Casual Connect 2013: Real-Time Performance at a Massive Scale

by Francois Orsini, VP of Platform Engineering and Chief Architect, Machine Zone

·         Game of War offers real-time gameplay and translation at a massive scale. Their servers have worldwide reach, no language barriers, 5 million to 40 million DAU, 100k to 500k concurrent users, cross platform, and are always on 24/7. Their games offer real-time chat with translations, events with massive parallel broadcasting and auto-subscription model, push notifications, and high availability. Their infrastructure has big scale architecture, is fully distributed and redundant, is cluster native with auto failover, and is cloud aware.

·         Their secret sauce it to know your subject and use the right tools. Pick proven software that are open-sourced. They profile everything and benchmark.

·         Ingredients include…

o    Erlang – a hidden jewel, open-sourced in 1998, supports distributed, fault-tolerant, soft real-time for non-stop apps, concurrent with no locks, hot swapping of code

o    MySQL – proven technology, logical shards and partitions

o    Redis – works with HaProxy/Heartbeat

·         Other tools to thing about – NoSQL (Cassandra, RIAK, Couchbase), MariaDB, PostgreSQL, RDBMS, Continuent Tungsten

Casual Connect 2013: The Merits of Multiplayer

by Rik Haandrikman, Director of Business Development, GamePoint

·         Rik defines a multiplayer game as any game in which your interactions with other players is a core part of the gameplay. Some examples of casual multiplayer games are Zynga Poker, Clash of Clans, and 8 Ball Pool, and core games are World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and League of Legends.

·         The pros of multiplayer are great retention (it may have poor day 1 retention, but incredibly high retention for anyone who sticks around afterwards), built-in discoverability through word of mouth, and endless content through users.

·         The cons of multiplayer are that users are content (one player’s bad actions can affect all players’ satisfaction), gaining critical mass is hard (especially with synchronous multiplayer), and multiplayer isn’t the norm (users need to be educated).

Casual Connect 2013: Growing a Hardcore Game on Facebook

by Leonard Franel, Head of Business Development, Plarium

·         Plarium started with casino games on social networks and casual games, then moved into the hardcore business with Total Domination and Stormfall Age of War.

·         Plarium has 25 employees dedicated to user acquisition and 51 in supporting departments (art, development, business).

·         Perfect Facebook integration with Open Graph, page posts, and strong paid user targeting. Open Graph stories on achievements were the most successful and lead to 75% increase in clickthroughs.

·         CPIs are rising based on platform, genre, and game’s age. It’s important to monetize players better and focus on increasing LTV. Improve monetization through PvP elements, holiday promotions, boosts (troop revivals), and permanent items (immortal guardians, legendary heroes).

Casual Connect 2013: How to Design and Operate a Successful Live Event in Mobile/Social Games

by Chris Plummer, Head of Ideation and New Development Strategy, DeNA

·         Abstract: This talk covers the essential features of running a successful Raid Boss event.

·         Events are not a sale, not a pushing of new content, not just for whales, and not just for an ARPDAU spike. Credible events add something special to the game.

·         Events will dramatically inflect game performance week to week. It doubles or triples engagement day after day, and can 4x – 10x your daily revenue.

·         Common event frameworks include solo progression, PvP, and the raid boss.

·         Event harness essentials – start and end, changes the rules of the game, introduces a new mode, unique scoring system and currencies from the main game, rewards systems that are more rewarding than normal play, content tools, promotion and description UI, KPI analytics, and event-specific affinity.

·         Event designer’s checklist – clear premise (episodic content), exclusive content and UX design, clear progression design, KPI targets, base rewards for everyone that are very generous but not overkill, elite rewards for the whales, and all references players would need.

·         Raid Boss framework – unique energy to power your attack on a raid boss, ability to buy more battle energy, call for help, and earn tickets to redeem rewards (this gets people going to the store as a habit, where they’ll run into other items they want to buy). Consumables are not valuable, so give people something they’ll desire such as a permanent upgrade or cards.

·         Raid Boss features – invasion premise, unique instance (we group together to attack the boss), event-specific battle energy, call for help, victory rewards (give stuff away for what players did, who discovered the boss, who did the most damage, who did the most healing, who did the killing blow, etc.), limited lifespan, boss progress (becomes harder to find and harder to defeat), rewards that are cumulative across raids, leaderboard rewards (give crazy awesome rewards for the top 100), pay for advantage/affinity that are specific to that boss (and no longer work after the raid is over).

·         Raid Boss KPIs – participation rate, daily EP totals by engagement cohorts, revenue, DAU, win/loss ratios for the boss, number of help requests and response rate.

·         Tips – tune event so that high users finish the event and light users get through about one-third of it. All players should get something cool so it drives participation rates. Tune the events daily, make the rewards worth it, and tune the progression pace. Tune supply of energy first and rewards engagement before tuning the boss difficulty. Be very careful about tuning boss difficulty because the entire event is based around it, so tune everything else first. Offer insanely powerful rewards for top leaderboard positions.

Casual Connect 2013: Adapting Mid-Core Gameplay to Casual Platforms

by Mike Goslin, General Manager, Rebel Entertainment

·         Summary: To make a successful mid-core game, your game needs to support evergreen content (user-generated content, PvP), challenge with stats (leaderboards, player matching), and social features (guilds, forum).

·         Mike started his career bringing casual games to hardcore platforms, but has since been working on the opposite.

·         The three tenets of mid-core gameplay to focus on are…

1.     Time – core gamers play more and faster than a casual gamer, so they’ll chew through game content really quickly. Trying to add new content to keep up will end in a perpetually losing race. Some solutions to this are to add an RPG treadmill (but this may be boring), include user-generated content, and add competitive PvP. In terms of operations, your infrastructure should support persistence, multiplayer, and moderation of user-created content and online multiplayer.

2.     Challenge – challenge is often split between your core and casual players. Core players want difficulty right away, while casual players need easy levels upfront to guide them into the game. The trick is to make your game easy to learn and difficult to master. Include leaderboards (both global and with friends), player matching, and real-time stats.

3.     Community – guilds will extend the lifetime of your game dramatically. You will need strong community management and moderation.

·         Theme matters. Your game has to look like it’s for the audience or they won’t even try it.

·         The major pitfall of core games on mobile is the lack of reach. However, core gamers will eventually move into the space and it’s worth making games for them since they have higher LTV.

·         Cross-platform real-time multiplayer for twitch-based games are tough. If you don’t have the infrastructure, you need to make your game turn-based or not cross-platform.

·         Don’t shove leaderboards into player’s faces because it will turn some casual players off.