Live operations (LiveOps) in mobile games have become a huge trend in the past years. We see many mobile gaming studios trying to make their game(s) look as live as possible by shipping as many new events as possible. For reference, when we launched Lily’s Garden, the general trend in the market and competition in terms of event diversity a game offers was not that high. Now, at least in casual mobile gaming, the leading games are producing at least 1 new LiveOps event per month! It has become a key differentiating factor for both engagement and monetisation – which are both deeply affected by in-game economy.
We sat down with Alberto and Mateus, both members of our LiveOps team, to dive deeper into the topic of live game operations. Why are companies spending so much time and resources focusing on this? How has Tactile approached reaching LiveOps excellence in the past years? And more – read below!
The three pillars of live game operations
Besides making the game feel alive, LiveOps make a game look new, fresh and cared-for, and most of all, they challenge the players in their routines by providing them with a variety of gaming experiences. And the impact goes even further than that. When players engage with different events, they are rewarded for their ‘new’ behaviours, which ties into the economy aspect of the game. This variety of events on top of the core gameplay and storyline (like in Lily’s Garden) engages the player in different timelines, throughout the day, multiple days, a month or even an entire season, which ties into the monetisation aspect of the game.
And so this brings us to the main 3 pillars of LiveOps – engagement, game economy and monetisation. All three of these have key relevance in running a live game because they all feed off of each other. Alberto, our LiveOps Product Manager, explains:
“Engagement refers to the extent to which players remain invested in a game over time. It’s crucial that players progress through the main core game as well as the events they encounter; that they feel the desire to come back and play more, and of course, that they have fun! This is connected tightly to game economy because we need to maintain a healthy balance between the rewards players receive for completing events and the resources they need to be able to do so. And finally, monetization is important as it gives players the opportunity to acquire more resources to complete challenging levels and events.”
Let’s dive a little bit deeper into each individual pillar:
Engagement
Engagement plays a key role in creating a well-balanced gaming experience for players. This involves designing a meaningful event calendar offering a variety of features such as single-player events, tournaments and team-based events. By incorporating diverse event types, the game can appeal to a bigger variety of players, from those who enjoy the social aspects to those who thrive more in competition.
Retention is a key factor in a game’s long-term success, and so we need to ensure that players consistently come back and play more. Keeping the game fresh with new events, well-balanced challenges and personalized experiences helps to maintain interest and to prevent player churn.
Additionally, engagement enhances the player experience by aligning events with the overarching game themes. Our LiveOps team therefore also oversees the creation of visual assets, including new skins, season passes, and other in-game items. In close collaboration with game economy, engagement ensures that event difficulty and rewards are well-balanced, which in turn creates a fair and rewarding gameplay experience.
Game Economy
Economy is focused on the inner workings of events, rewards and offers. It looks into how often players use the rewarded items, how much these items impact their progress in the game, and based on that, how we can properly assess the value of these items for future event set-ups. These inputs and analyses are fed directly back into the engagement and monetisation configurations.
The challenge here is finding the right balance between how much we make different resources (such as coins, boosters, special items, etc.) available to players as event rewards versus how much these events push players to spend their resources. If it is too easy to complete events and claim rewards, then players are less likely to engage with offers and make in-app purchases, or they might in general feel discouraged to engage with the game.
Designing free and paid reward structures is therefore a key economy contributor towards incentivising player engagement and monetisation. It is crucial that the core game loop makes players understand the importance of using the in-game items and that playing with these resources is in fact a key part of the gameplay.
Monetisation
Monetisation gives the player the opportunity to acquire more resources which in turn enable them to complete levels and events. On our end, this means setting up a variety of offers and in-app purchases corresponding to the variety of players we have in our games. These offers and purchase options need to feel connected to the rest of the game, so sometimes they are linked to an in-game season or seasonal event, or they are tailored to a specific feature.
The challenge here is ensuring that these offers and sales are contextualized to the player needs and/or the situation they have found themselves in in the game (‘I’m out of moves and need 2 more moves to win this level, otherwise I lose my win streak and progress in all these events I’m participating in!’).
The balancing act
In their day-to-day work, Alberto, Mateus and the team are constantly trying to find the right balance between the three pillars.
