click them you get rewarded with a new emblem.” For
Coldfire’s Cem Aslan, community is a strategic investment, with Discord the most
relevant channel for chatting with players. “Even as a small studio, we prioritized
community early on because players will appreciate it if you talk to them and
respond fast. Even if you can’t fix things immediately, they will honor if you make
the effort and answer them.”

One tried-and-true way to manage a community is with a set of forums. Consider

integrating the forums with your game, so players login with the same account.
PlayFab allows you to add the Innervate forums solution from the PlayFab
marketplace into your title. This lets you correlate forum behavior with game
behavior to identify your most valuable players. In addition, community managers
need a way to communicate back to players. Some options here include a
“message of the day” when players login, or a regular email newsletter.

Community best practices

Have a way to let your players communicate with each other. Forums are the most
popular - this can be Discord, Innervate, or any other mechanism that works for you.

Consider a “message of the day” feature - this is a great way for your community
managers to present news and updates to your players when they login.

47
 Everything in moderation

Moderation - both within your game and in channels devoted to it on Discord,

Facebook, and the like - is key for maintaining a healthy community. Trolls
happen, and you need to be ready for them, or run the risk of them poisoning
your game for everyone else. Find a strategy that works, and keep at it - for Andy
Wiltsire, that’s generally “to kill them with kindness - what they want is to get a
reaction; if you don’t give them one they eventually just move on.” Within your
game, you need to be able to ban toxic players before they scare too many
others away through bad behavior. In your community channels, it’s important
to make the effort to stay abreast of the conversation and even intervene when
needed (or co-opt members of your community to do so on your behalf). The
Brutes.io team figured out how to do this without expending more resources than
they could afford. Andy Wiltshire keeps an eye out “for people who are naturally
helpful - for example by directing people to different channels on the server. A
bunch of guys have basically helped moderate, which has been really helpful.”

Moderation best practices

Figure out a strategy for how and when you will ban players and then be consistent.
Also publish your rules so the community doesn’t feel blindsided.

Keep an eye out for problematic language or behavior. Commercial tools like
Community Sift can be helpful here.

48 playfab.com
 Monetization

Making monetization work is one of the biggest challenges of games. The three
most common paths to monetization are charging players to download a game,
advertising, and in-game purchases (often referred to as IAP). These are not
necessarily mutually exclusive, but you have to be careful. Many AAA games have
come under fire recently for charging $60 for the game, and then more money
later for DLC (downloadable content) or “loot boxes”.

Free-to-play vs. paid

While some games are able to charge for downloads, many find the challenge of
getting potential players excited enough to purchase a game without having had
a chance to experience it caps their potential revenues too drastically. Offering
a free trial for a premium game used to be a very popular model, but has lost
favor. That said, you can have a game be free-to-play up to, say, level 10, then
charge money via IAP to keep going. However, bear in mind that with a premium
game, it’s challenging to capture revenue beyond the price of the game itself,
despite potential player willingness to pay. A free game with IAP allows players to
spend whatever they want to spend, from zero up to thousands of dollars. While
there will probably always be AAA games that can command a high price for
download, selling a game outright rather than making it available for free is no
longer the typical path for live games, so we won’t focus on it here.

Advertising: The rewards are endless

For free-to-play games, advertising is often an important revenue stream, since

at the end of the day the vast majority of players never make a purchase. In the
world of games, one of the most popular and successful forms of advertising is
“rewarded video” - a short (and sometimes playable) video, generally promoting
a different game, that the player can choose to watch in exchange for an incentive
within the structure of the game being played currently. There’s understandable
fear amongst game developers that rewarded videos featuring games that would
appeal to the player can distract that player from their current session or from
coming back in the future. The opportunity cost is potentially high, particularly
for the most valuable players who are making real-money purchases. However, it
doesn’t have to be that way. Notes Dimitar Draganov, Senior Product Manager of
flaregames, “a well-designed and integrated into the core loop rewarded video
outperforms every other ad inventory by a wide margin; rewarded videos have
always been the biggest revenue driver across all the games I’ve worked on and
they are rarely filled with anything but game ads.” If you view rewarded ads as

49
 part of the core game loop, you’ll want to optimize the player ad experience
along with the rest of your game. That means you’ll need to monitor player
engagement with these ad units closely, so you can track and optimize the
rewards you offer to players who engage.

Other important ad formats include banners (ads that run across the top or
bottom of the screen, similar to what you might see on non-game websites),
interstitials (ads that run while the game pauses briefly, for example between
levels), and offer walls (a page that offers users rewards or incentives for real-
money purchase or in exchange for completing a specific task). With all forms
of advertising, remember that testing and segmentation are your friends.
Fundamentally, you want to make sure that your monetization efforts aren’t at
cross-purposes with your strategy for fostering player engagement and retention.
Many developers look to segmentation for this and choose not to show ads to
every segment, for example choosing to limit ads to those who do not make real-
money purchases.

50 playfab.com
However, execution really matters here. Draganov of flaregames claims that
“one of the surprising facts about well-integrated video rewarded ads is that
they don’t ruin the experience for payers and they don’t drive players out of the
game, on the contrary - we’ve seen consistently across many games and types of
implementation that rewarded ads can improve retention, engagement and from
there even IAP spending / LTV of both payers and non-payers. Therefore rather
than segmenting, I would advise developers to focus their efforts on building a
sophisticated system of rewarded ads that anticipates the right moment and the
right reward to offer.” Regardless of which path you take, you’ll need to test your
way into optimizing it. So make sure you have the ability to play around with who
sees your ads, and then ready, set...go test.

Once you’ve decided to run ads of any type, you will need to figure out how
to optimize them to maximize your revenues. The practice of attempting to
maximize revenues by showing the right ad to the right person at the right time
is often referred to as “ad mediation.” Joining an ad network is a quick-and-dirty
way to do a certain amount of optimization and can be a real revenue boost, but
it has significant limitations, particularly if you have more than one game to offer.
After all, showing people a message about a relevant event that’s going live in
your game or introducing them to another game in your stable may not give
you guaranteed revenue like showing an ad served by an external ad network,
but the expected value per impression has the potential to be much higher -
particularly if you target this information only to paying players. For non-paying
players, you’re likely better off generating revenue through a paying ad. Ideally,
your optimization process will be based an on-the-fly calculation of the value
per impression for an in-house-ad versus an external ad network for a given
player, so you can then decide what to show: house ad, event promotion or cross
promotion, or ad network placement.

