Keeping players playing is getting harder as player attention fragments and expectations rise, so understanding churn has become a core live-ops competency. Host Devin Becker sits down with Elad Levy, Founder & CTO of Dive, to break down how churn is defined (and when it’s actually “permanent”), the behavioral signals that players are drifting toward the exit, and the underlying causes teams can often address before it’s too late. They dig into practical interventions from in-session nudges, to win-back campaigns as well as what reacquisition can realistically accomplish. The conversation wraps with the dumbest reason players quit, the single most important retention move, and a game Elad thinks nails it.
We’d like to thank Overwolf for making this episode possible! Whether you're a gamer, creator, or game studio, Overwolf is the ultimate destination for integrating UGC in games! You can check out all Overwolf has to offer at https://www.overwolf.com/.
This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.
Devin: Hello, everyone. I'm your host, Devin Becker, and today, I'm delighted to be joined by Elad Levy, founder and CTO of Dive. Dive is a data and analytics platform that provides game studios with business intelligence and live ops tools to help them make better-- understand their data and make better decisions, scale their games, and maximize monetization.
And today, we're gonna discuss, uh, tracking, identifying, and handling player churn. Now you've been on the, the, the Naavik podcast here before, but could you just give a quick overview of yourself at Dive for those who hadn't heard any of those previous interviews?
Elad: Yes, of course. So, I've been working for the past 25 years as a CTO and a founder in the games industry.
In my last company, a game called House of Fun, as, we got to a huge scale and ended up selling it to Playtika, where I stayed working for a few more years and implementing our secret sauce of managing data and live ops and fun stuff like that.
Devin: Cool.
Elad: I've had the luxury of leaving the churn problems from inside a large studio And that's, that was a great insight because today in what we do with Dive, among other things, is help game studios with, with churn.
Devin: What does Dive do specifically with churn?
Elad: So the company, first of all, the, the company gives the game studio kind of like a, let's call it enterprise-grade data and live ops capability without building the whole internal team in-house, which will take them years, you know?, I spent my career staring at player data and working with player data, so churn is a very, misunderstood problem in this industry, which is, you know, what I wanna-- we can have a very long talk about today.
Most studios cannot diagnose churn because their, their data is fragmented. It's, it's a very common problem actually outside the games industry as well. So, sessions would be in one place, and the crashes would be in another place, and monetization will be in a third place. And what we do is we unify all those sources to a single place, and then we start looking for a correlation if there's, like, relationship between something that one w- something that happened in one place to the churn, and that's, that's what we do.
You cannot fix churn if you cannot see it, you know? And this is probably one of the biggest problems of the game studios. If their data is scattered all over the place and they cannot see it properly, though, it's, it's very hard for them to realize what is happening with the game.
Devin: How do you guys define churn exactly?
Elad: Games that are young or just started, we would probably define churn, like very early, like in matter of like one week or something like that. It-- never days because some players w- play on the weekends, obviously, you know. Some players, it's, it's very common in Asia, you know, people work throughout the week, it's okay, and they play on the weekend.
So, if someone plays in the week- in the weekend and he didn't connect for a few days, it doesn't mean he churned, it just means that he is busy working. So, we, , find that,, pattern, okay, which is like, let's call it a range, okay? And, uh, it can be, I don't know, like one week of inactivity or two weeks of inactivity.
But games that are more mature have a lot of reactivation campaigns for dormant players. So, we would define churn during, like in every three weeks or one month, something like that. It's very different from the one game to the other game. Also, the type of game, obviously. But it's something that we work with every game studio.
What we like-- I'm, I'm just gonna add one small thing I like looking at actually something we call LTC, which is likely to churn, that are players that are lapsing. So, someone who behaved in a, like a player that behaved in a specific way, like, I don't know, playing on the weekends or have long sessions, and all of a sudden they have shorter sessions or they don't connect that often, then we would probably flag them.
You know, as like a possible, we call them LTC, likely to churn, because they are not permanent. It's not a permanent churn, it's lapsing. Let's call it lapsing churn.
Devin: I mean, churn is obviously something that you guys are looking at, but what makes it so important to actually have like things like likely to churn and things like that, especially in the current gaming environment?
Elad: Yeah. So, the, the current environment, and that's the biggest challenge, the user acquisition exploded and the market is saturated. Plus, the privacy changes of, you know, ATT and IDFA, they gutted tracking, so they killed retargeting and studios lost the ability to track and retarget lapsed players across apps.
So winning people back is way, way more harder than it used to be, way more expensive. The logic is, is brutal actually. Acquisition is expensive and you can barely retarget the ones that you lose, which makes not losing them in the first place the only profitable lever you've got left. So, retention is like the new growth as I see it, because it used to be, you know, many, many moons ago you could buy your way out of churn or, you know, retarget somehow or just acquire more, but it's not working anymore.
Every one of those players is really valuable. Plus, if you identify them early and put them into buckets and you see that they are like highly engaged or paying players, those are the ones that you need to keep an eye of close, close so that they don't, so, you know, if they are starting to lapse or not connecting as often or not engaging as often, it's something you have to do like right away.
Devin: Well, besides like not connecting as much, like the, or as often, what are some other like key indicators that players are likely to churn?
Elad: So, yeah. I mean, the sessions frequency is probably one of the biggest. If you see a decline in that, that's the biggest indicator, I guess. If the session length, if there's a stalled progression, so for example, you're stuck on the same level for weeks and you used to have like a... We-- There's a dashboard that we create that is content consumption. Like we-- how many like levels, for example, or scenes or whatever you consume per day. And if that momentum started slowing down, then that's a flag from our point of view. Also reduced spending. Obviously, if someone has a deposit habit, we call it the paying habit of, I don't know, he averages, I don't know, $5 a week or something like that, and then all of a sudden he stops spending.
And then the best and really cool indicator that we can talk about later if you want Is the last session, which is like the last session before he started lapsing or churning. In our platform, we record everything that happened in that session. Like in every session, we record everything there. The pop-ups, the engagements, the clicks, the game behavior, the play behavior, the session length.
So sometimes the last session tells what happened, right before the player left. So, all that-- all those signals are before they leave, which means that churn is quite often preventable if you're watching, if you're watching these signals, you know.
Devin: Well, it sounds useful. What do you-- what are usually the biggest causes you see for churn, especially ones that developers can address like ahead of time, uh, to prevent that sort of thing?
Elad: I think the easiest one is anything related to onboarding and loading. So, some players, they churn even before the game starts because, for example, there's, you know… We had a client that we pulled the churned cohort of the last session, and we found that a huge percentage didn't even clear the loading screen.
So that was probably, you know, s- loading too, too many assets. It's too heavy. It's a very easy optimization, by the way, because you can background load all that stuff. So that's one of the biggest problems, which affects obviously day one because it's, you know, you just install the game and you cannot start loading heavy assets in the beginning.
You want to let the player get in and play as fast as possible. So, we had a client that we worked on that for, for a while. A- another client recently that we worked with, they had too many pop-ups, so they call it pop-up blindness. So, like you just install the game and you get like a gazillion pop-ups with, you know, pay this and upsell that.
And if you, if you show it in an ad, it's even worse. So, this is definitely something that we see that those revenue boosters is something that it's okay, but you need to sprinkle them in a very subtle way.
We did an experiment a few years back, I think in Playtika or with another client, that instead of using a lot of like aggressive pop-ups, we used slide-ins. You know, something that will just slide in from the bottom or from the side. It will show for a couple of seconds, and it will disappear. It's more subtle, it's more gentle, and it's less invasive, so...
Crashes are probably the biggest one, and people do not understand the impact. The impact is huge, especially when you launch a game and it's not polished, so you have a ton of crashes. So, we, we connect with, you know, Crashlytics or Bugsnag, Sentry, whatever tool you use for crash reporting, and then we start finding correlations between the crashes and the group that churned.
