GIAF USA: Summer 2015

UPCOMING TALKS

Curating the Mobile Player JourneyKady Srinivasan- Sr Dir, Player Engagement Mobile at EA

Lean AnalyticsWill Perone – CTO at Wicked Fun

IMVU Data ArchitectureJon Watte - VP Technology and Analytics at IMVU

Using Data to Prove the Value of HapticsNick Thomas - Head of Gaming at Immersion Corp

Curating the Mobile Player

Journey

Kady Srinivasan

Sr Dir, Player Engagement EA Mobile

Agenda

• Player Retention

• Managing the Player Journey

• Player Responsive Model

• 4 Areas to support Player Responsive Model

• Madden Mobile Rewards

2

Player Retention Key to Long Live Service

Games

Increasingly live service oriented games indicate heavy emphasis on engagement and

retention over acquisition

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

ACQUISITION BRANDAWARENESS

RETENTION

Average Company

Player retention is an integral part of product operations and EAM is beginning to invest

Source: Return on Behavior

% o

f D

olla

rs S

pent

3

Managing the Player Lifecycle – Key to Retention

MTX

OFFERTUTORIAL

YES

1. CONVERSION/ENGAGEMENT

CYCLE

MTX

CONVERSION

POINT 2

2. UPSELL/RETAIN CYCLE

UPGRADE

3. AFFINITY X PROMO

NEW

PLAYERS

NO

Presenting relevant “need based” offers at key decision points in a player journey

ENGAGEMENT

OFFER

INSTALLAFFINITY

Opportunity: 4X increase in Retention and 2X increase in Engagement**Source: Urban Airship

Curating Player Lifecycle – Four Key Areas

Player Value

(Who)

Decision Points

Mapping (When)

Desired Action

(Why)

Customized

Offers (What)

• WHO: PLAYER SEGMENTATION: Classify player and

expected value from player (i.e. Whales, Spenders,

Social Influencers)

• WHEN: DECISION POINTS MAPPING: Understand in-

game and out of game behavior and decision points

• WHY: DESIRED ACTION: Identify desired action we

want the player to take

• WHAT: CUSTOMIZED OFFERS: What offers fulfill need

states

TECHNOLOGY&

DATA PLATFORM

A scalable model of meeting player expectations supported by technology and 360 view

of player

Who -> When -> Why -> What

5

Who: Smart Segmentation

Following Best Practice

• RFM Segmentation

• Based on Predictive Propensity

• Multi channel Re-targeting and Customized Offers

• In most games, players treated equal

• Messaging not based on predictive

propensity

• All offers created equal

• No multi channel marketing

Generic Email

Generic

Promotions

(Ex: 7 day

Sales)

BEHIND THE CURVE

• Highly engaged: 3 sessions/day, > 10 mins per session,

plays on iPAD• User has low probability of churn but high propensity to monetize

• Show 10% interstitial offer on 2nd day, 50% on 4th day, push notification on 5th

day, IAN on 10th day

• High monetizer: 1 sessions/day, > 10 mins per session• User is fickle, convert early and high

• Show new and exciting content ad on 2nd day, show how to use premium

content, offer 50% off on 2nd purchase

• Fickle user: < 3 sessions/week, < 10 mins per session• User is fickle, retain

• New and exciting content, push notes on Day 3, 5 and 7

• Reminders to come back and play for new content through mobile notifications

• If not engaging, X promo or show GMS ad

CURRENT STATE

Step function changes in targeted and segmented messaging in the last year

6

Who: Smart Segmentation V2.0

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

Push Note Response Predictors

PNResponse RevenuePOST_PNResponse

Predictors informed “personas” created from game play variables

0.0%

0.5%

1.0%

1.5%

2.0%

2.5%

3.0%

$-

$2.00

$4.00

$6.00

$8.00

$10.00

Friends Explorers Offerhogs Rushers

DARPU & PN Response Rate by Persona

DARPU PN_response %

Personas

FRIENDS EXPLORERS OFFER HOGS RUSHERS7

Key: = PN = PN / IAM = IAM Green Text = New Campaign

When: Key Points During Player Journey

1d Churn PN

3d Lapsed PN

5d Lapsed PN

Job Complete PN

Tutorial Complete

IAM

~3x Status Quo Event-

based Notes

7/30/60d Lapsed

Spending

Friend Visit IAM

7/30/60d Lapsed Spender

7/30d Single Transactor

~3x Status Quo Event-

based

GranpaWinback(Email Only)