Ad mediation best practices

Integrate rewarded video ads into your game.

Test your rewards - don’t just build it once and assume it’s going to be effective
for all players. In fact, the same player may be motivated by different rewards at
different stages of his growth. By definition, a good reward is whatever the player
most wants at that moment, and what that is will change.

51
 When integrating paid ad networks, don’t just pick a single network. Different
networks perform differently for different regions and types of players. To maximize
your revenue, you will likely need several ad networks.

Don’t be afraid to negotiate with the ad networks. If you have enough players and
inventory, they will cut you special deals and even guarantee revenue - if you are
willing to give them special rights like first crack at your players.

In-app purchases: In for a penny...

Adding in-app purchases to your game adds a significant degree of complexity,

but the returns can be well worth the effort. Done right, in-game purchases can
drive a significantly higher level of engagement as your players start to feel more
invested in the game, as well as incremental revenue. This multiplier effect can
help you ensure that you retain your players for longer and increase their lifetime
value across multiple dimensions. It’s critical to measure and track your player
LTV (lifetime value) closely if you want to optimize your stores to maximize your
ability to monetize your players, but that’s not the only reason. If you don’t know
how much a player is making, you don’t know what kinds of players you want to
attract, or how much doing so is worth to you - which means you’re flying blind
on user acquisition as well.

However, setting up your game properly for purchasing takes a lot of

forethought. Because inventory is often sold in bundles, which are often then
segmented, even a simple store can have hundreds of SKUs, each with slight
variations. After all, targeted offers aimed at specific segments of players is a key
part of a good IAP strategy. However, uploading and managing these can be a
lot for a LiveOps team to handle, so one trick used by experienced studios is to
use backend tools to streamline and automate uploading content, displaying
it by segment, and testing offers. But the work doesn’t stop there; just getting
your store optimized can take a good amount of iteration, and if you don’t test
different configurations - everything from fonts to layout to color schemes - you’re
almost certainly leaving money on the table. Of course if you really want to throw
money away, you can simply fail to do server-side receipt validation for in-app
purchases, and watch the fraud pile up - and the game get ruined for your legit
customers.

52 playfab.com
Of course, monetization is not a substitute for user acquisition and retention. If
you take your eye off the ball on those activities, ultimately your monetization will
also suffer as your player base drops.

When Machine Zone’s Game of War - Fire Age slowed down user acquisition, the game soon
slipped out of the top 10 grossing games and dropped precipitously. (Source: App Annie)

53
 IAP best practices

Use server-side receipt validation to prevent fraud (e.g. Apple or Google receipts).
This ensures that the money you think you are making is in fact being made.

Your players are different, so don’t treat them all the same. Different players
may want to buy different items. Consider having multiple stores, with different
combinations of items for sale depending on the player.

When putting items in your store, don’t just sell single items, also sell bundles of
items. Bundles generate more revenue per transaction, and players will feel they are
getting a better deal - a win-win.

Consider running special sales events as part of your events. Common ones include
a buy-one-get-one-free promotion, limited time discounts, and even limited-time
offers for rare items.

You can target players with a one-time exploding offer that will never be repeated
- often at the end of a level. A typical offer might be a valuable bundle for a special
discounted price.

Stores are great opportunities for A/B testing. Try mixing up the order of items in the
store - the same item will sell differently depending on where it is in the store.

Take advantage of subscription functionality in the iOS and Android stores, which is
an effective way to get players in the habit of becoming a repeat purchaser.

Adding player-to-player gifting can be a big revenue boost, since wealthier players
may buy items to give to friends or guild members, especially when coupled with
multiplayer modes like cooperate playing.

Where your store supports it, offer special coupons that players can give to friends
or share via social media. That can not only drive sales but also encourage viral
growth. Especially when the player who offers the item also gets a reward if the
coupon is used.

Consider marketing IAP differently based on region. For example, Western

Europeans may favor cosmetic appearance items while North American players
prefer boosts that make them progress faster. Segmenting by user location will
provide another lens on their play style and triggers.

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First-time purchases: Getting off to a good start

Getting a player to make an early purchase significantly increases your chances

of getting that player to make future purchases, especially if that initial purchase
helps the player advance enough in the game to get really committed. The
challenge is the chicken-and-egg problem of getting players to open their
wallets before they’re fully invested in the game. Here, pricing and timing are key,
along with communication. A limited-time, highly compelling offer is a successful
paradigm for many games - particularly if it is communicated clearly via a pop-up
message with a clear call to action and timer. The advantage of this approach is
that it creates a strong incentive for a player to make that critical first purchase,
with a well-priced bundle that is likely to spur engagement, while also reducing
the risk of cannibalization since players who are already hooked aren’t eligible.

Notes Draganov of flaregames, “well planned and executed starter bundles

have been known to improve first time conversion by 80-200%.” Getting it right
is an optimization problem as well. Per Draganov, “even miniscule changes (e.g.
change of main art or slightly bigger discount / value added to the offer) in such
offers can bring significant uplifts, so AB-testing such offers is key.” With IAP,
“the goal is to offer players what they need and when they need it. This requires
design of features to be done in a specific way to make the needs and provided
solutions obvious and straightforward...everything takes iteration, so analyzing
how well a promotion converts new or reconverts old users is key to improving
your operations’ effectiveness over time.”

55
 First-time bundle best practices

Consider having a special “starter bundle” for first-time players who have never paid
before. Once a player has opened their wallet for a game, they are much more likely
to do so again.

Since the goal of the first-time bundle is to encourage players to spend, you can test
nearly everything about the offer to determine which is most effective at converting
players to buy it.

When designing your first-time bundle, look at which items new players buy most
often and include those at an attractive price. The goal is to provide overwhelming
value for your new players.

Game economy: The daily grind

One challenge games face in working through their economy is how to

differentiate between what can be bought vs. earned. Since the vast majority of
players never make a purchase, games risk alienating their base of players if they
make it too difficult to progress without purchases. Slogging it out to progress
through a game without making purchases - often referred to as “grinding” - is
a highly engaged player behavior that should be considered meritorious. As
Draganov puts it, “great live-games have both non-paying and paying users in
lower, mid- and high-end of the leaderboards. As long as you allow players to
trade time or money for progress there will always be both types of players -
those who pay and those who grind their way through.”