And the correlation's quite high, so we, we, we f- we fixed those many times with many clients. And I'll just summarize that the biggest causes are usually not the game content or the game itself. It's friction or technical problems or aggressive monetization, and they're all addressable if you just see them in the data, you know?
Devin: So, when, when people churn, like obviously there's all the reasons that are like more technical stuff.
When players are churning for maybe behavioral reasons or whatever, over like, like someone that's been playing for a while and churning, are there some typical interventions that could prevent, like say giving them some extra currency, making a level easier? What are the typical things you, you could do to prevent those like longer term players from churning?
Elad: The, yeah, the easiest would be to smooth the onboarding and loading funnels. That's a very high ROI fix, and many ignore it, unfortunately. And then the more, uh, deeper analysis, which is related to the content, content consumption and the progression systems, which is a great-- That's one of my favorite dashboards, progression systems.
How long does it take for a player to reach a specific level? And we measure that in days, in sessions, and in playtime. So sometimes the content gets consumed super fast, especially if the game just started and they don't have enough content, and then people would ask me, "Hey, but we don't have a, I don't know, D14 is like drop."
And I say, "Yes, of course, because by D8 all the content is totally consumed, so how, why would someone stay in the game?" In, you know, level-based it can be, or like milestone-based, it can be, economy walls, what we call economy walls as well, obviously. And those are places that you can inject even a temporary, you know, like a, a temporary, you know, a power-up or something like that to help the player pass that obstacle.
My, my mom, I always give my example of my mom that still play Candy Crush. She's, she figured out that when she cannot pass a level, she just stops playing the game, and after a few days it let it, it let her pass. And it's fine because, you know, they, they want-- There are a lot of like data people and monetization and live ops guys that work behind the curtains and help you pass so that you, you continue being engaged with the game, so, that's another one.
Pacing monetization, that's a very important. So, don't, don't hit new players with paywalls super fast, you know? Just let them be, let them play, and then you can start in a subtle way, you know. If they want, they can go to the coin store. Over time, you can maybe offer like a one-time deal, and then lower it over time because sometimes, you know, I like starting the coin store at, let's say, $5, but then you go on lowering it with like these one-time offers.
No need to do it every day, but, you know, once a week or something, or the next time that the player connects, lower it to four or three, and eventually to one to see if you can manage to convert them. So, the monetization pacing, I call it monetization pacing, that's another smart way to address that prevent that churn.
And the target re-engagement, I mean, you cannot do retargeting. You can probably on some networks, but it's not that popular as it used to be. But if you find those signals beforehand, you can, you know, give a well-timed reward or a notification or some sort of a content drop, like something new, and the, the idea is in an essence to intervene as early as possible on the at-risk factor, you know, on the LTC, and not after they've left because after they've left, you lost, you lost the player.
It's really hard getting them, them back, you know? You can, if they ha- if you have their email, maybe you can send them an email, but if they deleted the game, there's no, you cannot even send a push notification, so it, it sucks, you know? You basically lost the, the player. It's really hard getting them back, and if retargeting is not exactly working as it used to be, then it's, you cannot just, you know, show them, retarget ads in Facebook or something because privacy killed retargeting.
Privacy killed everything.
Devin: So how do you see reacquisition in like in the modern days? Is it just hope you have an email or a push notification? Or like what are people doing to be able to try and get these players back?
Elad: Well, the, like I said, the lap- the lapsed players are the best target, and they already know the game and they like the game, so winning them back is way easier than acquiring cold It's, it's way, way simple to work with someone with a, a player that, you know, played the game and got sick of it for some reason than to try and onboard a completely new player.
You need to segment them, obviously, because maybe it's not worth chasing every single player. You know, like a one-session tourist is not really worth it, but someone that was really engaged and then stopped playing out of the blue, this is like, this is like 100% someone I would chase, you know? You can use data to track who to win back and what drove them away, so you can create this win-back offer that can address the real reason.
You know, we fixed the bug, here is the reward, or, you know, give rewards even for free just to keep them engaged. And the, the reacquisition, let's call it reacquisition for the sake of the def-definition, even though it's not exactly retargeting. The reacquisition will work if you fix the problem, because if the game crashes all the time, they will eventually go away, you know?
I've had, I've had games and I worked on games that, - We, you know, players were churning because of, technical problems. Then we fixed them and sent them an email or a push, and they came back and they played and everything was fine.
Devin: Well, I imagine too, like paying players are a bigger target than ones that were just kind of free players that maybe not as valuable to bring back.
So, I imagine paying players are ones where it's like-
Elad: Yes, of course.
Devin: Okay, well, we'll give you really good offers. We'll do something that, like put an effort, maybe even multiple attempts to bring them back.
Elad: Yeah. It's, it's the, the rules of the game change. You cannot, you know, because privacy means that you cannot use-- you cannot cheaply retarget lapsed players anymore.
You have to win them back in a more, smarter and more data-driven way, you know? It's, it's a different, reality today. You cannot afford for your players to churn, basically. It's just-
Devin: Yeah. If it's too expensive to get 'em, to get 'em in the first place. Yeah.
Elad: Exactly. Exactly.
Devin: Do you ever s- do, do you see a, a way for us to get back to being able to cheaply acquire players, or is that, that just pretty much over with?
Elad: You can use prediction churn models. That's, that's like a... You know, if you use those signals and you test them over time, like over a few years, you can find those, signals and then intervene earlier to avoid ev- like getting into that problem in the first place. I think that real-time personalization, like pr- real-time personalized intervention is also a cool option that you can target someone if you can, in that session, see that something is going to happen and the, the game will adapt per player.
You know, the difficulty will be dynamic, the content and the offers will be personalized. And AI is kind of democratizing this in a way, you know, because historically big studios, only big studios could afford But today it's more, you know, I mean, we do our thing, but you can-- if you have the patience, you can build everything in-house, even though it will take a while.
AI churn prediction, that's the last thing that I wanna say about it. AI churn prediction is only as good as the data underneath it, you know? Because if you collect garbage, it's just garbage in, garbage out. Eh, but the studios that win will be the ones that get their, you know, data house in order. It, it affects everything.
It's one of the first thing I, I work with-- we, we work with every game studio. We explain them that the foundation accuracy of the data is the most important thing because everything depends on it. The, you know, churn, KPIs, ROI, ROAS, all those calculations, if you want them to be really super accurate, you must get every, all the data accurate as well.
Devin: Well, tell me more about the, the last session recording you mentioned earlier. That sounds like something really useful beyond just the AI for trying to maybe find trends and things like that. You mentioned the pop-ups being one thing you've seen, like where, where a lot of people getting those pop-ups causing churn.
Just tell me more about what you've learned from that whole process and, and how that last session recording works.
Elad: The SDK that we implemented the game When you implement it, then you record what screen the, does the user see in every given moment, and the pop-ups that you see, and if they close the, if they click the X button or the blah blah button or whatever.
Plus, we track in every moment, even from the login, we track the exact level and the exact balance that they have. So, when you gather that group, and we did that exercise a few times, which makes our life easier. When you take those sessions, and you take Claude, for example, and explain Claude the context of the game and say, "This group stopped playing," then you can learn a lot from-- because, because obviously it can analyze data faster than you.
Instead of you going session by session, it starts finding things in common for these users. So, for example, their balance was too low. They were stuck at the same level. They all had a crash just before they left or something like that, or their last session was a crash, so they stopped playing after that.
So, it-- we leverage AI a lot internally to help us accelerate the analysis of churn and predicting churn.
Devin: Yeah, no, it's, it sounds like a really useful feature. With that being something that you guys are doing that's like a, a m- maybe a bit of a newer thing, where do you see kind of the future of some of the stuff going with player churn, uh, reacquisition, like identifying play patterns that might lead to churn, that LTC stuff, like all that sort of stuff.
Where do you see that going in the future, maybe over the next three to five years?
Elad: One was the predictive churn models. AI predicting who will churn before the obvious signs, so you can intervene earlier., Another is the real-time personalized intervention, so the game will adapt per player in terms of difficulty or content or offers.
