Making a new successful game is hard. You need to find the concept/features that will appeal to a wide audience. And add the original new twist that will make it stand out among the crowd. Or maybe it’s something else altogether. Who really knows?
Operating a live game is also hard – a different kind of hard. You need to track the right segment of your userbase. See what behavior is most desirable and correlated with spending, understanding what to double down on and what untapped opportunities remain. Keep your most engaged fans excited, etc. Those are all core product challenges that have to do with game features and market conditions. But there are also internal, team-level challenges that can make it harder to identify and deliver on the product level. That’s the case both for new and live games – but in my experience it’s especially the case in live games. This week I wanted to share what I’ve come to see as the 3 types of mindsets that make it harder to deliver positive outcomes when operating a live game.
1) Making the game for yourself
This one can definitely happen in both new and live game teams. However, this is especially damaging for live games. When working on new games you need to be doing something you believe in to be successful. It’s a necessary – but not sufficient – condition to success. You can’t do better than your best. And your best will only come from something you believe in and are excited about. So making your dream game is not necessarily a problem for new games – although this will definitely go very wrong if your instincts are way off and you’re totally disconnected from the market. And it’s even worse if you don’t base your expectations on things players universally do across all games.
Making the game for yourself is 100% always problematic when working on live games. We sometimes tend to forget that the “service” part in “game as a service” involves giving players what they want. Not what we want them to do or what we think they should be doing. In live games, you have data on what players are doing. This should be the guiding principle you follow. Double down on what works and introduce new features/funtionalities that reinforce what players want.
Trying to get players to engage with a feature/game mode they’re not interested in – because you spent time working on it, because you think it’s cool, because you think that’s the way the game ought to be played – is counterproductive. The ROI of your efforts will be much greater if you focus on having players do more of what they’re already doing, or introducing a new activity that gives them what they want, rather than make them do something they don’t want to do.
So when you’re operating a live game, you need to let go of all normative thinking. Don’t think about what players should do, what the right way to play the game, etc. In other words, stop thinking about what the game is or ought to be. You need to focus on what the game does. A live game in a behavioral machine. Features drive players to act one way over another. [but this doesn’t mean you’re the mastermind manipulating users into doing what you want – that’s another very common mindset problem you will see in more junior and/or insecure profiles].
2) Not clearly defining success (and not using data well as a consequence)
Data can help you identify the player segment and behaviors that are correlated with success. They can help you balance values – prices, rewards, event points, etc. – that are most likely to improve engagement and monetization. Simply said, when you know what you want to achieve, it’s easier to know what to look at and translate player motivations into game features and behavioral data points. You can make a better and more impactful decision. That’s using data and looking forward: based on what has happened and what is happening now, doing x should lead to the desired outcome.
However, it can regularly happen that time and resources spent on generating insights are not productive. You can be right about something that absolutely doesn’t matter and won’t help you make a decision. You can go overkill on some one-off occurrence. Or you can use data retrospectively to justify or validate a previous decision. We all have examples of data not used the optimal way.
That’s why being intentional with what success looks like beforehand can be very useful, and why I’m a huge proponent of OKRs. OKRs are a great way to make product decisions and to lead teams. The advantage of OKRs is that you are going to spend more time on what you want to achieve. You need to define what success looks like. That helps a) focus your efforts and only make decisions that will help you on the road to success and b) align with the team and provide autonomy. There are multiple ways to achieve a product goal. Being aligned with the team on what that success looks like – and even better if you provide design guidelines based on available data and the performance of previous features – ensures you focus on what matters and get the best from people on your team who know the most about their craft.
When success is defined clearly, then you are using data with intentionality. Say your goal is to increase the next day return rate for players that are above level 20. Even if you’re not quite sure what the best way to achieve that might be (yet), you know you need to dig into the data to see what correlates most with that KPI. Is it playing PvP, is it being part of an alliance, is it playing 5+ games in single player a day, etc. When you are approaching product decisions with a clear objective in mind, you can use data in a forward looking way and make better decisions.
3) Being too serious
We care about the games we work on – a lot. And that’s a good thing But we should never lose sight of the fact that we’re in the entertainment business. It literally is just fun and games.
That doesn’t mean working on a game team is just fun and games (it’s not). It’s a big deal if the in-game inflation is running wild, if 30% of players who reach level 7 can’t make it to level 8 because they don’t have the power requirements, or if user progress has been reset. Some things are non-negotiable. And it’s a good exercise as a team to go over those and clarify what’s non-negotiable and what’s not (and arbitrate when needed). But not everything is life or death.
Monetization can be a touchy subject depending on the team or company culture. And this is where being too serious about monetization can be counterproductive. In a more modest way, you never make a player spend. You don’t manipulate players into spending money they didn’t want to spend. You capture that willingness to spend, you increase excitement or lower the player’s reluctance to spend.
There is a large “incompressible” amount of non-payers. No matter what you do they will never spend. And that’s not surprising. In free to play games we get players to install based on the promise of free entertainment. So there is little point in spending time and resources to monetize those users. I would argue all the remaining users have a propensity to spend. You just need to find the price point and content that they will find exciting enough to spend on. More importantly, monetizing players doesn’t have to be about being serious, about providing some objective advantage or functionality. Players spend because they like the game, are excited and want to find ways to engage with it more. It can be functional/instrumental. Like play longer, be stronger, produce more, etc. But most of the time it’s just because it’s fun.
Losing sight of the emotional/irrational part of spending – and what’s more irrational than trying to optimize and rationalize virtual resources in a free mobile game – puts a lot of counterproductive limitations on what we sell and how we monetize. We should avoid being too serious and assume the bar to trigger user spending is so high. We shouldn’t assume spending $5/20/50 in a mobile game is that big a deal. We sometimes act as if we’re a hospital where people’s lives are at stake and we’re responsible for players’ livelihood. We should probably think of a game team as a circus (perhaps for a number of reasons). We’re here to provide users with good fun and entertainment. It’s not that big a deal if the bearded lady doesn’t really have a beard and we just glued a fake one to her face. What’s important is people are happy and feel they are getting their money’s worth.
Alexandre Macmillan 