“We have different placements. A start-up package that’s shown in the

beginning of the game, and others that you only unlock later in the game. We
also have special offers that are targeted to special events. We try to give out
things that you can’t buy in the shops to avoid cannibalization.”

“Each player should play the game, we want to make the game play good for all
players, not only whales. But whales have the opportunity to buy boosts which
can accelerate their progress. We don’t want to make a game that’s only pay-to-
win. You can get all the content by playing but it takes longer. Really engaged
players can get through most of the content in 2-4 weeks but there’s no real end
to the game.”

- Oliver Löffler, Co-Founder and CTO Fluffy Fairy Games

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Game economy best practices

Most games support at least two virtual currencies: a “soft” currency that can be
earned in-game through play, and a “hard” currency that can be bought. Having
dual currencies gives you more control over your economy, since you can determine
which items can be bought.

Different cultures have different attitudes toward “pay to win”, or letting players
purchase directly the most powerful items in the game. Generally speaking, pay to
win is accepted in Asia, but frowned upon in the west.

Get around pay-to-win concerns by selling items that speed up the player’s growth
in the game, or that let the player accumulate currency more quickly. This sort of
indirect effect is more widely accepted.

It’s often easier to monetize resources than an energy bar, since the consumption of
resources is more abstract.

Once players buy or earn an item, they develop a level of attachment to the item, so
take it away at your own risk.

It is always easier to start with a high price and lower it than to raise the price on an
item. Anchoring an item as valuable with a high price can make discounting later
feel like a great value. Providing a comparison point for an item for sale can similarly
help get a player over the hump to decide to purchase.

Segment your catalog and promote different items as players progress in the game.
The player lifecycle - discovery, anticipation, and ultimately true engagement -
means different things are important at different times.

Be wary of selling items that encourage or allow paying players to prey on non-
paying ones, as this can have a negative ramification on your game play.

VIPs: Having a whale of a time

How much your whales spend, and what you should do with them to keep them
engaged, will depend on your game. A rule of thumb is to watch the top 20% of
spenders closely, but obsess over the top 5%, giving them a disproportionate
amount of your attention and creativity. It’s worth the time investment to design
and sell pricey but unique experiences that make this group feel catered to - from
special packages that are coordinated to enhance the experience of a limited
time event, to custom skins or other special gifts not available to the general

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 population, to early access to content not yet released broadly. As always, test
to see what resonates and keeps these very special players engaged, with an
eye towards encouraging them to keep buying at the high end. If you see their
engagement start to wane and purchase behavior start to slow, Dimitar Draganov
suggests that “going back to one-time offers of lower price and great value is
always a safe bet to re-engage them.”

But obsessing over your top customers doesn’t necessarily mean squeezing them
too hard, or ignoring the rest of your customers, as Ken Go, Founder of Deca
Games, notes. “Many developers think that squeezing more money out of your
top spenders is the best way to maintain a game longer. In the very short term
this will work, but if you are selling content that affects competition then you will
increase churn and shorten the lifespan of the game by creating a large power
gap between spender segments. Invest in game designs that scale without
large inflation in power.” Instead, Go recommends investing “in rubber-banded
designs that pit equally powered players against each other instead of having
the strong only prey on the weak. Having a broader spending base that is paying
less is much more sustainable than focusing only on ‘whales.’”

VIP player best practices

Design your store so you can offer different items and bundles to your biggest
spenders, since by definition they want to spend more money than other players.

Consider ways to make your biggest spenders feel special. These can include
special offers, special events, or first dibs on new content.

Find ways to let your big spenders spend money without ruining your game
balance. Cosmetic items and rare items are good examples.

A great way to encourage your whales is spend is through events. Design an

event that gives out a very rare, very exclusive item to, say, the first 50 players who
finish the event. Then provide a way for players to spend money to save time and
complete the event sooner.

Some games even set up special VIP player teams, designed to engage with their
biggest spenders, and provide them with special tools to monitor and chat with
their VIP players.

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 Acquiring and maintaining your players

Accruing and maintaining players is critical path for your game’s success,
regardless of how you monetize. In this section, we’ll deep-dive into best
practices for acquiring - and keeping - players that have a high degree of
engagement with your game.

Player acquisition

Acquiring new players is a fundamental challenge faced by all developers, for

obvious reasons. The more players you have playing your game, the greater your
game’s success, and the more money you will make. On the other hand, not all
players are created equal, and there are plenty of examples of very successful
games with a relatively small but highly-engaged player base, such as Eve Online.
So it’s not enough to just look at adding more players…you need to make sure
the players you add stick around as well! That’s why it’s so important to measure
both acquisition and retention together for each of your various acquisition
channels.

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 Let’s take a closer look at each of the various acquisition channels you should
consider:

Organic (“word of mouth”) acquisition. All games should aspire to having

great organic acquisition, because that means your game is so great that players
are raving about it to their friends and acquaintances without an assist from you.
However, to a large degree true organic acquisition is out of a game developer’s
control. Making a great game certainly helps, as does hitting the zeitgeist at
precisely the right moment, but in general this is not really a lever in your control.

Social installs are player installs that are driven by receiving an invitation from a
friend, or seeing a post on social media. This is an effective channel, because a
player who accepts an invite from a friend is much more likely to engage with the
game than a player who simply clicks on an ad. Your success will depend on making
it easy for players to invite friends, and a clear explanation of the benefits of inviting
them. Consider incentivizing both parties - the inviter and the invitation recipient - to
drive adoption. While this increases the cost, it’s possible to test and learn how to
make this an efficient channel, with the key metrics to track being invites sent per
user, conversion rate for invitations, and the viral coefficient (the product of invites
per user and the conversion rate).

User-generated content can be an excellent method of user acquisition, though

one that’s hard to control independently. Fostering an active player community
helps pull in new players and creates a soft landing for newbies looking to get a
comfortable foothold, so it’s worth monitoring your Discord channel and Facebook
page to keep things on track. If your game mechanics support user-generated
internal content - creating new levels or player skins - this can be a very effective
tool for boosting engagement as well.

Store discovery is a tool to help potential players discover your game in a

marketplace such as Steam, App Store, or Google Play. There are several things you
can do to boost your distribution through each of the various stores, starting with
optimizing how your game is presented in the store. Again, testing is key. Trying out
different game artwork, screenshots, and description text are relatively fast-twitch
experiments that can have a big impact on what percentage of players download
your game.