AI is basically democratizing this whole, this whole world because w- we used to use-- do this like in big studios like Playtika and really big companies had the skill set and the money and the resources to run that. But today, you can even run it on small game studios with us or without, without us.
Devin: You mentioned, Claude. Is, is that the model that you find works the best for doing some of this analysis?
Elad: I, I love Claude for analysis, like more code, writing code analysis, stuff that is more GPT for me is more of like an AI assistant. Like if I need to, I don't know, plan a trip with the family and look for places to eat.
But Claude is-- When it comes to work, I personally, actually the developers and the data analysts in the company, they all work with Claude. They pr- they prefer it. It's more direct, it's more, I don't know, aggressive, more concise. Not a lot of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know? It doesn't repeat everything you say and, and…
Devin: It makes sense, yeah.
It's definitely one of those things where it's a little more of on the technical, like, kind of brief side of things that's helpful. So that's good.
Elad: Yeah. More efficient. More efficient. And the technical people, we always, we're obsessed with efficiency, so it's just, it, it's easier for us to if, you know... We, we downsized the team actually because less people can manage more clients today.
This is the, the impact, the huge impact that you're seeing all over the place.
Devin: Makes sense. Definitely something- Yeah ... to consider, like, especially as the whole AI space evolves. , Just couple quick last questions that I think are, you know, just things that, you know, feel free to just s- you know, say whatever.
It could be controversial, it's fine. Let's keep it interesting. But what is the dumbest reason you've seen for players to quit games?
Elad: Loading screen takes too, too long. Like, three seconds, you know? Sometimes it's like, one second too long and they're like, they, "Oh, this sucks," and they just, you know, like will throw it away.
Devin: Wow. Yeah. Like, like loading or downloading?
Elad: Yeah, loading. Loading or down- if it starts downloading, it's even worse. But, uh, you know, it's very common for people to rage quit, you know, the game that they love because it's just, it's a slow boot, you know? I s- I see my m- my son is also, I see him playing and if something that new generation, if some things take like half a millisecond more than it should, we al- they already lose their patience.
You know? They don't, they don't have time for that. It's like, "Oh, that sucks." That's... And they, you know, they, like, judge it on the spot. That's pure crap when you're... It's too much.
Devin: There's other games. It's
Elad: too much. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.
Devin: When they're all free.
Elad: Exactly, exactly. It's a very tight competition, yeah. So...
Devin: Yeah. That seems like a, an unfortunate thing where it's just like optimize and, and make sure that that doesn't happen. Outside of like the optimization and preventing crashes and bugs and stuff like that, what do you think is the most important thing games can do to make sure they retain players?
Elad: I think that the experts in this industry are probably hyper-casual games in that sense because they get you to the core loop, to the fun part as soon as possible.
And- People will, you know, if the game is fun, people will stay and will play it. It's okay, you know? If you have enough content, they will play it for many, many days and months and weeks and years to come. But the, the mechanic, the core loop, try to get them to that core loop as soon as possible, you know, without all the pop-ups and stuff like that, so that they can understand what the game is all about.
Definitely nothing of those, you know, lying ads that, you know, show you one game-
Devin: Right.
Elad: And then you get another game. But, yeah, I think that that would probably be the easiest thing, you know, just... It's really easy. It's a really easy fix as well, you know. Just load it fast, you know, boom, it loads fast.
You play it, and that's it. Remember that the platform dictates your patience. Because if Fortnite takes a little longer to load, it's okay. You're sitting on a couch with the remote to, like, with the, in, with the PlayStation, with the PS remote, and everything is good. It's okay. But if you are in a subway, in the next stop you know that you're gonna lose signal or something like, like the reception, or you're in the doctor and he's about to call you any minute now, you don't have time.
You want it to, like, load, boom, get your doses, and move on, you know?
Devin: Yeah. That makes sense. Not just that, but the core loop needs to be pretty, pretty short then too, right?
Elad: Exactly, yeah.
