Live Service Layered Cake — Part IV
The Live Events
This text is the fourth part of a new series of texts about metagame design and live service monetization of free-to-play games. You can read the previous parts on the following links: Part I, Part II, and Part III.
Layer 3 — limited-time events
Limited-time events are the bread and butter of live service. Coming up with new limited-time events is what your live team should be doing most of the time. I am talking here about the limited-time events in the narrow sense, i.e. events that have prescribed time duration and a significant game component.
The main purpose of limited-time events is not monetization. The main purpose of these events is player retention. Free-to-play games are all about routine making. The main, static part of the metagame is about building a regular daily routine for the player. Routines, however, eventually by definition become repetitive and boring, no matter how well crafted. Limited-time events are all about breaking the routine.
Ideally, a limited-time event would offer either a departure from the usual game rules or a new context for normal game activities. For example, Touchdown Tournaments in Clash Royale offer a new set of rules by which the game is played. These rules would likely not work as an individual game but offer a nice periodic diversion from the standard gameplay.
The whole right page of the main screen of Family Island is crowded with limited-time event icons.
Typically, a limited-time event will offer a player a reward or a range of rewards that can be won for a limited time only. By definition, the player has only a limited amount of time to qualify for the reward. Typically, a player needs to obtain a specific amount of points, or currency in order to gain a reward. These points can be won by doing specific event-related activities.
Family Island Events always feature their own unique event currency.
These event points act as a distinct virtual currency. This has several advantages. Above all the sources and sinks of this currency can be tightly controlled separately from the rest of the game economy. Second, this currency has only a limited time duration. It gets vaporized after the end of the vent. Both of these things ensure that this currency will not get inflated.
Offering more than one reward with different point requirements gives a chance to more players to win at least something, and not leave the event empty-handed. It makes the balancing of the event easier, as players with various engagement levels can be rewarded adequately.
Rewards work best if they are a mix of unique new content, old content, and evergreen items and resources. In this way, various types of players have a better chance of finding a reward that is to their liking.
Rewards can be presented in the form of a catalog with prices. This format has the advantage that the player can freely pick and choose the order of rewards, starting from the referred ones first. However, this can lead to players abandoning the event once they have unlocked the rewards they like, ignoring the rest.
Another way to present rewards is using a reward track, i.e. a list of reward tiers that a player needs to unlock in a sequence. The most enticing rewards can be placed on the end of the track, boosting feature retention. In this way, even an implicit narrative of scaling rewards can be built. However, this format can feel grindy and exhaustive to the players.
From the monetization perspective, this type of feature tends to work best as indirect monetizing. The very notion that they are limited in time presents a challenge to the player. The player should be able to overcome this challenge by wisely using his resources and consequently his money.
To maximize the monetization potential this type of event should be paired with the targeted offers, described in the following sections.
Finally, one last parameter regarding the limited-time events is their duration and cadence. Ideally, in order to make your live game feel truly alive there should be something new happening in your game every single day. limited-time events are only one of the middle layers of the live service. They are meant to work in conjunction with all other layers. You should aim at having at least one live event per month if not one per week in your live service. The cadence depends on the ability of your live team to produce the needed content.
The duration of these events is typically guided by the pacing of your core gameplay. If your game is relatively face paced and revolves around quick matches and short gameplay sessions, this should be reflected in the duration of the live events. Such games usually include live events lasting from one to five days. If your game is more leisurely paced, as is the case with the farm games, live events that last several days or even up to two weeks, might be more suitable.
Tying your live events to the dates in the real-life calendar allows your game to stay relevant. You are also going to piggyback upon the general marketing hype built around the main holidays during the year. It is also something that the players expect. It is natural to expect something in the game tied to Christmas, St. Valentines, or Halloween. When Starbucks starts serving Pumpkin Spice Latte it is time to see carved pumpkins in the game.
Layer 4 — Periodic Events
This live service layer consists of events that occur on a regular cadence. While the previous set of live events typically requires a significant amount of actual design work and hand-crafting for each new instance of the event, this category of events can be to at least some degree automated. In other words, the individual instances of these events follow an established template that can sometimes be triggered automatically.
Typical examples of such events are regular daily or weekly competitions. For example, both SimCity BuildIt and Hay Day run their own set of weekly competitions known as the Contest of Mayors and Derby respectively. In both cases, these features are run fully automatically by the game’s backend. Both of these features are indirectly monetizing relying on evergreen purchases and periodic offers to deliver on the monetization front.
For a detailed analysis of these features see my previous text: Link
Daily Tasks or Daily Quests are another extremely common type of periodic event. This type of feature is one of the oldest in the free-to-play world. It had its origins even back in the premium days of games such as jet pack Joyride. In fact, daily tasks are so common that nowadays even non-game applications like Duolingo have them. They are so ubiquitous that they are often overlooked. However, they can be extremely important. In many games, they serve to establish the regular daily context for interacting with the core gameplay. They are often the first step that binds the minute-to-minute interaction with the rest of the metagame.
Since they require at least minimal engagement of players during the day they tend to perform far better than simple login bonus features. While the login bonus rewards the player for simply starting the game, these tasks ask the player to actually play the game. Playing even one round of the core should remind the player of the joys of the game leading back into the groove of gameplay.