Landing on app store top 10 lists can give your game a sustained advantage; once
you make a top-10 list, you get a boost from the many players who decide which
games to try out by looking at the lists. However, it’s hard - and often extremely
expensive - to get there, especially through concentrated ad buys. Some developers
try to game the system by engaging in questionable behavior, such as hiring bot-
farms to download their game, or by spending their own money in-game to buy
items, but these are certainly not best practices.

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Being promoted as an app store editor’s choice, by Apple for example, can lead
to millions of new downloads. But betting on this as a strategy can force you to take
your eye off the ball in terms of developing your game, so proceed with caution.
Stores will often insist you support custom one-off features for their platforms that
don’t actually make your game better, or ask for exclusivity periods that ultimately
hurt your distribution on other channels.

Reactivating a lapsed customer by convincing a player who quit (“churned out

of”) your game to reinstall it can be an effective acquisition tool, since these players
are already familiar with your game and know what they’re getting into. For this to
work, you’ll need a mechanism to message your previous players - typically push
notifications or email - and often some sort of incentive offer the player values, such
as 1,000 free gold coins for accepting the offer, which can be offered through the
message.

Cross marketing is a form of advertising limited to the universe of games you or

your publisher control. This is a valuable method since it lets you amortize your
cost of acquisition (CAC) across multiple games and thus justify a higher CAC
than you can otherwise rationalize. Many developers overlook this, though, and
launch games with no ways to cross promote other games in their catalog. You
can also partner with other developers and agree to cross promote games to each
other - that can be an inexpensive way to acquire new players without resorting to
expensive ad buys.

Influencer marketing is promotion via celebrity gamers who record themselves

playing your game and talking about it. If you’re able to get influencers interested
in your game and sharing their exploits on Twitch, Mixer or YouTube, this is a great
way to get new players excited about your game and also to communicate tweaks
and changes to people who haven’t experienced your game recently. Mainly,
however, this is a pay-to-play set up and it’s not cheap; big influencers can charge
$50-100,000 or more to promote your game - and the ROI is not always easy to
calculate. If you are interested in going this route, consider using a special code or
offer so you can tie the install back to the influencer.

Paid Acquisition, where a player installs your game after seeing a paid ad for it,
is certainly popular (for example, the bulk of rewarded video ads in games are
for other games), but your mileage can vary significantly here so you’ll need to
sharpen your pencils if you want to go this route. Regardless of whether you pay
by impression (CPI), or per install (PPI); run ads on search sites (Google), social
networks (Facebook), or ad networks, the math is the same. If your cost-per-acquired
player (CPA) is less than your lifetime value of a player (LTV) then you’re ultimately
making money. If your CPA > LTV then you’re losing money. Your goal is to pick the
channels that maximize your ROI (LTV/CPA). Not all channels are equal, and neither
are all players acquired; the cheapest CPA is not necessarily the best.

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 Acquisition best practices

For every new player who installs your game, try to figure out how that player
discovered your game. This may require using an attribution vendor for PC or
mobile games.

For each channel, try to calculate your CPA and LTV to determine which channels are
most profitable for you - then steer your spending toward those channels.

Include viral mechanisms in your game. Make it easy for players to promote your
game on social media and give players tools to invite their friends; encourage
players to stream their gameplay.

Tune your game’s listing in app stores. Try different artwork, screenshots, and
descriptive text. Localize your app store listing for different countries, even if your
game itself is not localized.

Run periodic re-activation campaigns to try and attract lapsed players who have quit
playing for more than 30 days.

Build a cross-marketing page into all your games. Choose which games to target to
each player based on the player’s segment.

Experiment with paid-acquisition channels - but don’t commit too much of your
budget until you’ve seen what works and doesn’t work.

Look for ways to scale your distribution efforts efficiently, even if it cuts into revenues
slightly. For example, consider outsourcing your distribution to third-party Android
stores; as Pascal Clarysse notes, “the billing, updating and maintenance of 200+
stores is too big of a headache for smaller game developers. Better outsource
things like this and give away a couple of percent here and there if it saves time.”

Use your YouTube channels to show your updates, leaderboard, and social
challenge winners, as well as a promotional video for your game.

Respond to user feedback, and feature the best comments in your promotional
messages.

Experiment to optimize your landing page content when doing search engine and
app store optimization, as this can have a dramatic impact on conversion.

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 Retention

Retention is the measurement of how many players come back to your game. The
most common measurements are 1, 7, and 30 day retention figures, measured as
what % of your players who play your game on day “0” play the game on day 1, 7,
and 30. You can also differentiate between new player retention (limited only to
your new players on day 0) and all players. Of these two, new player retention is
probably the more important.

Retention is an important metric, because it’s the closest proxy for measuring
“fun.” If your game is extremely fun, and players love playing it, then your
retention will naturally be high. If your game is boring, and players never come
back, retention will be low. Therefore, the best way to boost retention is to simply
focus on improving the core game experience.

But you don’t need to stop there. Ensure that your game has a satisfactory meta-
game, providing reasons for players to come back again and again. Having a
fun core game loop may be enough to boost day 1 retention, but to have a high
day 30 retention there needs to be a longer-term goal that players are working
toward.

Mechanisms to boost retention can include:

Events. Probably the best single thing you can do to boost retention is regular
events that are creative and original and encourage players to come back.

Game mechanics. “Daily rewards” and other mechanics are game systems explicitly
designed to boost retention, such as giving a player a reward for every day they
come back and play your game in a row. This is a bit artificial, since you’re essentially
paying your player to come back each day, instead of relying on them to come back
on their own because the game is fun. The trick with mechanics like this is to present
it in such a way that it feels natural and part of the game experience, and not some
artificial mechanic bolted on the side, purely to drive a KPI.

Push notifications. The ability to message your player with a reminder or pop-
up on a mobile device is highly valuable and creates an additional level of
immediacy for mobile games compared to what PC or console games can achieve.
However, these require a ton of testing to get right - a timely, authentic and helpful
communication will be welcomed by a player, whereas a generic marketing
message will be perceived as annoying. “Your castle is done building”, “Your town
is being attacked”, or “There’s a new Valentine’s Day event starting now” are all
messages players may appreciate. On the other hand, “Your farm misses you” is not
providing value to the player.

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 Content updates. As already discussed, continuously updating content is another
way to keep your game fresh and keep players coming back.

