Making Liveops Ready for Web3

LiveOps has become the lifeblood of games, especially on mobile. LiveOps boosts player retention and extends lifetime value (LTV). According to SensorTower, titles incorporating LiveOps generate 30x more revenue on average than those without. Therefore, it’s fair to say that LiveOps stands at the core of games’ business models.

Top-grossing games are all using LiveOps

Game LiveOps, short for live operations, describes the continuous updating and evolution of games after their release. This includes bug fixes, the introduction of new features, time-limited events, shop offers, and more. The goal is to extend a game’s lifespan and drive monetization to optimize the winning formula of lifetime value vs customer acquisition costs.

As the phrasing “continuous” correctly hints at, LiveOps heavily relies on data to improve over time. The more data one has about their players, the more targeted the offers, events, etc. Personalization of content ensures players only receive relevant messages that capture their attention. They don’t develop “notification blindness” because spam is minimized. As a result, players are more satisfied, retain longer, and conversion rates rise. Personalization of offers is equally important as it allows for price discrimination, thereby strengthening revenues. 

The first enabler of LiveOps has been the internet, allowing developers to update their games after the initial release. The second big driver that catapulted LiveOps into the limelight was mobile gaming, where it became an integral part of the Free-to-Play business model. The next big step for LiveOps is web3. Web3 gaming ecosystems open up new ways for players to interact with games, whether that’s staking, trading, providing liquidity, renting out game assets, betting on tournaments, or creating UGC assets like Helika partner Shrapnel is planning to do. We believe LiveOps will be 10x bigger for web3 games as it can now include actions outside the game and a combination of in-game and out-of-game activity geared toward new web3 player archetypes. 

This upcoming era of LiveOps requires new tools that bring together in-game and onchain data. That’s why we built Helika Engage.

Features of Helika Engage

Helika Engage consists of three interconnected components.

Logic System

Our engine employs “if this then that” (IFTTT) logic, enabling game studios to segment players, change game state, host personalized events, award players with in-game currency, and more. The system features various operators (<, >, =, =/=, AND, OR) and multipliers for teams to create any kind of relationship between an input and an output.

Examples

• IF the player has a playtime 5 hours <= p <= 2 hours AND hasn’t logged in in the last 2 days THEN give them 5 gold as a comeback reward

• IF the player’s lifetime spendings s <= 100$ AND wallet net worth n <= 10,000$ THEN discount all shop offers by 15%. Multiply the discount by 2x for every time they ignored previous offers until a max discount of 60%

• IF the player stakes s >= 10,0000 of the game’s token OR holds other gaming tokens worth >= 25,000$ THEN give them access to the exclusive high roller event

The logic scheme can include both offchain and onchain data, providing games with more information and greater flexibility. LiveOps now expands to activity and information that’s outside of the game.

Support Portal

Our support portal serves as a customer service software for gathering and summarizing player feedback efficiently. Discover insights and feed them right into your LiveOps management. For example, if tournament events are well-received, run them on a regular schedule. Do users get stuck on the wallet creation step during onboarding? Change the workflow.

Teams can also proactively manage complaints and increase player satisfaction. For instance, programmatically award players a discount for IAPs based on the severity of the issue.

Version control

Adapt in-game parameters without having to do an app update. This is especially helpful when handling onchain elements, such as tokens and NFTs, as these cannot be revised easily. Version control allows game studios to swiftly react to new situations, for example reducing rewards to better balance the economy and safeguard against sybil attackers.

Data seamlessly flows between all three components which improves actionability. As an illustration, a player providing valuable feedback through the support portal can be added to the “highly engaged” player segment, inviting them to test upcoming beta features.

The LiveOps engine is also tightly integrated with the rest of Helika’s product suite, namely end-to-end attribution, holder insights, and social sentiment analysis. This permits comprehensive approaches to marketing, LiveOps, lifecycle management, and web3 strategy only possible with an all-in-one platform.

• Marketing data can serve as a signal for LiveOps. For example, players acquired via owned channels like TikTok or X may show an elevated LTV curve.

