Live game ops academy is the place to learn the key concepts for success with your live game operations. We know that operating a live game is hard, and there’s a huge gap in performance between the top-grossing game developers and everyone else. The Live game ops academy is designed to help teach the skills that you need to close this gap. Keeping your players engaged is one of the most important long term indicators of success. Understanding motivation is a critical part of this strategy. Good engagement starts with understanding the variables that lead to abandonment, poor user adoption and customer attrition over time. All games are looking at the mechanics of their user experience for ways to increase stickiness. But engagement goes beyond just getting attention. A game must capture and deepen a user’s interests and expectations over and over again. To do this requires an understanding of user engagement over time and a focus on what motivates users. Join this webinar to learn the basics and best practices of game operations.

1. A live game operations company
Live Game Ops Academy: User Engagement
Thom Robbins (@trobbins)
thomas@playfab.com
@playfabnetwork

2. Welcome to the Live Game Ops Academy
Everyone who attended all three introductory sessions receives the
PlayFab Live Game Ops 101 Certificate by email!
10/27/2015 1
Beta testers needed!
Live Game Ops Academy 101 Certificate (beta)
We are finalizing a public release of the certificate and need
beta testers help!
Contact: thomas@playfab.com for more information

3. Live Game Ops Academy: User Engagement
User
engagement
is an
assessment of
an individual's
response to
some type of
offering
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4. Customer engagement cycle
Awareness: Basic branding and positioning of your
game. You can’t progress people through the cycle
before they’ve even heard of you.
Acquisition: I’ve always thought of this as getting
someone into your game. It’s a major step, but it’s
not yet profitable.
Satisfaction: Satisfaction is simply the foundation,
and the minimum requirement, for a continuing
relationship with your player.
Conversion: This one is simply defined as making a
sale. It may or may not be a profitable, but it’s still a
significant stage in the cycle.
Retention: We get them to shop with us again.
Excellent! Repeat sales tend to be more profitable
and almost certainly have lower marketing costs than
first purchases.
Referral: Getting players to engage their friends
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5. Measuring user engagement
An individual's degree of engagement may be determined directly through interaction or may be assessed through observation
of the user's behaviors.
• DAU, WAU and MAU. These abbreviations stand for Daily-, Weekly-, and Monthly Active Users respectively. It shows the
unique amount of users within a given amount of time.
• New users (downloads) are the people that just downloaded an app and have used it for the first time.
• Time in app means the total amount of minutes users spend using your app in a given time period.
• Uninstalls are an important sign of your app’s performance.
• Feature usage indicates if your app is used to its full potential.
• LTV stands for Lifetime (Customer) Value and is defined as the total value of an app user over the app’s or user’s lifetime
• Retention is defined as the percentage of users that use your app again in a given time period after they have downloaded
and launched it for the first time.
• Session length indicates the number of minutes a user spends using the app per interaction.
• Recency reflects how much time expires between two sessions.
• Reviews are a valuable resource to uncover explicit thoughts of users.
• Conversion tracking is a good way of keeping track of what users are doing.
• eCPM is a fundamental metric for apps that are monetized through showing ads.
• ARPU means Average Revenue Per User and is ideal to measure whether your updates are having a positive effect on users’
spending.
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6. Design patterns for 1st time users
• Visual story telling – avoid long
explanations and complexity
• Visual Cues – The power of three
• Tutorials – Onboard as easy as possible
• Reward schedule – “You can’t
over-reward the player in the first ten minutes” Sid Meier, designer of
the game Civilization
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7. Design patterns for a community
• Social feedback (sharing milestones) – Make sharing easy (thank you,
voting, likes and re-tweets)
• Reputation – Enables social status
• Connect community site into game
• (idea) Gated trial – Form a team to get started
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8. Best practices: Pre-launch
• Recommend 4+ weeks in multiple countries
• Test and tune First Time User Experience (FTUE),
economy, monetization, and messaging
• Make this time valuable and actionable
• Set KPI benchmarks (Red, Yellow, Green)
• Identify key experiments (balance, pricing, UI, etc.)
• Setup reporting tools and framework
• After soft launch, revise load testing based on observed
play patterns
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9. Best practices: Onboarding
• Interactive tutorial that quickly exposes best features/play
• Let them play: minimize reading, number of clicks, or forced actions
• Shower with reward and delight during
onboarding
• Don’t force non-core features into the FTUE,
additional lessons can surface when needed
• Include store/purchase tutorial
• Incentivize tutorial completion and immediate
follow-on play
• Allow returning or experienced players to skip
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10. Best practices: Content updates
• 60-90 days of content at launch
• Aim for 4-6 week update cadence after launch
• Roadmap at least one year of content
• Monitor progress and churn to determine correct rate of content
release
• Show content and depth: coming soon, NEW, etc.
• Message updates heavily
• Big updates and new features can get featured placement with publishing partners
• Message client updates in-app and via push with incentive for users to update
(>60% will update within 2 weeks)
• After two weeks, force update
• Make sure servers can support multiple clients simultaneously
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11. Best practices: Long term players
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• Design enough long-term content and evergreen play
loops
to keep veterans and spenders engaged
• PvP
• Leaderboards & Tourneys
• World/Saga maps
• Crafting, collecting, breeding
• Evergreen meta game allows value from replaying core
content
• Veterans can be 50%+ of spend, must keep them playing
• Introduce monetization components to elder game modes