Retention best practices

Understand your 1, 7, and 30 day new player retention rates. Track these rates over
time, and compare how changes to the game affect retention for new players.

Run periodic events, and promote them in your game so players know they are
coming.

Build in mechanics like “daily rewards” to encourage players to come back day after
day.

Ensure you have a channel to message your players. Consider using client-side push
notifications instead of server-side push notifications for better control over when
the messages get sent.

Analyze your onboarding funnel and pay specific attention to progress through your
tutorial. You have only one chance to make a good impression.

Focus on optimal session length - an initial session should ideally be long enough
to hook the player, but longer-term you want to balance short session length, so
that the user can play many times a day, with the need to avoid player burnout from
being required to login too often.

Key retention techniques with which to experiment include personalization and

rewards (even if they fail). Failing forward is always better. Look for ways to give
advantages to power users if they help new users, which is a great way to create a
sense of bonding while giving a hand to newbies.

Develop player personas, and make sure you have something for each one. Typical
personas include “achievers,” “socializers,” “explorers,” and “killers.”

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 Engagement

Engagement is a measurement of how often players play your game, and needs
to be considered alongside retention. There’s a big difference between a player
who plays your game for 2 hours on day 1, and a player who plays your game for
5 minutes on day 1, even though both players count the same on your retention
report.

Generally speaking, engagement is good. The more time players spend playing
your game, the more fun they are presumably having, and the more opportunities
you have to eventually monetize them. Some companies, like Riot, are famous for
only measuring engagement, and consider it their most important KPI.

You can measure engagement in a few different ways. For a game with long
session lengths, hours of gameplay is probably the right metric. For a mobile
game with lots of short sessions, number of sessions may be more useful.

In any case, mechanisms to boost engagement all come down to giving the player
reasons to come back to your game. Similar to retention, these can include:

Making the game fun. This is clearly important, but beyond the scope of this
document.

Game systems to encourage engagement. One of the reasons idle games and city
builders have been so successful on mobile is that they have built-in mechanics that
encourage players to come back. “Your castle upgrade is finished” or “New mine
level unlocked” both encourage the player to come back to the game.

Achievements. Rewarding players for specific actions in the game (e.g., finishing
a certain difficult level without dying once) can provide even jaded players with
reasons to go back and re-engage with the game again. With LiveOps, you can keep
adding new achievements over time to give players reasons to come back, or add
limited time achievements during certain live events.

Multiplayer mechanics. Multiplayer games also have numerous opportunities to

encourage replay, including challenges or tournaments. “Your city is being attacked”,
“You’ve been challenged to a new match” or a notification that your guild mate is
engaging in a battle with a boss are all reasons for a player to come back.

Limited time events. These are purpose-built to boost engagement. If the player
has just 3 days to complete limited time content and earn a rare item, they will be
encouraged to play practically nonstop during the event.

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 Engagement best practices

Find reasons to remind your player, from time to time, to come back to your game -
but not so often that the player feels nagged, or inspired to turn off notifications.

Implement game systems that encourage engagement.

Add an achievement system to reward specific meta-game accomplishments, or

quests.

Run one-off events with limited time durations to encourage high engagement
during those events - but balance these with less-intensive events to avoid burning
out your players.

Introduce complexity layer by layer to keep more experienced players on their toes
without overwhelming new ones. Always monitor when users churn so you can
tweak appropriately.

Listen to your community - polling is a great technique.

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 Support

Customer support is a key plank in your LiveOps platform. The first, and most
critical need of your support team is to ensure that your game is working as
intended, and to make it right when things break. To do this well, this team
needs the right tools, so they can communicate with players who reach out
with issues, investigate problems and take appropriate corrective actions by
making adjustments to a player’s profile (e.g. granting virtual currency or items
as consolations to players). Your support team is also your front line with players,
and a rich source of information on what is and is not working in your game.

Your support team is also your front line with players, and a rich source of
information on what is and is not working in your game. It’s important to treat
support as a communication channel rather than a cost center, particularly
because your paying players typically have the most questions and provide
the most feedback; giving them exceptional support encourages them to keep
spending. You should also have a feedback loop between your agents and
other departments where problems encountered by players are tracked and
addressed.

Customer support best practices

Set up a ticketing system so players can submit problems, ideally from inside the
game, and CS reps can answer them.

Give your CS reps a way to look up a player’s profile, and fix any problems with it,
such as restoring items to inventory, granting virtual currency, and even manually
editing a save game file.

If you have a ban system, ensure your CS reps can reverse or extend bans.

Your CS reps need a way to message players - both replying to tickets, but in some
cases sending a bulk message to all players to announce an outage or issue.

If a player is having a persistent crash, it’s useful to be able to have them upload a
crash log that can be passed along to engineering to investigate.

Track support KPIs, including tickets opened and closed, and disseminate them to
your team. Changes in CS contact or resolution rates can be a leading indicator of
larger issues.

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 Living on the plateau

“Games can last for decades as a service if you know how to operate them
properly and invest in scalable solutions. Some great scalable solutions are
automation and tools. Try to automate all the things that don’t matter and
build tools for all the things that do. They not only reduce costs and improve
efficiency, but they reduce pressure and allow the team to concentrate on the
most important parts of the service.”

- Ken Go, Founder, Deca Games

It used to be that once a game stopped growing, rapid decay was imminent,
and the overhead of maintaining the game would soon outweigh the revenues
it brought in. However, this is evolving as well for live games. These days, savvy
game marketers know that there’s often still plenty of juice left in a game that
has hit a plateau in user growth, and have developed techniques to squeeze it
out efficiently. After all, you’ve spent resources getting to this point, and have
developed significant assets - while you may decide it’s time to move some of
your developers onto the next project, there’s no need to throw out the baby with
the bathwater.

“As games plateau, developers need to put greater focus on retaining their
high value players with a high quality service while right-sizing their teams and
scrutinizing if you have the right team for the job,” observes Ken Go, Founder of
Deca Games. “When thinking about right-sizing and resourcing for games that
aren’t growing anymore, you have to think about the game as a service that is
constantly changing and engaging its fans. You need to have proper strategies
and expectations for this stage in the game’s lifecycle in order to keep a game
from shrinking.” Put another way, LiveOps not only helps your game grow during
the up portion of its trajectory, it also helps slow its decline.

