The Doctor is In
Engagement. Retention. Monetization. Growth. These metrics drive free-to-play success. Each are facets of a overall system with a talented team of people at its heart. MGD experts know how to move the right levers, at the right time, to generate sustained success. It is not easy, but we are here to help.
Game Design
Game Design is Mobile Game Doctor’s bread-and-butter. Let us provide support and direction for concepting, feature design, character design, level design, systems design, and game balancing across a wide variety of game genres and platforms. We also love to help internal game design teams level up with mentoring, guidance, workshops, and training.
Narrative Design
Trailer Park Boys innovated by bringing narrative progression to the Idle game genre. This creates a narrative “elder game”, tied the core gameplay to the meta-game, and driving much better retention than non-narrative Idle games. Our professional writing team can help you develop compelling original or branded narrative. We also offer mentoring for in-house writers.
Operations & Growth
For Free-to-Play games, launching is just the beginning of a multi-year journey of optimization and growth. Our Product Management and Marketing experts can help you forecast your business, prepare for fundraising, construct your live ops approach, create and prioritize your roadmap, deepen the connection between your team and your players, and bring high-quality new players into the game profitably.
Our Core Values
We aim to provide these three things in every client engagement
UNRIVALED
EXPERTISE
Decades of experience leads to better, faster outcomes
GENUINE
RESULTS
We measure success the same way you do: Meaningful, measurable results for your business
SERIOUS
FUN
You can’t make fun games if you’re not having fun doing it. Let’s have fun building games together
Every game and problem is unique,
so our treatment options must be too
When improving your game’s performance, what works for other games may not work for yours. Mobile Game Doctor engagements are tailored to your game, to achieve success as you define it.
Check Up
Check Ups take about 2 weeks. They are intended to provide a fresh perspective that can be acted on by a game’s design team. They are carefully templated analyses covering a wide range of critical free-to-play design and operational topics. A game design audit, for example, will cover FTUE design, creative direction, monetization integration quality, UI/UX, game balance, level design progression, user progression, retention mechanics, and long-term and social design feature-sets.
The client may request that a check up focuses on specific areas of concern or uncertainty in increased detail, or add topics for research and analysis that are outside the scope of the template to suit the client’s needs.
When you engage a Mobile Game Doctor expert to perform a detailed audit of your product, your concept/design, or some aspect of your operations such as team construction, analytics implementation, and/or marketing process you get:
The deliverables
- A fixed price project that contains costs.
- A dedicated senior consultant performs the check up.
- An in-house review so the MGD team contributes individual areas of expertise.
- A detailed 20-25 page analysis of the game’s strengths and weaknesses.
- A list of the most important actionable recommendations for improvement.
Specialized Treatment
Sometimes you already know what the problem is, but your team is struggling to address it as fast or as completely as you require. It’s time to bring in a specialist that knows just what to do for your particular project, because they have relevant, timely domain expertise that fits your needs perfectly. With resources all around the world, each with their own specialized skillset, we’ll provide just the right resource for you, or we’ll introduce you to someone who can.
Reach out and let us know what Free-to-Play expertise you need. Chances are we can put an expert on your team to help out. If not, we’ll refer you to someone who can.
Our expertise
- Free-to-Play feature design & balancing
- Economic design & balancing
- First time user experience (FTUE) Design
- Level design (especially for casual puzzle games)
- Free-to-Play live ops planning and management
- Ops and Analytics tools design, dashboarding, data integration, and data analysis
- Market research and marketability analysis
- Content pipeline planning
- Ad creative design and production
- User/Traffic acquisition
- Writing & narrative design
Intensive Care
It’s not uncommon to reach a stage, where nothing seems to be working and an overhaul seems unavoidable. Free-to-Play games require knowledge and expertise that just isn’t required for other business models, as well as a deep knowledge of how these specialities integrate with the whole. Long-term collaboration with Mobile Game Doctor experts can help resuscitate your project and get it back on track.
These kinds of collaborations are typically multi-month, or even multi-year affairs, and we are happy to discuss options for both long-term project pricing and performance-based compensation.
What to expect
- Working with our CEO and COO to clearly articulate what is needed and break it down into individual initiatives.
- Assignment of an MGD “Lead” to serve as primary point of contact to manage your project.
- Assembly of a team of MGD experts with domain expertise who work together to execute your plan.
- Integrating of our team with your team, existing processes, and tools.
- Ongoing project management/reporting ensures objectives are being met and any issues are raised and addressed.
Training Clinics
Experience matters in Free-to-Play design and operations. These businesses have so many moving parts – there is simply always something you just don’t know (yet).
Game development teams around the world are filled with talented, experienced, and dedicated individuals from other parts of the game industry who are struggling to wrap their minds around the demands of Free-to-Play. Our Doctors know how to build successful teams from these raw materials, and are on call to help you help them learn, glow, and succeed. Mobile Game Doctor is happy to provide at-need mentoring and guidance.
Workshop programs
- Building game design creative clarity
- Game design team development
- Designing for forever, intentional design for long term retention
- The opportunity and purpose of data-informed operations
- Performance marketing opportunities and limitations
- Leadership training
Meet our Mobile Game Doctors
Dave Rohrl
Founder
Dave is the founder of Mobile Game Doctor. He leads all the MGD game-design-related initiatives, game production and co-development initiatives, and assists on other projects as needed. Dave is a game industry veteran with more than 25 years experience designing and producing games for mass market audiences, including more than 11 years of free-to-play experience. Over the course of his career, he has led design or production on more than 50 games and overseen or consulted on dozens more. Dave has previously held management positions at Pogo, Zynga, Playdom, and PopCap, where he was immortalized as Crazy Dave in the game Plants vs. Zombies.
David Nixon
Chief Executive Officer
David leads all MGD marketing-related initiatives, and provides overall operational support as needed. He is a 30+ year industry veteran with experience in game design, project management, strategic operations, publishing, portfolio management, and live ops. He was one of the founding team members for Real Arcade, and helped establish the Casual Games industry heading Global Publishing for Real Arcade and then Oberon Media. David produced nineteen of the launch products for the original Xbox Live Arcade service, which kicked-started digital distribution of consoles games. He recently served as Principal Product Manager and then VP of Publishing for Wooga GmbH, and Chief Operations Officer for Lockwood Publishing.