• Holder stats and sentiment can feed into the LiveOps logic. A decreasing floor price caused by long-term holders selling their NFTs may indicate dissatisfaction. Social sentiment analysis may show that holders are demanding more in-game analytics utility. A potential solution could be exclusive events for holders or increasing the rewards multiplier for stakers.

LiveOps Use Cases with Helika Engage

Game studios can utilize offchain and onchain data to segment players and personalize content, monetization, customer relationship management, and in-game economics.

Segmented IAP Offers

Optimize revenues by tailoring shop offers to players based on data points such as their in-game engagement, progression, spending patterns, geography, and user acquisition channel. Now, you can also tap into onchain information, such as a user’s net worth and transaction patterns to precisely forecast a player’s LTV curve.

Web3 further provides you with an additional revenue stream as high spenders can be turned into NFT or token holders, where prices are not bound by the rules of gatekeepers like it is the case for IAPs.

On-the-fly Battle Passes & Leaderboards

Run seasonal challenges (daily, weekly, monthly) targeted toward specific player segments. Events can help to re-engage churned players, lift the number of sessions played by active users, and incentivize spending which can boost monetization and restore the economic balance of in-game assets. The latter is especially important in web3 where value accrual to economic assets is expected.

Challenges can encompass in-game, onchain, and social media actions to provide variety and speak to all player archetypes, including new web3 specific audiences. By tailoring battle pass challenges to individual players, teams can boost retention and motivate users to bring value to the game’s ecosystem in ways that fit their interests.

You can also run leaderboards for players’ contributions, onchain and offchain, to provide a sense of progression and reward your most-valuable community members.

No-code Play-to-Airdrop Campaigns

A special form of events in web3 gaming are Play-to-Airdrop campaigns. Here, players are rewarded with tokens at the end of the event. Often utilized for user acquisition of newly launched games, teams face the challenge of sybil attackers, people/bots that try to get as large of an airdrop share as possible. Helika uses offchain and onchain data to identify sybil attacks. Discovered sybil accounts can be assigned a special segment which the LiveOps engine then cuts airdrop rewards for. This is also better for real players who no longer get diluted by sybils and receive a larger airdrop share.

Beyond sybil protection, Helika Engage can also be employed to increase the effectiveness of Play-to-Airdrop campaigns. Game studios can distribute customized airdrop rewards to players based on offchain and onchain data. This targeted approach means games give out tokens based on the player’s expected value. This tactic is similar to web2 where CPM bids are different for Tier 1 compared to Tier 2 countries.

Moreover, LiveOps data can inform the campaign’s design. For example, an insight might be that retaining a player for 7 days straight increases LTV by 20%. The Play-to-Airdrop campaign could then require players to log in and play 8 days in a row.

Helika Engage allows games to optimize their Play-to-Airdrop campaigns for valuable player cohorts without the hassle of building a complex infrastructure system to find them.

Connecting LiveOps and Lifecycle Management

The LiveOps engine can feed data into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) service and vice versa to optimize effectiveness. For instance, players who have churned for 3 days will be allocated a comeback reward which they’ll be informed of via a notification.

Lifecycle Management in web3 has the special characteristic that it expands to activities that take place outside the game. NFT or token holders might be separate from players, turn into players after some time, or include churned players who will keep holding game assets. To manage the full web3 lifecycle, LiveOps tools like Helika’s are needed that combine offchain and onchain data points.

Localization

Localization is increasingly expected by gamers in all regions such as SEA, LATAM, and MENA, all growing geographies. Translation, localized events, and localized content (e.g. character designs, levels) have been shown to improve engagement, retention, and revenues.

Iterative Development

Drive retention by improving the game experience for players via bug fixes, technical optimizations, revised UX, and new features. Helika’s data insights and the user feedback collected in the support portal can feed right into your development roadmap and LiveOps plans.

We can’t wait for you to get your hands on our LiveOps engine, launching in March 2024.

Want to be among the first to try it? Book a demo with our team!