Make Live Games players love
Your Product Mindset starts with a torrid affair
This is a loose transcript of the first few slides of a keynote I presented a couple of times this spring under the title “Make Live Games players love”. It was meant as an introduction for game producers in traditional game companies to the product mindset I believe is needed to succeed more (or, at least, fail less) when making Games As A Service. It is quite a specific audience, but one that keeps popping up in my conversations with leaders in the industry. I plan to start a new publication to explore further the concepts covered here. All images in this post are part of the presentation deck.
As a user, think about the products you might enjoy using daily, the ones you probably praise for providing a great experience that makes your life easier. Maybe the people who created it were making it for themselves, but you probably don’t even think about that. Instead, you are just grateful that this thing is in your life.
It’s almost like a love story! I often say that my iPad is my most successful and long-lived relationship. I go to bed with it every night, wake up with it next to me every morning, and it makes me happy. And yes, I get a replacement when it gets old, but let’s not talk about that right now.
Falling In Love
Jokes aside, I am going to bet it would be difficult for you to find anyone making products these days that disagrees with the fact being user-centric is crucial when building products.
And yet, I’ve found this is a challenging aspect of making games. It’s common to meet game creators who only want to work on games they want to play themselves. And when they are working on something different, a genuine concern is that, if put in a position to do so, they will try and steer it towards something they would indeed want to play, regardless of what players may think. Players will surely prefer their take on it!
I get it; passion is a strong driver for game developers, who usually get into the industry because of their love for games. However, my main takeaway today is that when creating Live Games, we need to re-direct that passion towards the player instead. Falling in love with our players, as opposed to our own ideas, is essential to help us succeed more when creating games as a service.
Having crossed over from traditional / AAA games to live mobile games, apps, and MMOs, I’ve spent the last few years developing and growing live services that, on the surface, could be considered atypical success stories such as Toca Life World, an award-winning sandbox app that enables kids to tell their own stories, or Star Stable Online, a popular MMO that inspires girls who love horses to live adventures together. But, on the contrary, I believe that these games are almost textbook examples of effective, user-centric product value generation. Furthermore, working on them has allowed me to experiment and adopt practices that, while well understood in the larger tech world, are yet to be common in traditional segments of the games industry.
To be clear, I haven’t invented anything new here. Instead, I am synthesizing and adjusting practices that have helped drive innovation in software companies for decades now, supporting the creation of products people actually want to use and providing higher chances of market fit and growth.
The Challenge with Live Games
A high-quality, on-time, on-budget game, even with a substantial number of players at launch, may not be considered a success after the dust settles — the criteria for success when delivering Games As A Service has shifted.
For each enduring live game success, such as Fortnite, Roblox, and League of Legends, we have other games that lose traction, struggle to stay in the market, or are shut down earlier than their creators would have liked. Yet, companies keep trying because the rewards of having a successful title in this space surely justify the efforts.
Everyone pretends to be an agile organization these days, embracing failure as a learning opportunity. But these games take so much time and effort that we owe ourselves to find ways to fail less often, even if success is never guaranteed.
The traditional path for game developers is to start with a great idea we are sure players will embrace.
Some market studies are made, publishers analyze the trends, identify segments, study business models, make projections, and go through some green light process. So it’s not like studios jump blindly into the pool. But this is typically a linear project development process, hardly what you would call product development. It’s the “Field of Dreams” school of product — build it, and they will come.
This approach occasionally works, it’s how most games we love have been made so far, but we may be putting out an idea looking for an audience that may or may not exist (and persist). And that is a hard sell for Live Games. How will we know that players will love it and want to play it for years and years to come?
I’ve seen people upset about this conundrum. Being told that what they know doesn’t really cut it, but without a clear way forward. Confusion quickly turns into resentment and the demand for clear definitions, frameworks, and templates for what they are supposed to deliver in this new reality — “if only we knew what games as a service means!”.
Well, there is no template, exact definition, or silver bullet. The one thing that shapes your service is the user. And the success of your service will be shaped by how much your users love it.
As an example of the power of customer love, look at Microsoft’s trajectory under Satya Nadella, who famously declared that as a company they made a pivot to talk in terms of customer love first. Only when they started to deliver what their users actually needed were they able to grow further as a company.
Player First
And so, when success depends on your players’ love, we got back to my first point. Having a love story with those players instead of with your own ideas can unlock long-term success in services.
Look, I am not trying to minimize anyone’s genius. Ideas matter, but they are also cheap, and without context, they can be pretty useless. As the say goes, everyone that has ever taken a shower has had an idea. Putting your players at the forefront helps channel ideas in the best way. That’s where the magic happens. So what does it look like when we take this approach?