Another typical and very popular example of such features is various incarnations of the premium pass mechanics. I have previously written about the premium pass features in detail. You might want to take a look at this text, Link.
Keep in mind that in most incarnations premium pass features include a certain amount of new content. This means that they rarely run completely automatically and require some amount of handcrafting.
The true power of these periodic events comes from their periodicity. They provide regular time-boxed context for playing the core gameplay. A player has a renewed reason to revisit the core game each week over and over. These features provide the player with a set of goals to go after in each new round. As such these features tend to stabilize both the retention and the monetization of the game.
Layer 3 should actually form the backbone of your live service. Layer 2 should provide the muscle.
Layer 5 — Offers
I have reserved the offers for the last layer in this hierarchy, not because they are the least important. It is just the opposite. The offers are really where live service should deliver the punch. These are by definition the direct monetization features. However, their true power comes from the spending context created in conjunction with the rest of the metagame and especially with the rest of the live service layers.
There are several kinds of offers that free-to-play games employ, including:
- Targeted offers
- limited-time Offers
- Periodic offers
Each of these types of offers has its distinct purpose and should have its place in your monetization strategy.
As the name implies targeted offers are focused on a particular subset of the player base. There are several ways in which offer targets can be selected.
Players can be targeted based on their progression within the game. For example, an offer can be triggered automatically when a player reaches a particular experience level, or when a player unlocks a specific segment within a game, for example, a new arena. This type of targeting makes use of the context provided by the game progression. A player unlocking a new arena would benefit from buying a bundle of resources allowing him to be competitive in the new level of competition.
Starter packs are one special type of such targeted offers. One key thing to remember about them is the moment at which they are offered. Starter packs are offered very early in the game and are specially designed to be the first purchase that a new player makes. At this point, the player most likely doesn’t yet have a firm grasp of the game’s economy. For most other target offers the player is likely to already understand the context of the game. The player already has a mental model of the relative value of items and currencies in the game. Establishing a value proposition for a particular offer is, at least in theory, easier. The player will compare the value of every offer to other purchases in the game. The player will compare the value of the starter pack to his mental model formed outside of the game, guided by real-life experiences and other games.
Since the aim of starter packs is to give a boost to novice players and to normalize the spending in the game, they are one exception where going below the impulse purchase threshold is justifiable!
The players can also be targeted by other criteria. One typical example of targeting players is based on their spending profile. The evergreen purchases from layer 1 and layer 2 can serve as good guidance for this. A player that has already made several big purchases in the store might not be interested in a relatively cheap offer that yields relatively few resources. On the flip side, showing an expensive offer bundle to a player that has not spent at all or spent a relatively modest sum is not likely to produce results. Finally offering a deep discount to players that are likely to make a full-price purchase of similar items is probably bad for business.
Finally, players can be targeted based on some more idiosyncratic rules. Most games with a feature-rich metagame have a player base that consists of several distinct player segments. These segments can be characterized in terms of player interaction with one or a set of features. Once these clusters are identified through data analysis, distinct player profiles can be built for each of these clusters. Each of these player profiles would benefit from a different set of offers.
limited-time offers represent a different category of offers. Again as the name implies these offers are usually tied to limited-time events. They are supposed to be the direct monetization counterpart of the indirect monetization limited-time events. The context in which they operate is created by the event itself. They should offer a chance to the player to wisely invest money in order to obtain the goals. For example, if an event is going to require the use of a particular character, offering a set of upgrade cards during the event might make sense.
Finally, periodic offers are a type of offers that are shown to players based on a fixed predetermined schedule tied to the real-world calendar. The end of the month, or the end of the week sales, are typical examples of such offers. The advantage of these offers comes from their regularity. They tend to reinforce repeated purchase behavior. The most successful free-to-play games become digital hobbies for their most dedicated players. Such players tend to build a habit or a spending routine. — I love this game and spend 10€ on it each week. For that money, I get 50 gems and 20 power-ups. I use the powerups to win matches and gems to open loot boxes -. The sum of 10€ is really not all that much for a hobby, it’s the price of 3 cups of coffee, but it comes up to more than 500€ per year. Repeated offers maximize this player behavior.
On the other hand, the regularity is the main disadvantage of these offers. The players are smart. They will come to rely on them and avoid buying anything at full price if they can count on offers regularly occurring. If you are planning to integrate this type of offer, make sure to factor in their discount to the very basic structure of your game economy.
Synergy
If you are working on a live game, most of the stuff I was talking about so far must seem painfully familiar to you. However, just stacking the layers of the live service one on top of another is not enough. The true magic starts happening if they start operation in synergy.
One of the most essential parts of organizing a successful live service is to find a way to make these layers work together and complement each other.
Examining the difference in the time horizons of various layers of your game is a good starting point. Your core gameplay is often called minute-to-minute interaction. These are activities that are expected to occupy the player’s attention for several minutes, i.e. during one play session. On the opposite end of the spectrum, your metagame should ideally retain players for months if not years.