Alberto, as the main Engagement expert on the team, is taking care of calendar scheduling, creating event content, overlooking the production of art assets required for events, as well as deciding on upcoming themes for seasonal events and their complementary season passes. In this process, he works with many stakeholders including LiveOps Managers, who set-up events and offers on our LiveOps dashboard, the creative teams, who make the art assets and implement them into the games, and data analysts, such as Mateus, who ensure our decision making is as data-driven as possible.
Two other big chunks of Alberto’s time are dedicated to monitoring key engagement KPIs, making sure that everything is running smoothly, and creating a strong calendar of events for our portfolio of games. The event calendar should be thoughtfully structured based on the variety of events available, their difficulty, and the rewards players receive at different times of the day or throughout the week. On top of this, he also gives feedback on new product features and new in-house tools currently in development, which help to make their work more efficient. New events always add more complexity to the LiveOps calendar, so it’s important to test thoroughly how they can fit into the existing portfolio of events, and how they impact the overall player experience. We are asking players to dedicate more time and effort to our game, potentially even spend some of their inventory, so it has to feel rewarding in the right way.
This is all a part of the balancing act that the LiveOps team is playing. When planning out the LiveOps calendar, it is important to understand the underlying implications of setting things up in a certain way, or what issues we might face further down the line. It is important to look deep into why certain events stop performing well after a certain period of time and whether how we set-up and balanced events in the past is still valid today, when we have a much larger selection of live events. It is crucial to understand both short and long-term effects of the decisions we make on the game and our players.
And this is where data analytics comes into play. ‘Results must be validated’ is one of our core company values and is in particular important to us because the gaming world is so complex, composed of many different areas and moving pieces. As the Game Economy analyst, Mateus is primarily responsible for tracking the general economy KPIs, such as inventory sizes, coin sink ratios, feature completion rates and resource usage based on different players profiles. His main focus is on finding data that justifies a certain event difficulty or reward. All this information is considered also in the context of monetisation and engagement with the purpose of finding and defining the most suitable feature balancing, offer content and pricing structure. The main goal is to keep the game challenging enough in terms of resource management, whilst also giving that rewarding feeling to the player.
Mateus elaborates: “The value of an item is measured by its impact on the difficulty of the game. So when we are setting the value of a booster, we think about things like: How much are players making use of the rewarded item? How much does this item impact player progressions? For example, if the player is given a bomb, it impacts how easy the level becomes for them. We can then translate this impact into coin and real monetary value, which we consider when we’re setting up monetisation offers and reward systems.”
The balancing act is therefore all about understanding how much the players use the items vs. how they play. Mateus’ day-to-day revolves around collecting data to support our decision making, as well as making analyses, investigations, testing hypotheses and monitoring the outcomes. For example, if we launch a 3 day feature which requires a player to play 200 game rounds, we want to understand how inventory (booster) usage ties into the players’ success in completing that feature. A lot of these learnings and changes in our LiveOps events are made based on well-designed A/B tests and experiments. We will often also test things such as making the economy tighter or looser based on people’s playing habits. All of this takes a lot of time, a lot of testing and a lot of iteration.
Reaching LiveOps excellence
Our LiveOps team was centralized in early 2024. This enabled us a wider and better overview of what is going on in terms of live game operations throughout our entire portfolio of games. It gives us a lot of opportunity to experiment within live games and try different events combined with different game mechanics. It has also allowed us to do more bold testing in smaller games. We then try to understand whether the results and learnings can be applied to a flagship game such as Lily’s Garden. Furthermore, this has given us the opportunity to create a solid starting structure to support new game releases.
Our LiveOps team is now a solid team of 15 Tactilers – 8 operational (focused on engagement, economy, monetisation and analytics) and 7 focused on development (UI, programming, design and QA), working fully in scrum. They have defined processes, flows and structures which allow them to work faster, more efficiently and it also gives them a great foundation to grow the team further in the future.
The biggest challenge they are facing right now is to keep growing in this adverse period for mobile gaming. It’s important to make choices and come up with innovative ideas that make us stand out from the intense competition in the market. And so, our big goal for 2024 and the years ahead was and is to reach LiveOps excellence. Thanks to our product team, we managed to release almost 1 new feature per month, which allowed us to have a richer and fuller LiveOps calendar. It also offered us a wider portfolio of events to choose from and to distribute throughout the year.