This is where using a backend service like PlayFab can be especially helpful.
If you have built and are running your own dedicated backend, then that
represents a sizable fixed monthly cost. At some point, as revenue declines, the
game becomes unprofitable and needs to be shut down. But if you’re using a
backend service where your costs scale with usage, then you can conceivably
continue operating the game much longer because your fixed costs are so much
lower.

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 Part III: Using PlayFab’s backend
services for LiveOps
We hope you’ve found our Definitive Guide to LiveOps to be useful. At PlayFab,
our passion is to provide the best set of backend services to support LiveOps for
all types of game developers. This appendix lays out how PlayFab can support
you in implementing the best practices described in this guide. Furthermore we
are continually investing in new features, guided in part by the LiveOps practices
detailed in this guide. Games built on PlayFab should expect a continuous stream
of new features to help make their LiveOps practices ever more effective.

Included here are some suggestions of how customers today are combining
PlayFab features together to enable entirely new LiveOps features. One of
PlayFab’s most powerful aspects is its configurability, thanks to its scripting
functions and powerful API. That means PlayFab is capable of supporting
additional features even if they’re not available out-of-the-box. Curious about
how this can work for you? Come talk with us - we’d love to show you how, or
help you brainstorm how you can use PlayFab to unlock your own innovative
ideas.

How PlayFab supports LiveOps

Analytics: we’ve discussed at length in this guide how data is the lifeblood
of live games, and that the ability to respond quickly to issues is a key
capability for a LiveOps team. PlayFab provides a robust data infrastructure
for live games out of the box, with optional supplements like integrated data
warehousing via Snowflake. Key analytics tools supporting LiveOps include:

Real-time visualization of your data pipeline, so your LiveOps team

can monitor the “heartbeat” of your game and track if anything is
outside of normal trends. If they need to drill down, they can click to
view full JSON data of any event in the pipeline.

The ability to troubleshoot a range of issues, allowing you to tweak

your game with confidence and your CS reps to respond effectively to
service-recovery scenarios. Filter and search through recent events
history, zooming in on a particular time period, player, event type, or
error condition.

High-level overview and drill-down detailed reports of all major KPIs,

on-demand and via email, so you can keep a close eye on performance
and measure the impact of changes on your live game.

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 Support for real-time player segmentation - with PlayFab you can
define segments based on player behavior and then customize your
game experience for each segment, or target each segment with
campaigns.

Building an effective LiveOps team: while it’s up to you to staff this

team with the right people and create a work environment where they can
be successful, PlayFab can help with critical aspects like disseminating
information across the team and facilitating team collaboration.

All team members can have direct access to all features of PlayFab from
Game Manager, a single easy-to-use web portal; fees are based on
how many active players you have, not employees, so everyone can
collaborate.

Developers will soon be able to build their own custom UI to snap into
the Game Manager, in support of non-technical LiveOps team members,
and you can create roles and assign permissions so your users can
only access the features and see the data they should be seeing. You
can also view audit logs to monitor all changes to game configuration.

Customer support reps can quickly search across all player profiles
to locate a particular player record, review their play history, and then
make changes or grant items or currency to help deal with a service
recovery issue. They can also ban abusive players with temporary or
permanent bans.

Tournaments, multiplayer and guilds are some of the most effective

tactics for driving engagement and increase the longevity of your game, and
PlayFab provides the critical components for incorporating these into your
game.

Use leaderboards to rank players based on a numerical statistic, then

create a social leaderboard by filtering to just friends (from Facebook,
Steam, Xbox, etc.). Manually remove any players suspected of cheating.

Reset leaderboards periodically based on a fixed schedule or manually,

and use prize tables to take automated actions for players in the
leaderboard, such as automatically granting items or sending messages,
depending on their rank at the time of a reset.

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 For simple asynchronous multiplayer, use data permissions to allow
one player to see certain data for another, like a card deck or city build.

For sophisticated multiplayer games, build your own custom game

server, then let PlayFab host it for you with automatic scaling in data
centers around the world to ensure you never run out of room for new
players. Use PlayFab’s built-in matchmaking algorithm to find the best
match between players in real-time, based on logic you configure, or
plug in your own matchmaking server.

For simpler multiplayer games, PlayFab also offers direct support for
Photon to handle message passing between clients for multiplayer
without requiring a custom game server.

Use guilds to drive engagement through team dynamics. Key features

here include a guild membership system, guild vs. guild leaderboards,
and guild “banks” to help members of a guild exchange items with each
other.

Updating your content often is another key pillar of an effective LiveOps

strategy, and PlayFab has you covered with a full set of tools to help your
team update virtually any part of your game after you launch.

Store your game configuration in PlayFab, then remotely tune and

adjust your settings anytime you want. Settings can be anything from
simple key/value pairs (e.g., “XP gain rate: 1.0”) or complex JSON files.

Configure the full catalog of items available for in-app granting or

purchase, and update with new items at any time. Items can have limited
uses, expiration times, custom JSON data, tags and more.

Host all your game assets in PlayFab. Upload manually via the Game
Manager, or automatically via command line tools or the admin API
directly from your build pipeline.

Stream assets down to your game clients via a global CDN. Use our
default CDN (with pass-through billing) or configure your own custom
CDN to point to PlayFab to retrieve files.

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 Running experiments is a critical part of honing a game after launch for
maximum effectiveness. With PlayFab, you can set up A/B tests with multiple
buckets and A/B test elements of your game that often drive significant -
and easy - wins, including stores, rewarded video-ad offers, and even game
behavior.

If you don’t monetize, you can’t survive and thrive as a developer. Here
too PlayFab has powerful tools and services to maximize your upside while
protecting you from the many pitfalls.

Don’t let fraudsters ruin your game - and empty your pockets - with
fake purchases. Server-side receipt validation ensures your Apple or
Google receipts are genuine before a player completes a purchase
transaction. PlayFab also supports third-party payment processing
from Xsolla, PayPal, Steam, Xbox, and more

Stimulate demand with rare or limited-edition items that have

enforced scarcity, or craft attractive bundles for first-time or regular
players. You can also entice customers through variable rewards by
offering loot boxes with drop-table probabilities you can control, and
stimulate engagement by generating and distributing coupons for in-
game items.

Optimize conversion and revenues by creating targeted stores aimed

at specific segments. These stores can offer a subset of items, have
special offers and discounts, and custom data fields.

