Building for Global Success: The Role of a Live Ops Manager During Soft Launch
By David Molnar, Vito Minerva, Alysha Hum
Live Ops Blog Series
Building for Global Success: The Role of a Live Ops Manage during Soft Launch
Creating Personalized Player’s experience for maximum engagement
Live Ops play a key role in a game’s success once it is released worldwide. Today we’ll give you an overview of strategies, tools, processes, and pipelines that should be implemented in the months and years leading up to launch.
While a project is in Soft Launch, it's our responsibility to ensure that the game and the team is prepared for worldwide Launch. In this article, we’ll deepen your understanding of Live Ops and their role in a product’s development cycle.
More specifically, we’ll focus on:
How Live Ops Managers should take advantage of the Soft Launch period to set the table for long-term success
How testing plays a key role during Soft Launch
How Live Ops Managers should build and test game content and events for worldwide launches (and beyond!)
What Live Ops Managers do all day!
Live Ops Managers must think about all the future needs, not just the strategy for events and offers (although that is a big part of it), including:
How will we communicate with players?
What tools does the team need to prepare, not only to run events, but to react quickly and on-the-fly to the game’s performance and current events?
A Day in the Life…
For a Live Ops Manager, each day is different and filled with new and exciting challenges. Although there is no such thing as a typical day, here is what Live Ops Managers can expect during the Soft Launch phase of game development.
Coffee or beverage of choice – The day cannot start without it.
Learning – There’s always something new to learn whether from colleagues, competitors, conferences, videos, or books.
Checking the news – Keeping up with what’s trending in the mobile gaming and console landscape encourages innovation at the project and studio level.
Playing our games – Knowing our games inside and out and all their possibilities are essential to developing a concrete strategy for the future.
Meetings – Whether it’s a daily stand up meeting or all-employee studio meeting, checking in and socializing with team members is a must, especially in the era of working from home.
Reviewing KPIs – New numbers are always coming and we must stay on top of the latest data.
The Development Process during Tech and Soft Launch
During Soft Launch, our priority is improving player oriented KPIs, such as retention rates by developing, balancing and implementing features to prepare the product for a successful launch to a global audience.
But before the Soft Launch period begins, the game is first tested in Tech Launch.
Collect data on the game’s technical performances, such as crash rates.
Ensure that the game’s foundations are solid to evaluate whether we’re ready to begin further development.
Soft Launch in 3, 2, 1…Defining a Product Vision and Monitoring the Competition
So, what’s the role of Live Ops Managers in a game’s development process during Soft Launch? Let’s go into further details. When we are readying for Soft Launch, the team already has defined product vision: genre, sub genre, style, audiences, etc.
Monitoring and studying the Live Ops features of competitors (current and upcoming games) is key to the development process. It’s also important to study games that were once promising but did not live up to expectations to learn from their mistakes and make sure not to repeat them.
Allows the design and product teams to have a clear picture on what’s currently trending on the market.
Helps identify upcoming trends.
Monitoring the competition does not mean plagiarizing. Rather, it means understanding why certain mechanics work, how they can fit in our game, and how we can improve on them.
The Right Event, for the Right Player, at the Right Time
During Soft Launch, a selection of Live Ops events is collected based on the product vision. They are categorized by target audience, event length, and required engagement levels. Other unique factors such as virality can also come into play.
After the categorization is complete, we are left with the types of events that best support our product and those that would work best with the game’s current stage of development and the player journey. For example, the first live event that a player engages with cannot be an event that unlocks only after 30 days of gameplay. Obviously.
Once we have a portrait of the event types suited to our game and vision, they are pitched to the stakeholders — Creatives, Designers, and the Product team — to evaluate which events will engage with our players and how we can deliver a unique experience. If the team agrees to implement the event/feature, the design team will deliver the documentation that will be used by the programmers and artists for integration, and the QA team to ensure the feature has been integrated as originally designed. Balancing features is important to provide a seamless gameplay experience.
From a monetization perspective, this is a secondary issue in the early Soft Launch phase, but it becomes more important as we approach worldwide launch.
Test, Test, and Test Again!
In the previous blog post in this series, we discussed the essential tools and functionalities that are key to run Live Ops successfully in 2021. A key point was the importance of running A/B tests. When we develop a new feature or modify an existing one, we want to learn as much as possible.
Each update comes with new features and content that we believe our players will enjoy. Before releasing the update, the content is tested in secure environments that is only available to our development and QA teams.
During Soft Launch, the DAU (daily active users) is not as high as after worldwide launch, since the game is only available in certain countries or to a small group of players to playtest.
When we develop a new feature or modify an existing one, we want to learn as much as possible. A way of getting feedback from players is playtesting. Here are the major steps for successful testing:
