The Live Service Checklist: Five Pillars for Building Successful Games

• 🧲 Acquiring users and helping them discovering your game and New User Experience
• ⭐ Engaging users with events, strong core loops, and balanced progression
• 🤝 Retaining users with community building, streamlined core loops, rewarding progression systems, and holiday events
• 💰 Monetizing with store best practices, sustainable economies, and well-implemented live services.
• 📊 Analyzing data to gain insights and make actionable changes to improve acquisition, engagement, retention, and monetization.

TL;DR

The Live Service Checklist

✅ Acquire

1. Aid player discovery by curating a strong Product Details Page (PDP) and other marketing assets. Players have many titles competing for their attention in Meta Horizon. Help them discover your game with a compelling title, icon, key art and description on your PDP. Read more about optimizing your page here.
2. Develop a new user experience (NUX) with best practices in mind to acquire and retain users. The NUX is an opportunity to present players with a rewarding and fun taste of your game. Learn more about the NUX and its best practices here.

✅ Engage

1. Balance your economy and progression so players have a reason to work toward in-game goals. Making sure your currency is balanced is key to creating an economy players will want to engage with. Pacing challenges and rewards through progression will help motivate players to move through your economy. Learn more about designing a balanced economy and progression here.
2. Plan and design fun in-game events to give your players something new to experience. Events give players a chance to earn appealing, limited-time, durable goods. They help build a sense of community, and if planned around a holiday, can create lasting memories for years to come. Learn more about planning in-game events here.

✅ Retain

1. Define and build a strong community off-platform with services like Discord or social channels. Creating a strong sense of community, where players feel they are a part of something bigger, is crucial to retaining players. Read more about community building in live services here.
2. Build fun and rewarding core loops that players will want to experience over and over again. The core loop of your game is the foundation of your gameplay. Live service games often repeat their core loop indefinitely, with small changes introduced through limited-time modes and ongoing updates. Strengthen your core loops using the tips found here.

✅ Monetize

1. Design your store with best practices. Players will expect a store that is eye-catching and accessible. Placing your store in areas of the screen that are highly viewed is just one of the tips we have for designing your store with best practices. Read more here.
2. Develop a robust game economy and content offerings that motivate players to purchase. Creating a well-balanced economy helps make progression and engagement easier for players, which in turn can encourage them to invest in your game. Learn more about optimizing your game economy here.
3. Design quality content offerings that make players want to purchase. Players will expect value from your durable and consumable goods. Learn more here.

✅ Analyze

1. Design in-game programmatic events to help pinpoint engagement issues from the store to in-game quests. You can see which milestones players reach and where they drop off or stall by tracking specific events in your game’s backend. Learn more about frameworks for assessing problematic areas in your game in the live service article found here.
2. Test and refine your NUX. Measuring your new user experience with telemetry is crucial to its success. Track player progress through each step of the NUX to surface friction points and identify where players churn. Learn more about testing and refining your NUX here.
3. Audit your store with telemetry. Use telemetry to assess purchase behavior and understand what’s performing well. You can track whether promotions are being seen, whether discounts are landing, and how players move through the Store. Learn more about using telemetry to evaluate your store here.
4. Let player behavior and analytics guide your content creation. Telemetry can reveal which content offerings players are excited about. These insights can help inform what you build next and how you evolve your live service over time. Learn more about using analytics to guide content offerings here.

What’s Next?

Resources