On today's episode of the Mastering Retention podcast, our host Tom Hammond talks to hyper-casual guru Michal Tomcany! He is the Chief Gameplay Scientist at Studio Slovack and has a lot of experience with hyper-casual games.

Episode highlights:

• What is hyper-casual?
• Types of hyper-casual games
• What can mobile free-to-play games learn from hyper-casual?
• The role onboarding tutorials play in retention
• KPIs to take into account
• His retention tip!

Connect with him on LinkedIn

On today's episode of the Mastering Retention podcast, Riley Andersen, Co-Founder and CEO of Umami Games, joins Tom to talk all about hyper-casual games! Umami Games is a hyper-casual games startup in Copenhagen, Denmark. Riley always been a passionate gamer but found her light with hyper-casual games.

Topics from today:

• How being a social media manager shaped her way of thinking now
• How she started Umani Games
• What are hyper hyper-casual games?
• Who is the target audience for hyper-casual games?
• Steps to go from idea to reality in hyper-casual games
• CPI in hyper-casual games
• Monetizing your game
• One retention tip for hyper-casual games
• Finding the right people for your company

In today's episode of the Mastering Retention podcast, Tom talks to Francisco Andrada, the lead World Game Economy Designer at Gameloft. Francisco has always been very passionate about games and about helping other game economy designers in their career paths. During today’s episode, he discusses with Tom what makes a great economy, the GED school and the top 5 mistakes to avoid while designing your game economy.

Key topics from today’s episode:

• What is game economy design?
• Francisco’s 4 pillars of game economy
• Misconceptions of being a game economy designer
• What he calls The GED School
• If you are a small studio, at what point do you need a game economy?
• What makes a great economy?
• Top 5 mistakes to avoid while designing your game economy
• His retention tips!

Connect with Francisco on LinkedIn

On today’s episode of Mastering Retention, Kaitlyn Kincaid, lead economic and monetization designer at Rovio Entertainment Corporation joins today’s episode to talk all about game economy design. From what is a game economy, how to build it correctly to how to better use your data to improve your game.

Key topics from today’s episode:

• What is the game economy?
• The importance of understanding the psychology of players
• How to design a game from the beginning to have a good economy
• Things that every game product manager or game designer should know about the game economy
• Tip and tricks to get better at data analysis
• How to think about retention and monetization together?
• Understanding you audience
• Putting fun over money (always!)
• Her retention tip!

Adam Zelenay is an avid listener of the Mastering Retention show so we are happy to have him on as a guest! Adam is the Live Ops manager at ZeptoLab and today he goes in-depth about crucial aspects that game teams should take into account about LiveOps

Today's highlights:

• How he went from being a lawyer to a game developer
• The balance between copying and creating new features in the game
• Recommendations about types and numbers of live ops?
• Getting feedback from the community
• Tools and processes to manage the complexity of multiple events
• Reactive operations
• His retention tip!

Connect with Adam on LinkedIn

Jamar Graham, publisher operations partner at Unity technologies joins today's Mastering Retention episode to talk about ad monetization in games. He tells us how he got to his current role at Unity, some of the common mistakes on ad monetization strategies and the right balance between in-app purchases and ads.

Episode highlights:

• Common mistakes on ad monetization strategies
• The balance between in-app purchases and ads
• Examples of really successful ad ideas
• Where do ads fall into a LiveOps strategy?
• How should segmentation be used in conjunction with ads?
• Managing ads as a small team
• Figuring out player personas
• AB testing
• His retention tip taking ad monetization into account!

Learn more about Unity Technologies

Get in touch with Jamar: [email protected]

For today’s episode, we bring you two experts on what there is to know about gaming product teams: Patrik Wilkens & Chris Balazs. Listen to everything there is to know about gaming product teams, from how do you build it to what should it look like on different stages of your game and company sizes.

Guests:

Patrik Wilkens – VP of Mobile at Azerion and Founder of Game industry Networking

Chris Balazs – Game Director at SYBO

Episode highlights:

• What is a gaming product team?
• What is needed to have a functioning product team?
• Knowing when to scale your gaming product team
• The balance between copying and/or innovating a game
• Collaboration with LiveOps teams
• How to make your transition smoothly between companies or games
• What is the best working relationship between the marketing team and the product team

On today's episode of Mastering Retention, Oscar Clark the Chief Strategy Officer at Fundamentally Games and one of the pioneers of games services since 1998, joins us to talk about the core principles of LiveOps. He goes in-depth about the three core aspects of games as services: capturing data, configurations and selling.

Today's episode key talking points:

• What games as a service mean to him
• The difference between live ops and games as services
• What would be the first step to start running LiveOps
• Games as services and LiveOps as a promise to the players
• Tips to capture data
• Tools to do oversight configurations
• Principles of selling free to play games
• How does a LiveOps team look like?
• What services do they offer at Fundamentally Games?

Learn more about Fundamentally Games

Connect with Oscar on social media:

LinkedIn

Twitter

Buy his book "Games As A Service"

On today's episode of Mastering Retention, Harshal Karvande, Game Design Lead at Rovio, joins us to talk about how he started in India and ended up in Finland, what it means to create a LiveOps strategy based on player behavior and how to align yourself to the flow of your audience. During the episode, he provides several real-life examples that make his concepts and logic very fun and easy to understand.

Highlights of today's episode:

• Getting a masters in New media design in India
• Why are Finnish games so successful
• How impactful the why behind a company can be
• What is the purpose of live ops from his perspective
• Creating a LiveOps strategy based on player behavior
• Aligning yourself to the flow of your audience
• How he, as a designer, uses the user data that is collected
• One tip or trick to increase retention

Follow his blog on medium

Connect with him on LinkedIn

Today's guest for another episode of the Mastering Retention podcast is Rachel Ansell—senior producer & product owner at PerBlue. After getting her degree in arts, she got an internship that showed her what she wanted to do with her career: be a producer! She joins today's episode to talk to Tom about the different roles and responsibilities that fall under a game producer, some of the life lessons she’s learned along the way and her experience with live games.

Key highlights of today's episode:

• How her 1st job turned her into a big Star Trek fan!
• From her perspective, what does being a producer mean?
• How data-driven game development impacts the role of a producer
• What she thinks is the ultimate KPI
• How she would deal with having to do a client fix
• How important it is to be able to change things in the server
• Some life lessons that she’s learned along the way in her career
• Balance of events to add in so you get the right engagement and monetization without burning out your players
• And as always.. one tip or trick to increase retention!

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