First, if you want a scalable live game, find a clear audience segment instead of falling into the trap of thinking you are making a game for yourself. In product, we hear that around 30% of founders’ ideas come from trying to solve their own problems. But they still go through the process of discovering and validating if there is a scalable business behind tackling those.
As a game developer, you are not representative of your audience at large. We live in a bubble, breathing games 24/7. Most people out there don’t. Your players are not “personas”; they are multidimensional individuals with real lives who simply don’t need your game. And yet, you are hoping whatever you make for them will fit into their lives and create a relationship that lasts for years and goes beyond the engagement of a traditional game. Hard!
Take time to learn about your potential audience. Not with just a market study and a couple of surveys. And it’s not only about what games they play and how long. Get to know them, talk to them, learn what they are curious about, what inspires them, what they are afraid of, what they do in their spare time, who they spend time with, what they aspire to, and what moves them into action, what are their values, etc. You may see patterns, identify challenges and opportunities you didn’t think of, and understand what kind of experiences they may want to embrace and bring into their lives.
Next, apply your knowledge, expertise, experience, and ideas to craft experiences that you believe could be a match for these players in ways that create long-lasting relationships with them. And you do this with flexibility and humbleness, as your ideas will need to evolve along the way.
And it’s not as simple as doing whatever your players ask you to do. Treat direct requests as smoke signals but go beyond and understand the core need behind each request to deliver something that still manages to surprise and delight. Consider the insane amount of alternatives for entertainment your player has. You need to provide a significantly better experience than their preferred choice for your players to switch. Defining a narrow audience can help carve a niche to give you an initial fit you can build on top of, but that’s not going to be enough if your solution is not offering them something they find compelling enough.
As you build, you will want to involve players in validating and shaping the ideas constantly. Build a community where you can bounce ideas and test constantly. Try things with them; their behavior helps inform key decisions. You may discover that what you thought would work may not, and you may observe players engaging with certain aspects of the experience in ways you didn’t anticipate leading to new opportunities.
Search And Grow
If you as a business choose to create live games, you need to be aware it will affect everything. Not just what opportunities to pursue, but how you fund innovation, interact with your audience, develop your game, hire, organize your teams, lead, plan and execute your go-to-market, and most importantly, as mentioned before, your company culture.
A critical point you need to accept is that when we operate in the realm of live services, we are not delivering Projects anymore. Instead, we are building Products — a fundamental distinction.
Developing a game project going through a stage gate process, launching the thing, and handing it off to a live team may work… occasionally. However, this approach comes from a project mindset. It’s still linear thinking regardless of you having someone with a Product Manager title sitting somewhere in the office, of your teams using scrum, Early Access checkpoints, influencer marketing, battle passes, and public roadmaps.
Instead, product companies think in terms of “Search And Grow.”
Your game is a product that needs to resonate strongly with an initial audience segment. It’s not just “developing.” It is an actual search. You want to find that tipping point where it’s clear this is working for your audience, that your players stick around, and you also have strong evidence this live game is a business that can scale and grow to match your ambitions. After you reach this point, you can start the journey to grow it into a profit engine for your company. Tech startups and Free-To-Play mobile games developers know this very well, but the notion seems to escape most traditional game developers I meet.
The notion of “Search and Grow” is a take on the “Explore and Exploit” concept from Strategizer’s Business Portfolio Canvas, as presented in their 2020 book “The Invincible Company”[2]. This canvas provides fantastic visualization of the product journey, mapping it as we move from high to low uncertainty. Instead of charting a timeline, it represents the returns from our game versus the product risks at each stage. When discussing returns, we don’t necessarily mean just financial, but anything you expect your game to deliver. Like growing your brand, positively impacting society (as we tried to do with Star Stable Online), or anything else you are hoping to achieve.
Of course, development is part of the search and grow journey, but the big picture here goes beyond just that. The goal of Search is to get to the point where we have:
- A live game we clearly observe matters to players, who keep coming back regularly and enjoying it over a long period.
- We have some proof that it can scale beyond our initial chosen audience.
- We have strong evidence that it is a profitable business worth growing further.
- It is sustainable for our teams to operate.
From that point, this live service becomes part of our ongoing portfolio of products, moving into a Grow stage. From here, the goal is to make this product as much as possible a profit engine for the company while facing disruptions such as competitors, shifting market conditions, new regulations, or simply, our experience aging and becoming obsolete, with new players not finding compelling the idea of joining an older game.