Tailored gaming experiences
The major focus for the future will be on improving our game economy and creating tailored player experiences. Having a well balanced game in terms of economy can be really tricky, especially when we are adding many new features. The focus for our LiveOps team now is to create a solid, but flexible structure, which will allow them to do their job even better.
With that in mind, creating more personalized gaming experiences is also something that is an extremely interesting topic. Mateus explains: “When we talk about player segmentation, there is always something vital about creating the right experience for the right player, because there is not a ‘one-fits-all’ solution in gaming. We have cutting edge technology and tools at Tactile, all built by our internal tech team from the ground up, which enable us to do things like create tailored player journeys.” The best part is that Alberto, Mateus and their team have the possibility to influence how these tools function and how they can be improved and extended to serve the team’s needs even better.
Both of these goals sound relatively straightforward, but there is a huge amount of complexity underneath. Making economy changes and adjusting player experiences has a massive and instant impact in the game, affecting hundreds of thousands of our players. Adding a new event, changing the LiveOps schedule or adjusting offer pricing points can instantly make our players perceive things differently and therefore behave differently – the impact is huge, and that can be both positive and negative, so they are things we need to be extremely mindful of.
Alberto adds: “In all LiveOps roles, you have your hands on many different titles, economies, systems and core game mechanics. We need to make thoughtful changes in all of them to improve our engagement, monetisation and economy efforts, as well as to improve overall player experiences. Luckily, making changes is heavily supported by strong internal teams – from both the development and analytics side – which not only helps us to move faster, but also supports better decision making.” This is why one of the keys to the LiveOps team’s success is strong cross-functional collaboration and communication. Everyone on the team has a voice and everyone’s input is required to start conversations and spark new ideas! Well argued ideas often become real projects and we always leave room for innovation – only when everyone on the team is pitching in, can we make the most optimal products and reach our goal of achieving LiveOps excellence.
It’s Time for Talent – with Martin Haagaard
Hi, I’m Martin. It’s a pleasure to introduce myself! 👋
I joined Tactile in September 2024 as a Data Architect on the Core Team. I help build the foundational infrastructure that powers all our games. My role involves designing and implementing an innovative data warehouse solution in Google BigQuery, which serves as the backbone for a comprehensive self-service BI platform used by game analysts, product teams, data scientists and others.
We process millions of game events daily, ensuring the system is optimized for cost-efficiency, performance, and scalability. By enabling data-driven decision-making across teams, we contribute to improving player experiences and driving the success of Tactile’s games.
🚀 Before Tactile
I actually started studying communication at university with an idea of working in marketing in the end, but quickly realized that it wasn’t for me – there was too much subjectivity and not enough facts. I pivoted and pursued a master’s degree that was more IT focused (yay – objectivity, facts, TRUE/FALSE 🎉).
Since then, I have worked six years in IT and data consultancies. I started out more on the business side but quickly transitioned to the technical side as I discovered my strengths and interests there. For the past couple of years I’ve had tech-lead roles on different large data projects, working mainly on architecture and design, but still having the chance to get my hands dirty coding as well.
💜 Joining Tactile
Moving from consultancy to a mobile gaming company as an internal resource has been a significant shift for me. As a consultant you work from project to project with different people, different clients in different countries, different goals and so on – which teaches you A LOT. But it also means that you don’t get ownership of any of the solutions that you implement and actually see it in action and how it evolves over time. You get that here at Tactile.
There’s not long from idea to action, since we work very agile and with a flat organizational structure. You also have the opportunity to deep dive and become an absolute expert on what you’re working on, which I really enjoy.
The move has been exactly what I wanted and needed!
💪 Having an impact
Our team is basically responsible for everything data in Tactile. We build our internal data platform, including all of the tools and services which are used by game and marketing teams to manage, improve and speed-up their daily operations.
The most motivating part of the job for me is that we are building something truly innovative. The challenges here aren’t things you can simply Google or ask ChatGPT about – or you can, but most of the time you won’t get a useful answer. You just have to sit down and turn on the big brain 🧠
Working with state of the art tools with highly skilled people to build something brand new is highly motivating and rewarding.