Devin: I mean, do you see games where, like, they get you into the game very fast to start with, but then after that the pace slows down and those are able to keep players?
Or is it, like, does it need to always stay pretty quick and pretty, and pretty on it?
Elad: That's a great question. I mean, that, I think that once you get, like, really hooked, like really obsessed, es- especially if you have that, if you're that type of person, then it's a form of art to drag you to the next milestone and the mi- next milestone, you know?
I mean, I, I used to play Idle Miner Tycoon a lot, and at some point it started repeating itself, and I got sick of it. But then one day I wake up and I realize that- They created like a whole new thing and they, they created like a world. So the-- that shaft, that mine that you were working on, it's like just like a comma on the balance sheet, you know?
It's just like a tiny dot in this whole world full of mines, and that's like, whoa. They opened... I don't know how they, they managed to revive that, like stretch that content further. So really cool. My kids play it a lot, actually.
Devin: Nice. Well then besides that game, what game do you think does a, a really good job of retaining players and preventing them from churning?
I mean, you mentioned like Candy Crush. Like just what, what's a good example game of like this game does a good job of keeping people ar- around?
Elad: I would differentiate between fun games, casual fun games, and games that somehow have a deeper way to engage or stretch the content or something like that. So, you know, like a casual fun game would be, I don't know, Pixel Flow, I guess, something like that.
You know? That would be a more light and like, "I need to burn time," kind of game. And then all those infinite builders, you know, sum- summoners, you know, like Ice, Ice Age. What was that? It was, Century made that. It's a amazing game. Just endless, you know?
Devin: Right.
Elad: All those endless builders. Obviously, Supercell.
You know, I used to play Boom Beach for like months.
Devin: Yeah, we see a trend of games like trying to kind of bait you in with that easy core loop you were talking about for the day one to day, maybe day seven, and then they turn into a 4X game.
Elad: Exactly.
Devin: Exactly. And then that's, that's the way they're keeping you around, is that 4X game loop like you were talking about, even with the, the timers from the idle tycoon ones where they're just kind of-
Elad: Yeah,
Devin: it drags it out, but as long as you don't get fed up, then you stick around, right? And then they've gotta try and get you back.
Elad: Well, think about it that way. Every game caters to a certain group of people, and the challenge in the games industry is finding whether you can scale that group of people or not.
So, I don't know. There was this really old game called, I think it was, ... It was kind of a very, like a blackjack RPG. Really weird. Really, really strange game. Super fun. Like, I think that I-- me and like another friend of mine, we were the only one playing it, I think, or something like that. But, - That's why many games they use like, easy or known mechanic because this way they know that the mechanic already proved that it caters to many people.
Devin: Right.
Elad: For example, I don't know, if you take the Gardenscapes one or, you know, any of those Playrix that has-- The game is not the match-3. The game is the, it's the story. You're unfolding a story. So my mom, I told her, "Try, give it a shot," and she's like, "It's boring," because she wants-- she likes-- she enjoys consuming content and playing levels while someone else enjoys the story and uses that as an excuse to move on to the next level.
Devin: Right.
Elad: So it's, it's really different, I guess. But, yeah, I, I know exactly what you mean with those ads because I fall in this, those ads all the time. I install those dumb games practically every week, seriously, and my kids make, make, make fun of me because I, I love them, you know? I just, I don't know. I, I, I never have the time, and I need to, like, burn time waiting in the bank or in the doctor and then-
Devin: Right.
Elad: or stuck somewhere and, you know, there's like a-- I don't know. There's a caller blocker. I'm looking at my phone now. Caller blocker, blah, blah, something, maze fill, IQ boost. I don't know, like a lot of stuff. Back to your question, we have, one of our biggest clients is, it's a company called bluebat, and we provide through them.
We help with the BI and live ops for the Hard Rock group, the Hard Rock group in, in Florida. So, they have resorts like hotels and, you know, st- and they have arenas and stadiums, and they have shows. So, they found that they can engage those players in-- I don't know. If you win a tournament, you get, I don't know, $5 in the buffet or, like, concert tickets or something fun like that.
