Enhancing Multi-Platform Gaming: Strategies for Excellence in LiveOps and Player Engagement

Ahead of the Live Service Gaming Summit, we spoke with Alexander Rehm, Director of Live Operations at People Can Fly. Drawing from his own experiences, he explored strategies for driving success and product growth through the effective utilization of LiveOps.

What strategies ensure high-quality gaming experiences across multiple platforms?

First and foremost, focus on your players: get feedback early and ensure your team receives this feedback (having a strong feedback loop is key for good operations). Analyse that feedback and use it to adapt your strategy and stay ahead of the game.

Data-informed decision making needs to be key in understanding what makes a high-quality experience: with your analysis, include community sentiment, understand what your content creators need, monitor industry trends and learn from what other games in your market do. Planning your execution: A good experience is one that joins up extrinsic and intrinsic engagements. What assets will be launched at the same time on social media? Is there going to be a collaboration with someone? Are your content creators set up? Are there any exclusives during that event or engagement that would drive a FOMO behaviour? Especially with new franchises, getting that planning right can really help garner more interest, more engagement, and a better experience for all.

Finally, learn and predict: what worked well? What did not sell? What event had the most hype? Learning from what you did and applying that to predict the success (in terms of player numbers, but also revenue) will be key.

How can LiveOps teams and leadership convert operational complexity into streamlined efficiency and drive product growth?

As leaders we need to understand what it is that is complex: is it the event or art pipeline? Is it a lack of resources in certain areas of the business? Or the prioritisation of game features over tooling that might add to the complexity? Once you understand what it is that the teams (LiveOps, marketing, dev, support, ... make sure you engage with all parties) find are the biggest complexities, work on identifying your lowest hanging fruit: what are quick wins that are not too difficult to change, and aim to provide teams with incremental improvements, as often as you can. It is often a balancing act and conflicting priorities, and we cannot always get everything as quickly as we would like - this is why we as leaders need to have a clear understanding of those needs and then discuss and agree a way forward. What helps is when teams can measure the impact of those changes - in terms of (less) time spent, faster deployment times, etc.

What can LiveOps teams do to improve workflows and enhance effectiveness and efficiency?

Work with your other teams directly and understand what is working and what isn't: which comms channels internally are successful, is the cadence of meetings and calls sensible, do we get the right data about our workflows and impact on the changes to the player experience? Are there certain activities on only one individual, and could sharing some of these activities reduce bottlenecks? In most cases in my career efficiencies could always be found in tooling, comms and (internal) sign-off processes, though each team and game may be different - and you can only get that through experience of delivering content to your players and doing after-action reviews after every release and asking the questions of "what went well", "what didn't work well?" and "what could work better?"

How does your team drive excellence in game functionality and operational integrity throughout the lifecycle of gaming products to meet strategic goals?

For us, having LiveOps considerations (events, content, cadence) integrated into the development process from day one is crucial to set the teams up for success. Additionally, we focus a lot on our active engagement with our players (especially the early ones) and being able to gather feedback and respond in a timely manner. Lastly, data, data, data! Providing the right data and analysis to the game teams, in a good cadence, will be important to ensure that we provide a consistent, positive and rewarding player experience.

What advice would you give to companies looking to scale up LiveOps resources to support the entire lifecycle of game products?

In all companies I worked in, the learning from moving from production into external testing, technical testing, alphas, betas, etc is immensely valuable for your teams to know where you need to grow, or where you are falling short still. Find out which areas you need to cover first and foremost and expect that some may be wearing multiple hats for a while, as you figure out which areas you need to focus on first, second, third. Training and education would come next for me: training in terms of understanding your tools and processes better, and education in terms of explaining the ‘why’ around tools requests and prioritising those and helping those with less live game experience in understanding best practices. Finally, think about streamlining processes and automating any repetitive tasks to free up staff for more strategic activities, as you learn and improve your ways of working and delivering a consistent and positive player experience.

What discussions are you hoping to have with your peers at the Live Service Gaming Summit?

I am keen to connect with my peers on their experiences over the past years, in particular on multi-platform releases, and I would be keen to understand what they are doing in terms of analysis and reporting / predictive data.