Handle a global audience with support for multiple real-world

currencies, and avoid the pay-to-win trap with support for multiple
virtual currencies.

Foster cooperative behavior by supporting gifting and trading

between players, or celebrate holidays by gifting from system to player.

Open up new recurring revenue channels by offering subscriptions for

ongoing services. For example, charge $9.99 every month for your VIP
program.

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 While many game developers like to have a hands-on negotiating
strategy for ad mediation, they’re often forced to work with the
mediation firm’s analytics. PlayFab integrates with popular ad mediation
providers for rewarded video ad tracking. PlayFab’s also there when you
need to track reward offers so you can fulfill them accurately.

Running live events: As we’ve shown in this guide, live events are powerful
drivers for player engagement and monetization. PlayFab provides all the
building blocks you’ll need to build a full live events system, including:

Multiple ways to define and configure your list of all upcoming events.
We have a demo showing how to use an item catalog and store to do
this.

For competitive events, create one-off event leaderboards to motivate

players and update them with automation rules. Use prize tables to
automatically give out prizes when the event ends.

Replace your standard stores for the duration of the event with custom
event stores that feature special discounts, bundles, and offers just for
that event.

Remind players about upcoming events using a message-of-the-day,

and fire off a push notification or email to notify players when the
event starts.

Boosting player retention and engagement is one of the main reasons

to invest in LiveOps. A backend platform like PlayFab provides a variety of
features to help, including:

Review your 1, 7, and 30 day new player retention with the daily
retention report.

Help game designers tune and tweak the game to make it more fun by
digging deeply into player behavior using PlayFab’s data warehouse.
Analyze where players are dropping out and test theories for why.

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 Build game mechanics like “daily rewards” using a combination of
PlayFab’s CloudScript (server-hosted game logic) and player data
stored on the server - where it can’t be tampered with by players intent
on cheating.

Use the rules engine and custom player data events to build a
powerful achievements system that reacts in real-time when players
meet the criteria for a new event, and can be updated with new
achievements at any time.

Player lost their phone? Avoid sending them back to square one by
storing their game progress in the cloud on PlayFab. Link accounts
together to provide multiple ways of recovering an account, such as
using their Steam, Facebook, or Google accounts.

Take the right action for the right player at the right time through real-
time player segmentation. Divide players into groups based on a
variety of properties including spend, geography, device, client version,
play patterns, and acquisition channel. Then, experiment with triggering
actions as players enter or exit segments. You can also use PlayFab to
run scheduled tasks that apply to all players in a given player segment,
which lets you combine the efficiency of automation with the intimacy of
a message or offer crafted to appeal to a particular audience.

Communicate to individual players, or to all players in a segment, via

the channel that fits your needs best - including push notifications to iOS
and Android, email messages to player email accounts and message-
of-the-day pop-ups. You can also send messages in response to rule
triggers you create (e.g., “we’re sorry you keep dying…”) and customize
messages using parameters.

Once your game hits the plateau phase, it can still be very profitable.
PlayFab’s per-active-player pricing means that your operating costs scale
with usage. As your players drop, your costs drop, allowing you to maintain
healthy margins all the way down.

74 playfab.com
To learn more about PlayFab, please visit our website at https://playfab.com.
We’ve got getting started guides, tutorials, documentation, forums, videos, and
other resources to help you begin using PlayFab with your game. You can create
a PlayFab account for free, and begin integrating PlayFab services into your game
in just minutes. For your reference, here’s a detailed list of PlayFab features:

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 PlayFab feature overview

PlayFab supports your game well beyond your LiveOps needs, so this guide
wouldn’t be complete without a more complete overview of PlayFab’s features
and functionality. We’ve included the following for reference. Questions? Please
feel free to reach out to us any time and we’ll be happy to give you more detailed
information or a demo.

Game manager. A single “portal” where all members of your game studio
can come to build, configure, and operate your game.

Direct access to all features of PlayFab, from a single easy-to-use web

portal.

Custom tabs and pages, so developers can build their own custom UI
on top of PlayFab, for use by non-technical LiveOps team members.

Notifications for important updates and new features.

Manage accounts for all users of PlayFab in your game studio.

Create roles and assign permissions so your users can only access the
features and see the data they should be seeing.

Developer support. Industry-leading support solutions, to help your team

as you build, launch, then operate your game on top of PlayFab.

Extensive documentation for all PlayFab services.

Code samples that can be dropped right into a game.

Videos describing specific features.

Case studies of how other games use PlayFab Developer Success.

Forums for posting questions and browsing answers.

Slack channels for ongoing conversations with other developers, and

direct communication with PlayFab developer success.

Ticket submission for asking for help or reporting issues.

76 playfab.com
 Server health page that lists status of current servers, and includes
history of previous issues or outages.

SDKs. Support for most major game engines or platforms, to help you
access and consume our services in your game.

Support for 14 different SDKs, including Unity, Unreal Blueprints, Unreal

CPP, C#, Windows, Lua, JavaScript, Cocos2D, ActionScript 3, Android
Studio, Objective-C (iOS), Java, NodeJS, Xamarin, Lumberyard.

Access to the full set of PlayFab services, with client, server, and admin
APIs.

Real-time analytics and data pipeline. Get immediate insight into what’s
going on inside your game, with full visibility into performance and issues.

Real-time visualization of your data pipeline, so you can monitor the

“heartbeat” of your game. Click and view full JSON data of any event in
the pipeline.

Reporting. Both on-demand reports, and regular emailed reports.

Includes both high-level overview reports and drill-down detailed
reports of all major KPIs. Export reports as CSV files.

Filter and search through recent events. Zoom in on a particular time

period. Look for particular players, event types, or error conditions.

View events on a player-by-player basis to help CS reps uncover what

happened in a service-recovery scenario.

Full data warehousing into Snowflake, a world-class data warehouse, for

advanced SQL queries. Ensure that no events are ever lost.

Raw event logs for so you can import your raw event data into your own
data warehouse system.

Ability to run complex offline queries, to set manual player “tags” for
segmentation into more complex groups than can be segmented in
real-time.

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 Player accounts and relationship management. Managing your player
accounts is at the heart of any effective LiveOps solution.

Account linking and authentication. Provide multiple mechanisms to

retrieve a player account if they lose their device, including username/
password, Google, Gamecenter, Facebook, Steam, Kongregate, Twitch,
and any other custom ID.

Full-text search across all player profiles, including support for wildcard
symbols or complex queries involving player profile properties.

