Gaming, Monetization, User Acquisition

Video: AppHacks—What is LiveOps and Why is it Important?

AppLovin
Sep 30, 2021

In this video, Dominic Minogue,  director of product marketing at Lion Studios talks about the importance and benefits of LiveOps to your mobile app. 

Visit us on YouTube for more AppHacks and other informational and educational videos!

Learn more about LiveOps

Transcript

Hi, welcome to AppHacks. I’m Dominic Minogue, director of product marketing at Lion Studios, a mobile games publisher, launched by AppLovin. 

Lion Studios works with mobile game developers to get their games discovered by players around the world. Our growth and product teams utilize their expertise to help game developers break through the noise and grow their businesses.

AppLovin is a leading marketing software company that provides a powerful set of solutions for developers to grow their mobile apps. 

We also own studios that create apps for millions of users around the world. Our mission is to grow the mobile app ecosystem. 

This video today will cover what LiveOps is and why it matters.

What is LiveOps?

LiveOps is short for live operations. In mobile gaming, LiveOps refers to any changes, updates or improvements made to a game without having to release a brand new version of that game. 

These live operations can be cyclical, such as weekly, monthly, yearly, or even a one-time occurrence at alliance with a real-world event or other milestones. 

From a business standpoint, game developers see the benefits of implementing LiveOps because it helps engage, re-engage, and retain users. It also supports boosting key KPIs, such as EAU, MAU, and ARPDAU

It helps ensure that updates are exciting and new content is delivered on a regular basis to a game’s player base. 

How does LiveOps work? 

LiveOps works by implementing strategies and data-driven insights to add new aspects to a game. LiveOps focuses on the user’s lifecycle from the time they start playing the game to the time they leave. 

The goal is to improve a player’s loyalty by incorporating events, new game features, promotions, community engagement, and troubleshooting in real time. 

However, LiveOps doesn’t fundamentally change the game. For example, a game’s LiveOps may include a new reward for players, the launch of new challenges, and making temporary changes to a game in a very familiar way. As LiveOps should be treated as an optimization on engagement, a game should avoid events that vastly change the user’s understanding of core gameplay, which would require re-onboarding of that user. 

Why is LiveOps important for a mobile game? 

Lots of mobile games regularly implement LiveOps to keep their players engaged and excited about new features and changes in their favorite games. 

Implementing new features, exclusive content, and live events encourages players to continue playing your game and provides more opportunities to monetize your game. 

LiveOps is important for a game because it allows developers to customize and tailor the mobile experience based on things like apps for reviews, spend behavior, and real-time feedback from users. 

Ways to implement LiveOps into your game

These are just a few examples of how you can implement LiveOps into your game. 

  • New features, such as gameplay mechanic changes.
  • Exclusive content, new characters, or increased friendly competition create ways for players to show other players how far they’ve gotten to the game. 
  • Social content, such as guild competitions and battles. 
  • Live events. This is a way to get players to return to your game and help improve retention rates. 
  • Bundles. This can be a combination of any of the previous examples. 

The goals and keys to creating successful LiveOps events are to find concise event structures that resonate with your games player base that can be replicated or reskinned.

Think of the content treadmill. Over time, players are going to consume the content you are putting out there until they don’t care about it anymore. See what your users are spending their money on. And curate the most enticing chase prizes as possible. 

Your first LiveOps events may not create the engagement you were looking for — but be persistent, look at the data, and learn from your players. Before you dive into LiveOps, make sure you know your user and create an event or feature that keeps them coming back for more. 

Well, that’s it for now. I’m Dominic Minogue. Thanks for watching and see you next time.

Visit us on YouTube for more AppHacks and other informational and educational videos!

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