Intro to liveops

Editor's Notes

• #3: I’m Crystin Cox. 15 years in game development Design and leadership LiveOps and monetization
• #4: Stepped away from game dev because I care deeply about LiveOps I believe good LiveOps can get players the game experiences they deserve, engaged, personal, and community driven. I believe PlayFab can enable the industry to raise the bar.
• #5: Today, games are huge. There are 2 billon gamers in the world and last year, games generated over $100 billion in revenue. Games are a big deal and the market is continuing to expand. But games have been through a lot of change to get here.
• #6: First we had games as products. Games were a single item that was purchased before playing Playing required special hardware, it was a big event. created a strong emphasis on advertising and marketing to generate demand and interest in a game before release. Developers rarely had an opportunity to interact with players, they created games mostly in isolation and then delivered them as static objects.
• #7: But as connectivity increased with the advent of the internet, the nature of games changed and we got Games as a Services. Digital distribution created a direct purchasing relationship between devs and players This era is dominated by social and mobile platforms that were well positioned to take advantage of digital distribution and connection. This era was all about acquisition of players and popularized free to play as a business model. But we are now moving past the games as a service era and moving onto the next evolution of games.
• #8: We like to call this Games as Community
• #9: Because this new era of games is about games as more than services, now games are about the community of players engaging and with them and game developers are focused on growing and retaining communities. Many touch points of communication between the developer and the players all along the player journey. Dominated by multi-platform experiences, games need to meet their communities where they are and provide deep interactions between developers and communities both in and out of the games themselves.
• #10: Because this new era of games is about games as more than services, now games are about the community of players engaging and with them and game developers are focused on growing and retaining communities. Many touch points of communication between the developer and the players all along the player journey. Dominated by multi-platform experiences, games need to meet their communities where they are and provide deep interactions between developers and communities both in and out of the games themselves.
• #11: This new era of games as community is already having a massive impact on the industry. Here is the list of the top grossing games worldwide for the past two years. One of the things that stands out about these lists is how much overlap there is.
• #12: 80% of the games are on both lists. These games are building and managing communities to keep them relevant and growing year over year. They are all employing the same kind of strategy.
• #13: We call that strategy LiveOps. A strategy that cares deeply about continual engagement with player communities. You’ve probably heard this term before but what does it mean?
• #14: We can start by looking at the term itself. It’s the combination of two words. Live stands for Live Games. These are games that include some sort of connected experience or persistence. This part of the term speaks to the design and engineering of a game as well as back end and services needed to make a game live. The other word is operations, this speaks to the continuation of the service, it's managing the game itself over a period of time which requires process and structure, This is really about mindset and strategy in fact LiveOps all up is a mindset more than it is a process .
• #15: First it's a way of thinking about players. As a community of people that's complex and changing and evolving over time People are primarily motivated by intrinsic needs like mastering new skills or developing social connections. And it's about thinking of your game as a part of your players lives not just one piece of entertainment for them to consume but something that's a hobby or interest that they want to engage with all the time.
• #16: LiveOps is also an approach to product design and direction, specifically an approach that is player centric. Traditional games as product tend to be developer centric in their design. Liveops games tend to be more player centric. It's about what the players want, what are they interested in, how they want to see the game evolve or change. Delivering value to players, if they invest in your game they want to see a return back that makes sense Traditional games as product oftentimes are about attraction How do I get you interested in this game How do I get you excited for the launch but live OPS games are about continually satisfying people overtime as their needs change as their experience with the game changes.
• #17: And finally live OPS is a process, it's an experimentation focused process. Live OPS process is about iteration and evolution through frequent engagement. Content needs to be flexible, we need to build features that are modular and can operate independently so we can take them out or put them in or make significant changes to them after the game is live. Demands the ability to ship frequently and always be ready to ship. LiveOPs doesn't really like waterfall process, LveOps wants to be able to do things quickly to take things to just ready put them into the game live and then see if they work and iterate on them and make them better and better overtime.
• #18: All these things that make up the live OPS approach produce games that have longer player engagement cycles. They produce games that engage players over a longer period of time. You get that to some extent we just live games, a live game is going to have a longer tail then a game that is completely static. But being live is not enough, it will extend the life of your game, but not grow it over time.
• #19: All these things that make up the live OPS approach produce games that have longer player engagement cycles. They produce games that engage players over a longer period of time. You get that to some extent we just live games, a live game is going to have a longer tail then a game that is completely static. But being live is not enough, it will extend the life of your game, but not grow it over time.
• #20: All these things that make up the live OPS approach produce games that have longer player engagement cycles. They produce games that engage players over a longer period of time. You get that to some extent we just live games, a live game is going to have a longer tail then a game that is completely static. But being live is not enough, it will extend the life of your game, but not grow it over time.
• #27: So that’s a lot of information about live ops but we’re really here to talk about play fat so how does play fab enable LiveOps?
• #28: Because this new era of games is about games as more than services, now games are about the community of players engaging and with them and game developers are focused on growing and retaining communities. Many touch points of communication between the developer and the players all along the player journey. Dominated by multi-platform experiences, games need to meet their communities where they are and provide deep interactions between developers and communities both in and out of the games themselves.
• #29: Because this new era of games is about games as more than services, now games are about the community of players engaging and with them and game developers are focused on growing and retaining communities. Many touch points of communication between the developer and the players all along the player journey. Dominated by multi-platform experiences, games need to meet their communities where they are and provide deep interactions between developers and communities both in and out of the games themselves.
• #31: Faster, cheaper, more reliable than doing it yourself
• #32: PlayFab is completely platform agnostic It supports the Games as Community future of multiplatform experience Great to have all your data in one place even if your game is on multiple platforms
• #33: PlayFab was built from the ground up to support live operation of games It's a set of back end services and tools that make it possible for you to build and operate your live game PlayFab is modular, you can use it completely but you can also just use parts of it We built the platform from the ground up to easily integrate with existing middleware packages engines so you can use just the pieces that you need