💫 What sets us apart
Working in a Danish company where you as a Dane are basically a minority is something that I don’t think you find in many other places 😅 We are 50+ nationalities here, so it’s a big melting pot of different cultures – which makes every conversation interesting, because you learn something new every day about the minor or major differences that we have in our everyday lives.
💡 Hot tips for joining the gaming industry
If you’re looking to get into the gaming industry or join Tactile, my advice is: don’t be afraid to show curiosity and ask questions. The industry moves fast, and every day brings new challenges, so being open to learning is key. And don’t be afraid to bring your unique perspective to the table. Diversity is one of the things that makes Tactile such an exciting place to work! And passion for games obviously helps a lot! 🤩
When we started developing new game projects in more recent years, we found limitations in our gameboard technology used by games such as Lily’s Garden. At the same time, we could also see that the match-3 gaming market was moving towards a very fluid gameboard experience – whilst the post-move visual animations are running, the players are already able to make their next move. This was a limitation in our own technology which we wanted to overcome.
And so a small team of Tactilers set on a mission to rebuild our core gameplay tech in order to increase our gameboard capabilities. We sat down with Lasse, who has been on the team since the very start, and Niels, who joined it a year in, to learn more about the why’s and the how’s of what they’ve been doing and to find out what this new tech enables them to do today.
Starting from scratch
Our ‘old’ gameboard tech was set-up in a way that whenever you made a valid input (i.e. made a match or set off an in-game booster), its logic would instantly get solved. This meant that you had to wait for the visual presentation to complete before you were able to make the next move. You basically had to tap and wait, and this limited us both in the experience we wanted to give to our players and in how we worked on the gameboard from the development perspective. Developing the connection between logic and visuals was often troublesome because time, as a concept, differed between the two parts. This is why our gameboard team decided to build new gameboard tech which allowed them to move time to the logic and give them the flexibility to do a lot of extra things on top of that.
Building gameboard tech, however, is no small feat. Gameboard tech is incredibly complex, simply because there are so many little things and combinations that can happen within it. It took a team of 3 people, including Lasse, several months to get it to the place they wanted it to be. They started off with creating core building blocks, made several different versions, and then started testing. It was very much a trial and error process. “At the beginning, you think there’s stuff that is really smart architectural design, but then you see that in practice it doesn’t really work. We learned a lot just by doing things, testing them and making changes afterwards,” says Lasse. The learn-as-you-go process is still ongoing now, 3 years later, but the rate of change is becoming less common as the team gains more and more experience with each new case.
The best thing is that this new technology can now be used to do practically everything gameboard related – whether it’s a match-2 board, match-3, merge-2, merge-3, or something completely different. This is because it is built on the core concepts of an interactive gameboard, instead of catering to a specific game genre. Building it from scratch gave us so much experience and insight into where we can go with our new gameboard tech. This is important because this new tech will likely be integrated into every new game project we start working on.
The harsh reality of building new tech
New gameboard tech was initially built for a game called Makeover Match. This was a brand new project which we started working on in 2021. As it was on a much smaller scale compared to a game like Lily’s Garden, it presented the perfect environment to build, test, implement and iterate in.
The team invested a lot of time into building this new technology and eventually more and more people joined the mission. It took an incredible amount of work, dedication, consideration and support to get it up and running, but the long-term benefits were worth the initial investment.
After they had the new gameboard tech working in Makeover Match, they decided to take the next step and implement it into Lily’s Garden. This presented a challenge on a completely different scale.
They knew going into it that Lily’s Garden is a monolith and that this would be a big task. Everything gameboard related basically needed to be re-coded from scratch. On top of this, the game had over 10.000 levels, which all had to work after being moved to the new tech, and the team had to be extra careful to not miss out on any edge cases. For nearly an entire year, they had to run Lily’s Garden on both game boards at the same time, to ensure that everything performed as expected. “It was a difficult time,” say Niels and Lasse, “But now we’re so incredibly happy that we did it!”
Once the new gameboard tech was up and running in Lily’s Garden, we were able to focus on using it to build new projects. Having all of our games based on the same core technology enables us to reduce the overhead. Firstly, it is easy for our game programmers to move in between projects because the code architecture is shared. Secondly, it makes it simpler for us to scale and maintain the tech. When we discover an issue in a core building block, we can fix it in one game and then easily update it in all of the other games as well. The new technology therefore provides us with a lot of benefits.
