Launch and Live OPS Planning

Plan for the long term success of your free-to-play game

Launch and Live Ops Planning is crucial to not only the successful launch of a free to play game, but also to it’s long term growth and success. As part of this service, a product manager with years of experience in the free to play gaming industry will work with your development team to evaluate the current state of your game and team to help gauge the readiness state of the product. This will include evaluating tools and processes in place or needed to create a successful product launch, everything from data analytics structures to social media plans to content and release cadence and A/B testing.

This service is for the new developer launching their very first game, as well as established game companies that are pivoting into a new target market or live operations for the first time.

We Can Help With Your Launch and Live Ops Planning

1

A launch plan will provide your team with the confidence to launch your game into the market knowing that an industry expert has provided advise of common pitfalls and costly mistakes to avoid in this pivotal moment for your company.

2

A Live Ops plan developed with one of our world class product managers will give your team the knowledge on the next few months of key growth points for your product along with ways to measure and track success in those initiatives and warning signs to watch out for.

3

Working with us on your Launch and Live Ops plans gives you an outsider perspective on the way your team and product are planning and performing without the closeness to the project that can often make teams overlook serious issues. We can provide an objective diagnosis and suggestions for improvements that can find a balance between your team’s creative vision and tried and tested business performance.

How it Works

Over the past decade, we have come to the conclusion that the impact, purpose, and perception of commonly referenced pre-launch stages like “beta” or “early access” or “soft launch” are misunderstood by most product teams. At MGD we operate under the philosophy that you are either LIVE or NOT LIVE, and the transition happens the moment you make the game available to any player anywhere in the “real world” (eg – user testing in a controlled environment does not count as LIVE). In addition the concept of a “Full Launch” has become less and less relevant for software-as-a-service businesses like free-to-play games. We look at the transition from NOT LIVE to LIVE as occurring in three stages.

We break down the process of Narrative Design into three major steps:

Launch Planning

Ideally this should take place before the game is available in the wild in any form on any platform or market. The purpose of this process is quantify both the marketing approach/plan for the game and the live ops transition plan for the development team and tangental resources. 75% of the issues teams face during what is commonly called “Soft Launch” would have been avoided by having a comprehensive launch plan ahead of time.

Launch Execution

This is driven primarily by a live ops Product Manager with support from the Marketing and Production teams. It follows the high-level vectors laid out in the Launch Plan, but the purpose is not to slavishly execute that plan. Rather this is an ongoing, iterative feedback loop with players with the goal to provide a positive response to the question “Are we ready to scale to the next level?”

Scaling

When the answer to the Launch Execution question is “yes”, then Marketing takes the lead to drive a much higher distribution volume until it becomes clear that the product has reached a new growth plateau. Everyone else is tasked to immediately jump on and solve any technical, community, or content problems that come up as a result of this audience scaling.