A decade of live ops: Keeping creativity, player communities and gameplay alive

Tommy Prentice is product lead at Exient and Steve Cassar Laudi is a senior data analyst. 

Game studios have faced a perfect storm in 2024. New user acquisition is proving difficult, business models are under scrutiny, and the challenge of keeping existing players engaged is tougher than ever.

But is there a silver lining? Are there opportunities for studios with established back catalogues to leverage the power of live ops to breathe new players and revenues into their older titles?

At Exient, we’ve been designing and running live ops in games for over ten years (Angry Birds Transformers 10 years, Lemmings 5 years), so we would like to share insights into what we have learned during that time. 

Specifically, we’ll spotlight the secrets of keeping the creative spark alive in your teams, using first-party analytics to make data-driven decisions, building great community relationships – and achieving all of those things within an economically sustainable framework.

In fact, according to recent data from Griffin Gaming Partners, a staggering 66% of studios view live ops as essential for long-term success.

So, how can your studio leverage live ops to keep your game ambitions on target?

Keeping the spark alive: Creative fire and team motivation

Maintaining a steady flow of content for a long-term live ops model can be a creativity drain for even the most passionate teams. We have been relatively lucky that Lemmings (infinite tribe and world possibilities) and Transformers (decades of characterisation and lore to draw from) offer bountiful source materials.

However, that’s not always the case, particularly with original or newer IPs – so how can we keep the creativity flowing?

Theme your updates: Plan content seasons around holidays, special events, or anniversaries to keep things fresh.

Festive seasonal content has always been a key fixture in our content roadmap. We take our projects and give them a lick of paint and a refresh to fit the current seasonal occasion. Christmas is the perfect example of this, with snow and tinsel being a staple throughout our titles.

The cosmetics we offer during this time relate to the event, and we always see a nice uptick in engagement from our players. It’s important to consider the markets in which your game performs best to help determine the seasonal events you should be targeting.

We have also had good success with theming our more general content releases. Often, this is achieved by adding a narrative that helps players better engage and understand our new offerings.

A really positive example was the addition of a new trap/instruction to ‘Lemmings: A Puzzle Adventure’: instead of being marketed as exactly that, we called it our ‘Big Bang Update’, which was oriented around explosions and the fact that a new technology had been discovered in the Lemmings narrative. We also used this narrative to engage across our marketing efforts, including platform features across Apple and Google.

Focus on variety: Introduce new gameplay mechanics, characters, or challenges alongside regular content drops. 

Players love variety almost as much as they love consistency, which may come across as an oxymoron. In the live ops space, regular content becomes an expectation really quickly for players, so it’s super important to keep these content releases fresh and of high quality to keep players engaged and coming back for more.

Variety is also key for the teams working within the project. Enthusiasm and morale are key elements of success, as it can be easy for live ops to become repetitive, which can be a real creativity blocker.

Empower your team: Give developers ownership over small projects within the larger roadmap, fostering creativity and engagement.

No one else knows your projects better than the team working with their boots on the ground. They experience it day in and day out and often have the best ideas on where a game is thriving or lacking.

Ensuring that this expertise is listened to and actioned on is one of the best ways to keep a project healthy. The best insights come from listening to our QA team on what frustrates them when testing a game. From this, we put together small teams that can take an issue, own it, and make positive changes to help resolve it.

For example, Lemmings had an issue where our darkness (i.e. low light) levels were coming across as too difficult for a majority of players. However, a quick internal discussion found that we could help solve the problem by adding an additional booster that allows players to turn the lights on.

It was a simple fix that didn’t trivialise the gameplay. The small team that proposed it implemented it, and it was out and tested with our audience within two weeks of conception. It’s much easier to be agile and proactive in smaller strike teams.

Community feedback loops: Leverage player feedback to inform future updates and ensure they resonate with your audience.

Live ops development is a commitment to the players who have invested both time and money into our game. Their voice is important and should be heard when looking at the direction of a title.

We find some of the most valuable feedback in the reviews across the platform storefronts, as these players have been impacted enough (both positively and negatively) by our title to warrant spending their time posting feedback for us.

The best interaction we see is when we take action on an issue raised in this manner, reply, and let the reviewer know that they have been heard and the issue has been addressed. You’ll often receive an updated review or rating to reflect your hard work!

Data-driven decisions: Optimisation and quality assurance

At Exient, we’ve migrated away from reliance on 3rd party data to full ownership and customisation of our analytics, so we get precisely the information we need when we need it. This also helps smooth out bumps should – as increasingly seems to be the case in games right now – off-shelf-providers suddenly change features, terms or models.

Our Autonomy platform gives us full visibility of mission-critical operations, encompassing live ops, game data, ad revenue, UA, ROAS, and content delivery. Having direct control of these data points allows for real-time decision-making and proactive management.

In short, live ops provide a wealth of data about player behaviour. Here’s how to utilise it effectively:

A/B testing: Test different features, monetisation strategies, and difficulty levels to see what resonates best with your audience. For instance, during a recent rebalance of early game content, we used Autonomy to set up an A/B test to evaluate the impact of these changes.

This allowed us to directly compare the newly balanced levels against their original versions. By collecting real-time data on player engagement, difficulty progression, and completion rates, we could determine whether the rebalancing enhanced the overall player experience or needed further adjustment.