Clear separation between logic and visuals
Despite rewriting the entire system from scratch, the basic principle of having the logic and visuals clearly separated remains. This protects us from visual changes causing bugs in the logic and it’s something we highly value. The main difference is that the logic now progresses in sync with time, mimicking real-time behavior. Simulating time within our logic in this way allows the player to make moves while pieces are still falling (or performing other actions, like exploding).
This clear separation allows us to run our gameboard simulations in a more deterministic manner, which gives us time. It also gives us the ability to execute logic independently and at a higher tick rate, which increases speed. This capability offers numerous benefits. For example, the team now has quick access to logical test scenarios that help protect against recurring bugs. When issues arise, we have developed a tool that lets us replay levels exactly as they were played. All of this is crucial when developing something as complex as gameboard technology, simply because it has so many edge cases (just think of all the combinations a player can make!).
Separating the logic from the visuals also safeguards us in future improvements and enables us to stay agile and keep moving fast. If we want to be able to play the game fast, test new things and move forward faster with technical improvements (such as new AI tools), we do not have the luxury of time to spend on things such as waiting for visuals to play out.
Speaking of making improvements, when it comes to gameplay tech, we need to keep in mind that even the most minor changes can have a massive impact on the gameplay experience. For example, if we speed up booster logic (like making all the rockets go off at the same time), it completely changes the outcome of player moves, which can then alter the difficulty of our levels. So we always have to keep these things in mind when trying to optimize the technology.
What helps us to maintain high quality of everything that we do though, is strictly following the same core coding principles as a team. These include clean code, SOLID, DRY and unit testing whenever possible. In particular on the logic side, we’re trying to keep things neat. On the visual side, however, we try to be a little bit more pragmatic. Here, we try to focus on what will make the levels fun to play and appealing to look at.
Building customized tooling
Building our technology from scratch has also allowed us to develop a range of customized, shareable tools over time. These tools include asset management, improved A/B testing capabilities, better data gathering, level replays, test scenarios, level search tools, level bulk adjustments, and many more.
Being able to share these tools across our teams saves us considerable resources, which can instead be spent on enhancing the core gameplay experience.
Writing this kind of modular code takes a lot of time and it took the team a lot of reviewing, testing and re-writing to get it right. But the team believes it’s worth the effort and once it’s all in place, it gives them the ability to do so much more with this technology long-term.
A great example of that is the fact that all the different game teams can take these core building blocks to construct their own projects. The teams have the freedom to use the core gameboard tech however they want in order to create the logic and the game feel they wish to give to their players. This means that Lasse, Niels and their team do not need to involve themselves into the details of what they are doing in other games and can focus on supporting Lily’s Garden gameboard and the core tech itself. Lasse adds: “We want to give the game teams the freedom to express themselves as they want, and we just support them along the way with these core building blocks. It’s about guiding them, not limiting them.”
Plans for the future
Now that the core building blocks are in place and being used across a number of projects, we can allow ourselves to dive deeper into the visual side of things. This means that if an artist or a designer has an idea, the programmers would like to be able to support its implementation using this new technology.
For performance reasons, the gameboard programmers also started looking into the areas where they have more heavy-performance on the logical side. They are currently exploring using Unity’s Job system*, which will enable them to, at least in some cases, enhance the performance drastically.
To support this testing process, the team started a small book club for gameboard programmers. The aim of it is to provide a space for deeper discussion on how to improve the general look of the architecture when using the Job system and how to integrate it best within the existing tech structure at Tactile.
* Unity’s Job system – The job system lets you write simple and safe multithreaded code so that your application can use all available CPU cores to execute your code. This can help improve the performance of your application.
About the co-authors
Lasse Beck Knudsen has over a decade of experience in game programming, having worked on a variety of projects both in Denmark and in the UK. He joined the Tactile team in 2018 and has since then grown into leading the efforts of all core gameboard related things.
Niels Meijer started his journey in the gaming industry in 2017 back in the Netherlands, where he spent the first years of his career working on city builder games. In 2022, he joined our team and after supporting both Lily’s Garden and Makeover Match productions, he settled on the Gameboard team. A fun fact about Niels is that he used to run a (quite frankly very) popular YouTube channel about Unity development.