14/30d Lapsed PN

Merch Engine IAM / PN

Promo Reminder PN

Predictive Churn iAM / PN

Lapsed Sage 7/30d PN

New

Player

Mature

Player

Elder

Player

Player journey enhanced to drive greater touch points at relevant intervals

8

What: Need Based Offers

RETARGET

LAPSED PLAYERS

FIRST TIME BUY

OFFERPERSONALIZED

PUSH NOTE

REPEAT

SPENDER

OFFER

eCRM PII

COLLECTION

NETWORK AFFINITY AD

These messages are triggered at appropriate points in the player journey

Right Message, Right Player, Right Time

REPEAT MTX

OFFER

9

Degree of customization

What: Need Based Offers V 2.0Provide compelling and differentiated offerings to influence the desired action

Stage One

All

Players

• Relevant and Personalized

Messages

• Promotions, Offers and

Discounts

• Limited and Unique

Products/New Affinity Titles

• Personalized

Products/Store

• Personalized Game Play

Differentiated

Experience Driven By:

Relevant

MessagesPromotions Unique

Products

Personalize

d Products

Personalize

d Game

Play

Stage Two Stage Three Stage Four Stage Five

130

140

Summary

Managing the player journey – massive opportunity but fraught with complexity

Needs tight integration between Analytics, Marketing and Product Management to

accelerate

How can you unlock this potential?

Lean Analytics

Will PeroneCTO & Cofounder

August 2015

Who Am I?

• Designing and Programming games since age 11

• Making mobile games since 2005

• Making social games since 2007

• Worked for Glu, Funzio, Kixeye

• Started 3 companies - Andrograde, RubyCoins, Wicked Fun

State of Wicked Fun

• Venture backed

• 16 employees

• Cross-platform real time multiplayer game

• Pre-revenue

• Iterating the product fast

• Iterating UA/Marketing fast

A Conundrum

Be as lean as possible

Iterate as fast as possible

Execute the highest quality bar possible

Different Needs for Analytics

Business Intelligence

– Industry standard events easy

– Hard to dig into the ‘why’

Design

– Want complex game balancing metrics

– Want in-game economy related analytics

Engineering

– Want performance/bug/crash monitors

Wicked Fun’s Solution

• No dedicated PM/Analyst

• Focus on a few core metrics per department

• Don’t waste time building analytics in-house

• Empower each team to do their own analytics

• Balance quantitative and qualitative analysis, don’t let analytics run your life

– Analytics can mislead you on what to focus on

Design

• Use hierarchical events for balancing• Not all off the shelf analytics platforms support hierarchical events, may have

to manually do it

• Total in-game currency, Net currency over time

• What are people buying in game

• Certain things still require engineering to get involved (db queries, adding events to code)

Engineering

• Use analytics as crash report statistics and performance/net monitoring tools

– Ping, packet size, function times & counts…

– Set up special API keys so you can turn it off if event traffic too high

• Set up a different analytics API key per platform (mobile, web, PC…)

– The platform itself will color user behavior even if the game is exactly the same

BI

• Retention (D1, D7)– Connected to # people who convert to paying

– How long does it take for people to buy?

• Total funnel is hard to set up but worth it– View ->Install ->Register ->Tutorial ->Screen flow

– Higher dropoff in your marketing or in your game?

• What is the first thing people usually buy?

• Organics vs Paid Installs -> Virality– Key to cheap UA

Industry Challenges

There is still no good solution for cross-platform marketing, attribution and analytics

Supporting infrastructure for real time multiplayer cross-platform games is still in its infancy

Developers want real time analytics data feed to personalize UX to customers

Questions?

will@wickedfun.com

@willperone

IMVU Data Architecture

Jon Watte, 2015-08-10

VP Technology and Analytics

Avatars Lean Start-up

User Generated Content

Continuous Deployment

Virtual CurrencySocial

Entertainment

Social VR Multi-platformReal-time atWeb Scale

Data Architecture

resty

download

mobile

web

istatd

Fun Facts

400 database shardsfor customers

Haskell uses 10% as much CPU as PHP

20 million item catalog(works in VR, too!)

Top selling UGC has sold > 1 million!

IMVU creators pay the rent with UGC

End-to-end analytics reduces payment fraud

Recommenders give users what they want

Price Elasticity optimizes revenue

12,000 new items per day

700,000 items sold every day300,000 metrics

10 second interval

Contact

jwatte@imvu.com

https://engineering.imvu.com/

https://github.com/imvu-open/

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