Store and retrieve player data, such as save-game files, with a rich
permissions model for sharing data with other players.

Real-time player segmentation. Divide players into groups based on a

variety of properties including spend, geography, device, client version,
play patterns, and acquisition channel. Trigger actions as players enter
or exit segments.

Run scheduled tasks that apply to all players in a given player segment.

Self-serve password reset mechanism, for games using email and

password.

Ban abusive players with temporary or permanent bans. Allow other

players to report abuse.

Data storage. Flexible mechanisms to store all the data generated and
consumed by games.

File-based storage for large binary files.

Object storage for smaller JSON objects.

Rich permissions system, to set permissions for which entities and which
players can read or write data.

Storage associated with all entities on the backend, including players,

titles, catalog items, guilds, etc.

78 playfab.com
Player messaging. Engage with your players using a variety of messaging
methods.

Push notifications to iOS and Android.

Email messages to player email accounts. Optional tools to verify email

address. Configure custom SMTP server. Track clicks to embedded links
in email.

Message-of-the-day pop-up that players see when they first login.

Send messages in response to rule triggers (e.g., we’re sorry you keep
dying…”)

Send to individual players, or to all players in a segment.

Customize messages using parameters.

Content management. Tools to help you manage changes to your game or

asset updates.

Remote setting of game configuration on the server.

Asset upload via game manager, command line tools, or raw API.

Download via CDN. Opportunity to use default CDN with built-in

pricing or configure a custom CDN (for example, if you already have a
corporate deal with Akamai).

Multiplayer. A variety of technologies to support multiplayer games.

Server hosting. Upload server builds, choose regions, spin up servers to

host game sessions, automatic load balancing.

Monitor game sessions in real-time - after sessions end, archive log files
to help debug issues.

View player previous match histories.

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 Synchronous matchmaking, to find a match between players all looking
for a match right now at the same time. Configure what makes for a
“good match.”

Support for Photon to handle message passing between clients for

multiplayer without requiring a custom game server.

Leaderboards and tournaments.

Basic leaderboards. Rank players based on a numerical statistic.

Filter leaderboards to just friends (e.g., social leaderboard).

Reset leaderboards on a fixed schedule, or manually. Archive the

standings so players can see how they did historically.

Manually remove any players suspected of cheating.

Prize tables, to take actions for players in the leaderboard depending on

their rank at the time of a reset, such as automatically granting items, or
sending messages.

Social features. Encourage engagement and retention by involving friends.

Guilds. Join guild, set roles within guild. Guild vs. guild leaderboards.
Guild inventory and guild “bank”.

Friend list, with synchronization to other friends lists like Facebook,

Steam, Xbox, etc.

In-game commerce. Support in-app purchasing, including real-money

transactions, virtual currencies, stores, and player inventories.

Receipt validation (e.g. Apple or Google receipts), or third-party

payment processing (e.g., Xsolla, PayPal, Steam Wallet, Xbox and
PlayStation entitlements, and more).

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 Create catalogs of in-game items that can be purchased. Items can
have limited uses, expiration times, custom JSON data, and tags to help
manage items.

Limited edition items have enforced scarcity.

Group items into bundles or containers. Containers can have optional

“locking” to require “keys” to open and obtain contents.

Create one or more stores with subsets of the item catalog. Target stores
based on player segments. Stores can have special offers and discounts,
and custom data fields.

Store and manage player inventories. Items in inventory can have

custom properties, for randomized items.

Configure one or more virtual currencies. Set initial default balances,

specify auto-recharge rates.

Create loot crates, with drop-table probabilities.

Manage subscriptions in app stores, like iOS and Android (e.g., charge
$9.99 every month for VIP program.)

Support for multiple real-world currencies.

Generate and distribute coupons for in-game items.

Support gifting and trading between players, or from system to player.

In game advertising and ad mediation. Integrate with popular ad

mediation providers for basic rewarded video ad tracking.

Support rewarded video ads with tracking reward offers.

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 A/B testing and experimenting. Set up basic A/B tests, then track results.

Set up A/B tests with multiple buckets.

A/B test stores, rewarded video-ad offers, and game behavior.

Third party plugins and integration. Built in integration support for popular
third-party backend services, such as analytics, profanity filtering, payments,
and more.

Custom server logic. Easy way to handle server logic to change game
behavior without modifying game clients.

CloudScript. JavaScript is supported, and C# is coming soon.

Rules engine. Ability to set actions to fire based on any event passing
through the pipeline in real-time.

Scheduled tasks. Run actions across all players in a given segment.

Customer Support. Tools to help your CS reps support your game.

Set permissions so CS reps cannot view data or make changes they

shouldn’t.

Quickly locate and view player profiles, including historical player

actions.

Edit player data, grant items or virtual currency, and send messages.

Compliance. Help supporting relevant government regulations that apply to

games.

GDPR. PlayFab will be GDPR compliant by the May 2018 deadline.

COPPA. PlayFab is used today to support many COPPA-compliant

games.

82 playfab.com
 “We looked at the industry and saw that the typical path is to do most of the
work upfront. We wanted to test if our game is actually working - it’s hard to
know in advance if our game would be successful. The game itself took about
8 weeks to develop, we released it and then continued to iterate. We wanted
to get really early measurements and adjust based on user feedback. And
if the game didn’t work out, we could kill it and start a new thing - we’d only
wasted 8 weeks.

For us, LiveOps is a natural approach. We have no differentiation between

LiveOps and actual development. We see the game itself as a service. We
keep adding on features to it, getting long term monetization and retention.”

- Oliver Löffler, Co-Founder and CTO, Fluffy Fairy Games

Also, the team here at PlayFab is happy to help. Don’t be afraid to reach out -
we’d be happy to schedule a call and discuss your LiveOps strategy at any time.
Some ways to stay in touch with us:

• Email us at “devrel@playfab.com”
• Join our Slack channel at https://api.playfab.com/slack
• Read our forums at https://community.playfab.com
• Browse our tutorials at https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials

Copyright © 2018 PlayFab, Inc.

This Definitive Guide to LiveOps is for anyone interested
in learning more about LiveOps for their games.

1 A general introduction to LiveOps.

2 A detailed compendium of LiveOps techniques.

3 All the tools and services that PlayFab provides.

Visit playfab.com to learn more.

copyright 2018 PlayFab, Inc.