The life service part of the metagame is there to bridge this time gap! Here also various layers play slightly different roles. Typically limited time events have a duration ranging from a single day to a week or two at maximum. This produces a nice set of medium-term goals for players to aim for while enjoying their minute-to-minute gameplay on a long journey through the metagame.
This pattern is further reinforced by periodic events, Ideally, these should have a regular rhythm and a time duration that again bridges the time difference between limited-time events and the long metagame. This is why these events tend to work best if they are timed to last anywhere from a week to several weeks. Premium pass seasons are generally designed to last between one to two months with 6 weeks being often the norm!
Stacked on top of one another these layers produce a timeline dense with goals that a player can pick and choose and aim for.
In the best case, you should make these events work together. If you are planning to run a sale offering premium currency or a bundle of items at a discount. It makes sense to schedule it so that it would overlap with an event that would open up a new sink for whatever you are selling. Creating an immediate need for the item which are on sale, helps present the value of the purchase to the player. It also helps to offset the possible problems of the cannibalization of regular sales, as players are likely to spend a significant amount of stuff that they just purchased during the event.
Finally, in the ideal case, participation in one type of event should also provide players benefits in other events.
Consider for example a very common case of Christmas live events. Assume that the game has an ongoing weekly competition, thematized premium pass seasons, and a system of live events. To maximize the impact of the live service, the premium pass season that runs at the regular schedule and coincides with Christmas should bring in a set of new Christmas-themed content. It should also provide the player with some resources that can be used in live events. The live events happening in parallel should bring yet more content that thematically fits in with the stuff gained from the premium pass. They should also feature gameplay that acts as a sink for the items obtained there.
This synergy can be further reinforced by having a special section in an item catalog or a similar feature, creating a mini collection that the player should complete by engaging with both types of limited-time events.
Furthermore, since both the pass season and the Christmas event are time-boxed, many of the players would benefit from having a sale offering suitable Christmas-themed bundles of items that can be used to gain the rewards from the events faster.
This scheme creates a very dense and interconnected set of features. A player should ping pong from one layer onto another to gain a holistic gameplay experience. Various layers thus support each other maximizing each other’s benefits.
Building the Cake
It is also important to note that each layer of the cake should be able to stand its own legs independently from the rest of the edifice. In this way, you can afford to build one layer at a time, focusing your development efforts to optimize the thing that you are building. This approach reduces the dependency between features during the development time while maximizing their dependencies once they are operational and reasonably optimized.
There is a tendency for various development teams to bite more than they can chew and build a very complex set of features before gaining the full understanding of the thing that they are making. Each separate layer of the cake needs to be validated in practice separately! If you attempt to ship a very complex and very interconnected metagame structure in one huge go, it is likely that you would not be able to tell which aspects of it are not working and why. Trying to optimize a dynamic system over multiple parameters all at once is not a sound strategy.
Focus on one layer at a time, and get it into operational shape, before moving to the next one, but always keep in mind the grand vision of the layered cake and the layer synergy!
Conclusions
In this chapter, we have finally delved into the depths of the live service. The true power of seeing live service as a set of multiple layers comes from the synergy of various systems. This requires some careful planning of both the development schedule, roadmap, and live service calendar.
So far I have spoken only about very typical types of features. In a way, these are the features that almost all successful games need to have in this day and age. In the following and the last part of the series, I will discuss some additional advanced monetization features that are gaining importance as we speak.
Key Takeaways
- Limited-time events are important for player retention and breaking the routine of daily gameplay.
- Offering a range of rewards with different point requirements allows for a wider range of players to win something.
- Rewards should be a mix of unique new content, old content, and evergreen items and resources.
- Limited-time events should occur frequently, with duration and cadence dependent on the pacing of the core gameplay, and tied to real-life calendar events for relevancy.
- Periodic events occur on a regular cadence and can be automated to some degree.
- Examples of periodic events are regular daily or weekly competitions, such as SimCity BuildIt’s Contest of Mayors and Hay Day’s Derby.
- Daily tasks or daily quests establish regular daily context for interacting with the core gameplay and provide a set of goals to go after in each new round.
- Premium pass features are another typical and very popular example of periodic events, including a certain amount of new content and requiring some amount of handcrafting.
- The true power of periodic events comes from their periodicity, providing regular time-boxed context for playing the core gameplay, stabilizing both the retention and the monetization of the game.
- Offers in free-to-play games are important for direct monetization and their power comes from the context created in conjunction with the rest of the metagame and live service layers.
- Different types of offers are employed, including targeted, limited-time, and periodic offers, each with its distinct purpose and place in a monetization strategy.
- Targeted offers can be based on game progression, spending profile, or player segments, limited-time offers are tied to events, and periodic offers reinforce repeated purchase behavior but players may come to rely on them and avoid buying anything at full price.
- The success of a live game depends on making various layers of the game work together and complement each other.
- The time horizons of different layers should be examined to bridge the time gap between short-term and long-term goals.
- Limited-time events, periodic events, and offers should be timed and designed to produce a timeline dense with goals for players to pick and choose from.
- Each layer of the cake should be able to stand on its own legs independently and be validated separately to optimize its performance while keeping in mind the grand vision of the layered cake and layer synergy.
