Introduction To LiveOps

Introduction

This course provides you an overview of how to run your game as a service. By combining in-game content, events, and sales, you can build a long-term engagement and monetization strategy that leads to a healthy and sustainable lifetime value.

What you'll learn:

• How to build an in-game content strategy
• How different types and cadences of sales can drive long-term monetization
• How building an in-game event strategy can drive engagement for all player types

LiveOps

With LiveOps or live operations, you can run games as a service focused on augmenting engagement, stimulating monetization, and reducing player churn (retaining your loyal players). To maintain a successful LiveOps strategy, you'll want to offer a blend of regularly introduced in-game content, sales, and events. Let’s review each of these components.

Content

Maintaining an active pipeline of fresh content engages your users. LiveOps strategically distributes frequent content updates and can help you drive a consistent heartbeat of revenue.

Types of content

Content can be durable or consumable. Durable content is highly valuable to players, but can be timely and expensive to develop. Consumable content doesn't require development time, but players may not value it as highly since it doesn’t last. 

A durable good could be something like an outfit for a character, or a building that is permanent once purchased. A consumable good might be something like energy or in-game booster that the player uses as they continue with the game. 

How to build a content strategy

Content value is inversely related to rarity and popularity

When building your content strategy, be sure to balance the releases. For example, while durable goods often have higher perceived value, giving them away too frequently or easily will lessen their rarity and value over time. Make sure to balance your content’s value versus saturation over time.

How to build content strategy cohorts

You can also test re-releasing content. For example, try creating two different user cohorts. 

Cohort A includes your most loyal and active players, while Cohort B is slightly less active. Try releasing content to your loyal Cohort A first, giving them exclusive access. Then, re-release that same content a week or two later to Cohort B. 

Both cohorts will find value in the content, but the exclusivity and early access will reward and encourage Cohort A.

Questions to think about content

Select each card for more information.

• Community

  • How can you leverage your community?
  • Are there ways they can create content for your game?
  • Consider adding level editors or tools to help users craft their own content.
  • It's a great way to produce a steady flow of content, while engaging gamers more deeply.
• Churn

  • When do you see players start to churn?
  • Consider breaking content releases into smaller pieces to engage these players more often.

  
  
• Content

  • How often are you releasing new content into the game economy?
  • How are large feature releases balanced against smaller content updates?
  • Are you getting the most out of each content release and giving players reasons to play and replay?
• Game Economy

  • Does your game economy have a balance of durable and consumable content?

Sales

Sales are a way to drive monetization metrics. There are several metrics you can track and different metrics are better measured at different stages.

Broad versus targeted sales

You'll want to decide when to run broad versus targeted sales:

Broad sales

Broad sales are open to all players and drive community participation and engagement between large game updates.

Targeted sales

Targeted sales can be used as lifecycle management tools to drive individual behaviors and key performance indicators (such as the sale on a starter pack presented the first week after install).

Different stages of sales

Select each (+) to learn more.

Early acquisition stage

Mid-level stage

Long-term stage

Sales based on a diverse set of user characteristics

Think about targeting sales based on a diverse set of user characteristics. The most common characteristics include:

• A user’s financial profile or conversion behavior
• In-game progression
• Personally identifiable information

The goal of all sales should be to move players down the monetization funnel, from first-time buyers to active payers, and ultimately VIPs.

Types of sales

Similar to releasing content, you’ll want to be cautious about the types and cadence of sales run in your game. For example, running sales too frequently can cause burnout. Additionally, consider using different types of sales to drive different behaviors and key performance indicators.

Select each image to learn more.

In-app product discounts and currency sales

In-app purchase bundling

Item sales

Questions to think about sales

• How often do you run sales in your game? 
• How do you monitor and measure the effectiveness of sales and make sure they’re not too frequent or driving users away?
• Do you run all sales globally? Do you have segmented or targeted sales?
• Do you design sales with particular key performance indicators and segments of users in mind? Or is the goal typically to generate higher revenue and average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU)?

Events

Events drive engagement metrics, such as 1, 7, and 30-day retention, as well as core game loop adoption. They can also be used to drive player progression and metrics such as session length and frequency. Below are a few different types of events you can run in a game.

Select each tab to learn more.

• Competitive tournaments
• Quests and achievements
• Collection and redemption
• Game parameters

Competitive tournaments

Competition can drive high engagement and incentives to monetize, but be cautious not to create a “pay-to-win” feel.

A few tips on running events

Here are six tips to keep in mind when running events.

Select the arrow to view the next tip.

Tip #1

Different events and rewards appeal to different types of players. Try spreading rewards over multiple event types to encourage broader participation in-game.

Questions to think about events

Select each card for more information.

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  Events

  • What kind of events are you currently running in your game?
    
  • How often do you run them or add new event types?

  
  
• 
  

  Automation

  • Can any of your events be automated?
    
  • If you're running frequent basic events, consider minimizing your team’s resources by investing in backend automation (for example, double XP Tuesdays).
• 
  

  Competition

  • How do you structure the rewards for your events?
    
  • Is it possible for all player types and levels to feel competitive?
• 
  

  Measurement

  • Do you design events with particular key performance indicators and segments of users in mind?
    
  • Or is the goal typically to generate high revenue and average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU)?

Check your knowledge

Now that you've learned more about LiveOps, let's quickly check your knowledge.

What are the key benefits of running LiveOps in your game?

Select all that apply, and click Submit. 

Offer players hook to keep them coming back, thus reducing player churn.

Amplify and normalize revenue drivers to increase the overall lifetime value of your game.

Recap

Introducing content, sales, and events in your game can help with player progression and encourage participation in key experiences throughout your game.

Look for ways LiveOps can create competition and community building. A successful LiveOps strategy should be targeted and measured against specific key performance indicators and player segments. Make sure to have an open mind for testing and learning from the results. LiveOps is a great way to drive long-term engagement and monetization of a game.

Drive engagement through promoting strategic event types and experiences at targeted stages of the player lifecycle.