12. Best practices: User Tracking
Guest Mode
• Don’t force login before users experience the game
• Can increase first session start by 90%
Login
• Incentivize social login
• Never force social login before users experience core fun
Cross-Device Saved State
• Ideally, fully-synchronous with server
• Use platforms’ tools for saved game state
• Purchases, inventory, level-data, friends, etc. should all come with.
• Requires persistent server-side player accounts
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13. Best practices: Communication – Push
Permission
• Wait until after a moment of
in-game delight
• Use pre-permission interstitial to
qualify receptive users
• Make a clear value prop relative
to recent in-game experience
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14. Best practices: Communication – Push
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Game-Generated
• Allows for automatic, customized
re-engagement
• Transactional events:
• Energy refill
• Build complete
• Freebie available
• Social events:
• Turn notification
• PvP challenges, etc
• Leaderboard position changes
• Gift send/receive
• Prioritize and group PMs to avoid spamming
• Create auto-campaign for lapsed users with
progressive incentives (3, 7, 14, 30 days lapsed)
• Monitor CTR and adjust cadence/content
• Messages triggered by user behavior and
including friend’s name have higher CTR

15. Communication – Push
Custom
• Notify users of important game
changes and events
• Sales & Promotions
• Updates and new content
• Re-activation campaigns
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16. Communication – Email
• Supplements other out-of app channels (Push, Facebook)
• Good for re-engagement and announcements:
• User-to-user invites
• Lapsed user campaigns
• Transactional receipts
• Marketing notifications
• Include incentive offers whenever possible to improve CTR
• Obtain email permission and address via FB
• Monitor CTR to optimize cadence and content
• Use deep link vanity URLs so email links can open directly
into app
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17. Best practices: Badges & Switching
Badges (Apple)
• Icon counters that notify users of outstanding push notes
• Indicate in-game what incremented counter
• Cap counter at 5-10 to avoid overwhelming users
Fast App Switching
• Game should NOT reload when user gets a call, text, email, etc. and leaves app briefly
• If you must reload, welcome user back and let them know you had to reload
• Return to exact gameplay state as when they left
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18. Best practices: Communication – In-Game
Several formats:
• Interstitials/Overlays
• Banners
• Heads-Up Display (HUD) indicators
• Custom display zones (in-store, etc.)
Deep link interstitials and banners directly to offers/purchase
Time interstitials at launch and between key transitions/loading
moments
• Loading/launch good for game issues, updates, or big promotions
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19. Best practices: Events
Timed Events
• 7-14 day events with deep incentives
• Clearly surface details about event before and
during
• Include unique rewards only available during event
• Make winning hard (target 15-20% for top rewards)
• All users should have access
• Repeat purchases or event-specific currency can
help drive spend
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20. Best practices: Events
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Quests
• Help direct gameplay toward desired activities, improve mid-term
engagement
• Tutorializes gameplay and incentivizes engagement with key play elements
• Use interstitials, HUD, and counters to surface quests
• Timed or multi-step quests can improve retention and monetization between
content updates
• Make rewards meaningful and clearly surface them

21. Best practices: Events
Achievements & Collections
• Rewards engagement with core loop
• Mastery encourages replay
• Don’t bury achievements, surface and celebrate them
• Consider tiering to make achievements repeatable at increased difficulty/reward
• Adding new achievements/collections on a regular basis increases elder game
engagement
• Adding premium-only elements to some achievements can increase conversion
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22. Best practices: Events
Return Mechanics
• Fun, but brief, daily bonus event
• Login rewards are boring, make it fun
• Include purchase options:
• Extra plays
• Better rewards
• Press your luck
• Etc.
• Optimal cadence may not be daily (could be every few hours)
• Include Push Note when new bonus attempt is available
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23. Best practices: Customer Support
• Proactively message planned or significant outages
• Have tools to provide entitlements for problems
• Use forums and social channels to provide direct
communication with users and community managers
• Expose CS email address in-game
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24. Additional Resources
Getting started with Live game
operations E-book
http://bit.ly/playfabebook
Live Game Operations Resource
Center
http://bit.ly/playfabresources
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25. Welcome to the Live Game Ops Academy
Everyone who attended all three introductory sessions receives the
PlayFab Live Game Ops 101 Certificate by email!
10/27/2015 24
Beta testers needed!
Live Game Ops Academy 101 Certificate (beta)
We are finalizing a public release of the certificate and need
beta testers help!
Contact: thomas@playfab.com for more information

26. Live Ops Training: User Engagement
For more information: http://www.playfab.com
Twitter: @playfabnetwork
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/playfabnetwork
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