And, of course, this journey is far from linear or straightforward. And yet, the industry continues using linear production frameworks and stage-gate processes to navigate this complexity.
Product Leaders
Remember what I said at the beginning: what we typically consider a project management success, delivering on time, on budget, and at the agreed quality level, will not guarantee a successful Live Game. If you want to create valuable experiences players love and engage with for years while delivering business returns, you need a product mindset.
Now, every game developer can develop a product mindset. It can become a core value for a team, and most will argue it already is. Strange is the team that won’t claim to be pushing things because they want to bring the absolute best to their players.
That is fantastic, and at the same time, it is relatively easy to misplace all that energy without clarity on the product as a whole, understanding the core audience’s actual needs and wants, and connecting to the business model and how the service will be financially viable and sustainable to deliver.
It is essential to develop the right leadership for Live Games; how we frame these roles can have a significant impact. A common challenge in traditional companies is the Producer’s role — yes, the definition of the role differs from company to company. But in most places, they are considered Project Delivery Managers primarily.
But, again, we are talking about products here, not projects. And so, I advocate for steering Producers (and other leadership) toward a Product Management stance. The responsibility for driving value creation for players in ways that benefit the business lies within Product Management, not Project Management.
When I hire Producers, I look for well-rounded product leaders equipped to enable teams and organizations to succeed in the Search & Grow journey. Their responsibilities, accountabilities, the capabilities we require from them, and the decisions we ask them to own need to reflect they are leading a product.
What they are building as a Live Game transcends the actual playable; the business model is the product [3], from day one, not something you do when the game is nearly done, and you realize you need to make a return somehow. And it will only hurt you to have Producers unable to see the whole picture.
On a Mission: A Product Culture
The players-first mindset needs to become part of your culture. You could think I am spoiled after working for value-driven companies with laser-focus alignment about their players, as Toca Boca and Star Stable Entertainment are. But even in these environments, creating conditions where everyone collectively adopts a player-first outcomes mindset is still not trivial. Depending on their background, it takes time for new starters to adjust.
The investment is worth it, though. Putting players first and understanding what impact your live game will create for them is a fantastic way to align a team, rally people around a mission, and channel our ideas in the best way.
Imagine you were pitching Star Stable Online to me. It is very different to hear “We’re going to make the best horse game in the market” than “We want to become the best alternative for girls who can’t own a horse in real life.” The former might sound ambitious but doesn’t tell me why we are even making this thing or what success looks like, while the latter conveys a player need I feel a lot more compelled to satisfy, one in which I will need to partner with such player to create something they will embrace for years.
What’s Next?
So far, this post has covered a quarter of my original presentation, and while there is a lot more to cover, I want to stop here for now.
I hope I have managed to 1) convey the high-level player-loving product mindset we need for Live Games, and 2) hint at how complex things can become when creating them. I’ve also tried to argue that the skills required for successful products go beyond those we typically use to deliver traditional games.
I see many industry leaders wondering why things don’t fully take off with their new live service reality. Without scratching too deep, what I often observe is a lack of a product mindset in their teams. Everyone can learn. But if we need to start somewhere, I believe that leaders such as Producers are in a prime position to go beyond JIRA tickets and standups to develop the skills to lead from a product stance if the company truly empowers them.
I typically find many skill gaps when I try to hire for Producer roles from the traditional games industry, with my most successful hires coming from other industries or possessing a mix of experiences. This makes for a bittersweet reflection — we must collectively level up our product people for better outcomes.
Thanks to Doanna Neville and Mayara Fortin for their feedback and for helping to improve this post.
References
[1] Product curve and terms based on The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen (Harper 2021)
[2] The Search and Grow concept and Business Portfolio Canvas are part of The Invincible Company by Alexander Osterwalder, et al. (Wiley 2020)
[3] Read more about the business model as the product on Ash Maurya’s Running Lean 3rd. Edition (O’Reilly 2022)
Image References
[1] Neon heart photo by Allec Gomes: https://www.pexels.com/photo/neon-heart-shining-in-red-9762615/
[2] Promotional still from “The Notebook” by Nick Casavettes, New Line Cinema, 2004
[3] Still from “Toy Story 3” by Lee Unkrich, Walt Disney Pictures, 2010
[4] Kids playing at Toca Boca’s office
[5] Still from “I Love That For You” created by Vanessa Bayer and Jeremy Beiler, Annapurna Television, 2022
[6] Star Stable Online key art by Marie Beschorner
All images are copyright to their respective owners.
