Announcing our white paper for building a data strategy for Premium+ Games

While we’ve seen recently that Games as a Service isn’t necessarily a recipe for success for all titles it still represents a revenue opportunity that cannot be ignored for most game developers. This is especially the case for multiplayer games that have ongoing server infrastructure costs to absorb. For traditional, Premium, game developers the transition to F2P or Premium+ can be quite challenging. We had a customer on this journey reach out and ask: How do we need to change our thought process for Data as we make this change to our business model?  What metrics, analytics and new use cases do we need to be prepared for?  

As you can imagine we searched online, we asked the LLMs, and while there were a lot of resources regarding F2P we couldn’t find anything that tackled this shift in thinking. For those of you from the F2P world, much of this might be second nature. The balance of this blog is a short introduction to the content of the attached white paper.

For the purpose of this blog and linked white paper we define the following business models terms as:

• Premium: A game where the player must purchase the title up front to play
• Premium+: A game that has an up-front cost but also has microtransactions
• LiveOps: A title that has updates over time to ensure ongoing engagement with the title, typically with the intention of selling microtransactions

Building a Premium+ LiveOps Data Strategy

LiveOps shifts the focus to convincing a gamer to continuously spend on a title rather than making a singular purchase. A LiveOps-driven data strategy:

• Puts the continued experience of the player front and center, 
• Values near real-time insight
• Enables learning from experimentation within an experience
• Uses configuration driven development
• Can track cohorts through their lifetime
• Is trusted by the organization to shape the future direction of the title

Configuration driven development is often necessary to take advantage of the value a data platform can provide. This methodology has been leveraged within F2P for quite a while as it enables personalization of the player experience and increases player engagement. This is most easily implemented early in the development of a title. As you build your games, data teams should be engaged to help instrument the game (for the purpose of analysis) and advise on places where configuration driven personalization could be impactful. 

One of the most important outcomes from your data efforts is maximizing the value that your players receive from your experience. More often than not value is measured through time played and by increasing that metric your players will reward you monetarily. This is a great first mindset when considering how personalization and data projects can help you serve your players better. The same mentality can be applied to your in-game (microtransaction) offers. Through your data platform, analytics and machine learning you are attempting to align the value of your offers to the players that will value them the most. Consider an MMO that focuses on the player’s self expression. Through a recommendation engine you can help them more easily find the hat, skin or other in-game asset that furthers that expression. Your players want you to succeed, they understand that the community you’ve built can only exist if you can survive as a business, they just want what you offer to align with what they’re looking for, and that’s where your data platform can help.

To build your Premium+ Data Strategy we proffer 8 steps to consider and work through:

• Build a solid foundation based on organizational goals, culture and a solid player360 view.
• Define a flexible lexicon that considers users, peer groups with consensus across the business
• Establish benchmarks considering leading indicators. Without them did you succeed?
• Define data sources, collection methods and share governed data across your organization
• Build your architecture to support the creation of data products, leverage software engineering practices with privacy, governance, auditability and bias in data front and center
• Data, analytics and insight access needs to be easy, governed, discoverable and include lineage
• A cross functional data organization ensures that all lines of business and use cases are considered and enabled
• Monitor and optimize whatever you build. 

Iteration is a critical core competency within LiveOperations. This applies to the creation of the game, ongoing content and your data platform.

Key Takeaways

The most successful Live Operations–focused games companies are data informed. The shift from Premium titles to Premium+ requires a new way of thinking. A focused data strategy and supporting data platform will help with this shift. 

This effort will take time and iteration but will result in significant business impact, including:

• Higher yields in user acquisition through marketing campaign optimization
• Better allocation of resources to high-yield creative efforts
• Delighted and engaged gamers, leading to higher retention and monetization

Finally, within the whitepaper you will find a series of common datasets across player, game, qualitative, and telemetrics. We also share common KPIs including those focused on user count, sessions, player journey and player experience, user acquisition and revenue. These are all good sources of insight and indicators to consider as you build out the data strategy for your next Premium+ title.

At Databricks we work with games companies of all sizes and around the globe to make their data platform strategy a reality. If you’d like to explore how Databricks can help with your journey and why it’s the best platform for execution of your data strategy, contact us or reach out to your Databricks Account Executive. Thank you for letting us be a part of your journey to serve the players of the world.

Huntting Buckley, GTM Leader

Games @ Databricks