There was another company that they used to do that. I, I remember the CEO. I don't remember the company name. That they did that with the sports goods. You know, you can, you know, win sneakers or something like that, and that, that's cool. You know, that's like, that will definitely stretch people to play.
I mean, s-some people will play out of, you know, obsession because they really want to pass that level like a Flapping Bird kind of thing. Mm-hmm. And other people would, you know, they wanna win something, and sometimes I know I see my kids playing and they will grind hours to just get, you know, like $1 or something like that, you know?
Devin: Wow.
Elad: They will just, you know, they watch all the ads and click all the rewards and do everything so that they can... I guess this is why Benjamins, that app, became so successful because lots of people are, I don't know, grinding. And I don't even wanna talk, we had a huge client of Solitaire, real money Solitaire as well, and there is a real money, you know, Match Three, and those games are really getting popular lately because people are like, "Yeah, we can win."
I know. If you can win a few, a few dollars playing, that sounds cool. Plus it gives you some sort of a rush.
Devin: Right.
Elad: Back in the days it was illegal, but somehow, magically- Mm ... all of a sudden, Apple and Google are now allowing it.
Devin: Yeah.
Elad: They don't call it gambling, they call it RMG, real money gaming. It's kind of like its own category, but-
Devin: Right.
Is this a good way to prevent churn is, is essentially be paying people to stick around?
Elad: It's amazing. Yeah.
Devin: Yeah, it is.
Elad: It's great.
Devin: Yeah, it's, I mean, it's kinda like you mentioned casino stuff, and it's like they obviously are kind of a master of keeping people around and spending money. Yeah. But they also, like, dip into that with, like, free play credits and like you said, the buffet, doing things to, like, kinda throw out those carrots to keep coming back.
Elad: Yeah, exactly. That's why Playtika was a great school for many monetization managers and live ops and data people because they do it all day long, you know-
Devin: Right ...
Elad: Across all their brands. And, you know, there's, when you have a big portfolio- You can start doing cross-marketing. So, "Oh, you got sick from this game? It's okay, we have another game for you."
Devin: Right.
Elad: And you don't need to acquire because you already acquired them. You just show them like a pop-up that moves them from one game to another game that is in your same portfolio.
Devin: Yeah.
Elad: So it's, it's cool, you know? And back in the days, Playtika did, like, a rewards program.
It didn't work. I didn't see a lot of companies doing that, which kind of sucks., Like if you play our games, our portfolio games, you'll get like loyalty points, you know, like, like airline companies that you have. Right. Like SkyTeam would connect several airliners companies, so you wanna fly those companies as you're gaining, points, and you can redeem them for whatever.
Devin: Right ...
Elad: I think that this is, like, a really big evolution happening in those last years-
Devin: Makes sense ...
Elad: In games. Yeah.
Devin: I mean, it sounds to me like one of the things that I've noticed about a lot of the stuff you said is that finding that likely to churn indicator is really important because then there's all these things you could try and do, see people out while you still have access to them. Exactly. Even if it's just, "Hey, move on to another one of our games if you're just not gonna play this one."
Elad: Exactly, exactly. If you smell, if you can predict that as soon-- Prediction, it's a very, like you cannot do prediction with the data of, like, you know, two weeks.
You need months and sometimes years because when you run the prediction algorithm and calculate the scores- And validate those scores. That's how you do it in data. You, you need historical data because you have an assumption and you need to prove it. Right. And you basically take a group of people that churned last year.
Okay, fine. Now let's take all their, I don't know, behavior, players, game data the year before that or six months before that, and try to test assumptions. Was it crashes? Was it pop-ups? Was it coins balance? Was it a difficult level? Was it this? Was it that? And then out of the assumption that I checked, let's say I'm throwing 20 or 50 assumptions, how many actually churned?
And that will... Like, what's the score rate? Then you test that on another group and another group and another group, and if it works, you have a... You can predict churn. It's not that complicated- ... if you know what you're doing.
