🚀 Are you making the most out of weekends in your LiveOps strategy? Weekends are your LiveOps cheat code. Weekends bring the highest DAU, but many games still treat them like just another day.In this carousel, I’m sharing why weekend events are a must-have (and how to use them to boost both engagement and monetization — even mid-week!).
Want to know what's wrong with Vita Mahjong from Vita Studio? My wife got seriously hooked on this game, and I resisted for a while before giving it a try. Then I saw it ranked in the Top 15 Free Games on the App Store, and decided to run a poll—should I review it or not? Only one person voted yes, which felt odd… but I went ahead anyway. According to my wife, the game is overloaded with ads—which drives her crazy. But when I launched it for the first time, I saw zero ads. NONE. The gameplay was chill, familiar from other mahjong titles, and surprisingly soothing. And then I played for three hours straight. Can you imagine that kind of session for a mobile game? And again—not a single ad. There’s even a “No Ads” option in the […]
Another review based on my poll, second top choice—the latest release from Supercell — mo.co. For those who will read till the end, there is a bonus—a chance to get an invite. I really like the visual aesthetic—it’s fresh and vibrant. The idea of receiving quests via chat with NPCs and collecting rewards right there is great—very modern. Feels like chatting in DMs, familiar and intuitive. Brilliant marketing move with the invite system—you get 3 invites after reaching level 8. That’s going to bring in high-quality, motivated viral traffic. At first, the shop only offers loot boxes for merch tokens (currency earned through gameplay), and there’s no way to spend real money. Later, the full store unlocks. It follows a classic structure: Short LTO offersLong 3-week bundlesHard currency packs for IAPsA free resource pack on 24h cooldownLoot boxes for hard […]
What if your game studio was staffed entirely by fantasy races? We all know how wild game development can get—tight deadlines, broken builds, and caffeine-fueled feature drops. But what if your team had literal elves polishing UI, goblins running monetization, and a necromancer maintaining legacy code? Yeah, this is totally ridiculous… but also, kind of accurate. So here it is: a totally fictional (but weirdly relatable) lineup of a fantasy GameDev studio. No offense to actual trolls, vampires, or product managers — I love you all equally. 1. Elves – UX Designers & Narrative Designers Graceful, long-lived, and deeply connected to the flow of form and function. • Create UI so intuitive it feels enchanted. • Write narrative arcs that span centuries (and tug at your heart). • Likely to complain about pixel spacing… poetically. 2. Dwarves – Backend Engineers […]
Want to know what’s wrong with Block Blast from Hungry Studio ? The game is #1 in the casual category at the moment (March 20), but from a monetization perspective it is pure AdMon and much more simple that many other casual games on the market. Static banners at the bottom. Interstitials after every level, short ones, easily skippable. The only case of rewarded videos – revival after losing. In this case, the video ad is long because the player is motivated to wait, providing better CPM. Revival happens only one time. If you lose again, it will be final. There are no IAPs, so there is no game shop, no offers, no resources, no energy, no lives, you name it. Players can play as long as they want. Game sessions are not limited. But absence of IAPs also means […]
The idea of a “perfect game” — a seamless, bug-free, universally beloved masterpiece — is as much of a utopia as the concept of a flawless society. Throughout the history of game development, countless studios have chased this dream, only to be met with the harsh reality of missed deadlines, shifting player expectations, and the unpredictable chaos of the industry. Game designers, producers, and executives alike have long tried to craft the ultimate experience. Some believe in rigorous planning, some in deep player research, and others in revolutionary innovation. Yet, no matter the approach, every project inevitably collides with technical constraints, budget limitations, market shifts, and, of course, human imperfection. Why the Perfect Game is a Myth 1. The Definition of “Perfect” is Ever-Changing – What players consider groundbreaking today may feel outdated in a year. The industry evolves rapidly, […]
Game development is a roulette wheel, and we’re all just spinning it, hoping to land on a hit. The illusion of control is what deceives us. We think we make strategic decisions, plan roadmaps, and predict market trends, but in reality, we are simply navigating the chaotic laws of randomness. Success in this industry is a puppet show, where market shifts, player behavior, and even platform algorithms pull the strings, while we scramble to keep up, pretending we have a say. Each project is a gamble. Some teams strike gold seemingly overnight, while others, with just as much talent and effort, watch their work fade into obscurity. Some try to crack the code, searching for patterns, building “foolproof” monetization strategies, chasing trends, and relying on data-driven decisions. But the hard truth is that no formula guarantees success. What worked yesterday […]
Designing an advanced, scalable LiveOps system for games requires a robust architecture that can handle continuous updates, large player bases, and real-time personalization. Such a system treats the game as a live service – enabling ongoing content deployment, event scheduling, A/B tests, player segmentation, automated offers, and dynamic monetization. It must be scalable across multiple games, cloud-agnostic, and modular for future AI/ML integration. The following sections break down the key engineering components, and how they integrate into a cohesive LiveOps platform. Core Backend Infrastructure (APIs, Services & Game Integration) A strong backend is the foundation of LiveOps. Adopting a microservices architecture is widely preferred for complex, evolving games over a monolithic design. In a microservice approach, distinct services handle specific domains (events, player profiles, economy, etc.), allowing independent updates and scaling. This modularity means new LiveOps features can be added […]
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