Live Operations (LiveOps) is the lifeblood of any free-to-play game, especially on mobile. LiveOps is about delivering new features, updates, promotions, and in-game events to keep the game fresh and fun. Such ongoing improvements can enrich player experience, boost engagement, and drive monetization.
Though LiveOps has been a big part of gaming for at least fifteen years, getting data on live events and their impact on key metrics has always been tricky. Collecting and processing this information can be time-consuming and expensive, especially due to the secretive nature of any internal development. However, AppMagic has introduced a solution that makes event analysis much easier and cheaper: the
LiveOps and Updates Calendar by AppMagic.
This new product provides producers, product managers, and game designers with all the information they need to understand how LiveOps is managed in top games on the market. It shows the types of features presented to players, the frequency and variety of events, thorough deconstruction of updates, and most importantly, how these events impact various KPIs.
Calendar Overview: Event Schedule and Its Impact
Let’s take Monopoly Go as an example. The LiveOps & Updates Calendar shows the events occurring within a set timeframe for the chosen game, alongside a graph of the metric you want to track. It’s a one-stop view that can show the frequency and density of the events in perspective. Above the event grid, there is a performance chart that shows how this or that update influenced the targeted metric.
The metrics selection allows switching between Revenue, Downloads, DAU/MAU and Retention (Day 1, 7, 14, 30). The events are categorized and color-coded as One Time, Regular, Irregular, and Seasonal. By scanning this chart, it’s easy to quickly identify which activities might have correlated with boosts or declines in the selected metrics.
But this is just the beginning. For each game in the calendar, there are additional tools that help to search and analyze specific events.
Deconstructing the Events: Filters and Expert Commentary
The next important feature is the filter tool, which allows for narrowing down the specific type of events for research. For example, if you are looking for Long Seasonal events that monetize with Passes or Holiday events incorporating Competitive mechanics — just select the needed parameters and get the results.
Not only will this highlight selected events on the schedule, but it will also show detailed information about them. Expert commentary will describe how the event works, explain the reasons behind crucial game design decisions, and outline the goals the event is achieving.
Equally important, the commentary will indicate if there are reskinned versions of the event in the game and name similar events in competitors’ projects. And of course, there are screenshots for each event, so that you could get the full picture and save your time.
Learning Best Practices from the Market
One of the biggest challenges in staying updated about the latest events’ trends is playing all the games and tracking all the updates. It’s not just very time-consuming, but you can also miss a lot of information: some events are only for veteran players, others are time-limited, or run only during weekends.
This makes it impossible for a producer to simply download the top 10 games and be fully informed about all the live events and their details. This is why this tool is so valuable. It automatically tags all events with categories for filtering and provides comprehensive descriptions of each event, covering both narrative and gameplay aspects.
In the example pictured above, the description and screenshots quickly show that these two Monopoly Go events are just reskins of the same mechanics. This gives you an idea of the level of novelty and creativity of certain events and shows examples of effective reuse of assets and mechanics. Together with the metrics, the calendar allows you to assess the impact of reskinned events and see how players reacted to them, which can be especially useful for planning your own schedule.
Overall, the new
Live Ops and Updates Calendar by AppMagic is a must-have feature for any team running a Live Ops game in today’s market. This tool provides invaluable data that cannot be obtained elsewhere and saves product managers and producers hours of research and gameplay to collect data and report back. I will certainly use this for all analysis work for my clients as well as in my own studio.