In-Game analytics: Beyond the basics of churn and playtime, our data dives deeper into session frequency, feature engagement, and player acquisition funnels. This helps identify pain points in the player experience and informs decisions around content pacing, in-game events, and overall game balance.

Focus on quality: Utilising data isn’t just about features; it’s essential for maintaining performance and stability. For example, when our backend crash analytics dashboard flagged a high volume of crashes on the Samsung S24 Ultra, our team quickly identified the issue and provided a fix. This allowed us to resolve a critical issue before it significantly impacted player satisfaction and retention.

Iterative updates: Data-driven insights fuel a continuous loop of iteration. Whether it’s adding new features, tweaking the difficulty curve, or optimising monetisation strategies, we use player data to guide each update. This iterative process ensures that we’re always enhancing the player experience while aligning with business goals.

Predictive analytics: Using historical data, we’re able to forecast when our player base is most likely to engage with new in-game content. This informs the timing of our content releases and allows us to deploy highly targeted monetisation offers that are aligned with player expectations. This approach results in a measurable uplift in both retention and revenue during critical event periods.

Understanding what players crave

We hear and experience time and time again how strong player communities are essential for any game’s success – and this also applies to the live ops element.

We have strived to remain engaged by being where the fans of our games are – whether that’s in-game, X, Reddit or Discord – and, like many studios, try our best to keep players informed of updates and DLC as part of basic comms best practice. Communities can be cultivated too, which is especially valuable for live ops.

Open communication channels: People love your games more than you’ll ever expect and with more passion than you will have ever seen before. These players will be the lifeblood of your titles. They will be the ones driving forward a sense of community and being vocal about your title, both positive and negative.

The best place to find them is on social media channels. Use these streams to build engagement and encourage users to continue thinking about your product, even when not interacting with it.

Transparency: Patch notes. No matter how small or insignificant the changes may be, we always have players request them, which is great for us as developers. When players see an update on their devices, they want to know what’s changed, usually so that they can engage with the new system or content as soon as possible.

Alerting players ahead of time about updates and changes also allows them to factor this into their own schedules, possibly spending more time with your product due to that extra communication.

Community events: Building a community is one facet of live ops, but capitalising on it is another – the effort you spend to create a network is only paid off once you see returns from it.

A popular way to do this is to encourage further engagement through events. The more obvious ones tend to be competitions, which drive players via the desire to win: this will work for most games as players inherently strive for personal wins.

There is also an interesting facet of engagement that revolves around community and teamwork. Encouraging players to work together to reach a goal is a great way to foster a more positive community, further encouraging social sharing and referrals.

Evaluate your player archetypes to see if they lean more towards competitive or collaborative, and prioritise your community event strategy accordingly. In Lemmings, we recently launched a community event that involved players filling out a survey: the more responses there were, the better the reward would be at the end of the event.

This has driven a massive bump in engagement, more than we have seen before from our social channels. Even more importantly, we’ve experienced a large increase in player sharing to encourage others to help achieve the overall goal. We will be looking to do more and more of these in the future.

Reward participation: Rewards for the sake of rewards are great – sometimes players just need a ‘thank you’ for playing a game. We do this with exclusive promo codes that are distributed via our Discord and other social channels.

These receive great responses and help build a positive environment for all our players. Additionally, this system helps encourage repeat visits as players check back to see if any new codes are available for them to claim.

Balancing cost and value

Live ops don’t have to be a bottomless pit financially. And that’s important at a time when many studios are looking at costs across the board. Here’s how to manage them efficiently when it comes to live ops:

Prioritise using data: Focus your development resources on features with the highest potential return on investment for player engagement, using your aforementioned data to identify where these opportunities are.

Content reuse: Utilise existing assets and mechanics to create new content variations, saving development time and resources. Games with templated characters, like Lemmings, can offer great economies in terms of time. 

Smart monetisation strategies: Explore a mix of models (e.g., in-app purchases, subscriptions, cosmetic items) that are fair to both players and profitable for the studio.

Long-term planning: Develop a long-term live ops budget that factors in content creation, marketing, and player support costs.

Keeping pace with the market

Fundamentally, live ops within games has undergone a dramatic shift in the past decade, certainly in the time we’ve been active in the market.

Players now, quite rightly, expect a continuous stream of fresh content, compelling narratives, and meaningful social interactions.

Technological advancements like cloud storage and analytics tools have facilitated this evolution, allowing developers of all sizes to push updates seamlessly and gather richer data insights.

What’s next? Away from pure tech, all of the above can only really succeed if players are at the centre of your decision-making processes – we should design updates that cater to their evolving interests and provide a sense of community.

Internally, meanwhile, it’s important to build a culture of continuous learning. As we all fully acknowledge, new technologies and player trends emerge constantly. Be prepared to learn, iterate, and refine your live ops strategy over time. Stay adaptable.

Much of this is about empowering your teams with the necessary tools and resources for live ops success, whether that’s investing (where possible and/or appropriate) in data analytics platforms, marketing strategies, or assembling a skilled live ops team to manage the all-important ongoing content development and player engagement.

Leveraging live ops for catalogue titles given current market conditions is a win-win scenario, allowing players to rediscover the joy of their favourite games while studios can unlock a wealth of untapped potential and revenue streams. 

It can enable your dormant back catalogue to become a vibrant, thriving testament to the enduring power of great games.

                                                                        Edited by Paige Cook