Devin: Do you ever try anything about contacting any of the players to try and find out?
Like, just as a sampler, like a couple of people would be like, "What, what caused you to churn?" Or some way of, like, finding out f- like, specific answers from people as a sample.
Elad: I had the... I had this in, .. I had this actually in, no, in Playtika. We had this, like, amazing customer support, a team that had, like, a live chat, and it worked really cool because, when, when you...
One of the biggest import- like, things that you need to do with those, with the players that you have is create a community. Discord, Facebook, I don't know, wherever. Just create some sort of a community so that they can vent, you know? They can write, "Oh, this game sucks because of this, because of that." And sometimes it's better than data because it gives you, like, this weapon.
Like, you... The guy that is using the this and that weapon kills everyone, and it, it ruins the game for everyone.
Devin: Right.
Elad: So, you cannot take that. You cannot gather that from data. You need s- like, another human being to... that played the game for hours to tell you what's going on.
Devin: So- Do you usually do, like, a churn analysis where you're seeing, like, a trend of churn, and then try and look for that stuff?
Where you're like, "Hey, it's not an individual player thing. It's, like, a something's wrong with the, the game more broadly," sort of thing?
Elad: I think that, like, most of the techniques that we use are mostly focusing on crashes, content, and the sessions data that we gather. But, like I said, I started saying before that in Playtika, I had the...
We had the funnel, loading funnel, and that's, that's one of the, like-- This is like challenges that big companies face. It's not, you know, like, loading funnels in a new game would probably be, I don't know, 80% whatever. Playtika, it's like 96 or 97. We had like a really, really amazing, like it was-- You start fighting for the 0.5%, you know?
Devin: Right.
Elad: Optimizing. But when you have, when your DAU is high, that zero-point-something is thousands or-
Devin: Right ...
Elad: You know. So, we had this problem on the loading that we couldn't figure out what is causing it, and we saw players churning because of it. And I was so frustrated that I asked customer support. I told them, "I think that we have a group of players that is churning because the game is not loading properly."
So, every time someone contacts, we put a live chat. That's one of the things I tell all game studios. Make it easy for the player to complain because this way you can talk to them and understand what's going on.
Devin: Right.
Elad: So, I asked them, I asked the, the customer support. I told her, "Listen, next time someone complains about loading, I don't care at what time of the day, offer them like a gazillion coins for free if they let me do a remote session with them- And figure out what's going on.
And obviously a lot of people thought that, you know, what the fuck? I mean- ... I don't know who, I don't know what. This guy's gonna connect to my computer and start touching stuff. But one guy said yes, and I, I, "Hi, my name is Eran. I'm the CTO of, ... I understand that you love our game, but we realize that, it's not loading sometimes, and I would like to help you."
And he was actually really happy because, you know, all of a sudden, like, if you think about it from your point of, you know, as a user, if you use, I don't know, if you use Spotify or something and, something doesn't work and someone will reach out to you actually to get your opinion. And I fill out those forms.
I'm one of those nerds that when I find a bug in Spotify, I will, will click the Contact Us because I know there's someone on the other side that cares about it and polish those bugs. And when we fixed-- I mean, I took over his notebook. It was like, I know, they woke me up at like, I know, 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM, in the middle of the night because he was from, I know, PST time zone, whatever. And we finally like, "Oh my God, it's like the dumbest thing." It's always the dumbest- Oh ... thing ever. And then the next day we patched, we released a hotfix to production, and all of a sudden thousands of people started going through the funnel.
It worked like magic, you know? So, it's just, it's amazing. It's really amazing. And you move-- Imagine that if you move 1%, 2%, you know, like a, a tiny bit in D1, it affects D7, it affects D14, it affects D28. Right. Like s- to-- So that onboarding is really precious.
Devin: Yeah, I've definitely done that analysis myself where you're like looking at, okay, like we're, you know, we're acquiring new players, but they're not really sticking around that long.
Where is everyone kinda stuck at or stopping at? And it's like sometimes you find it's a technical thing, sometimes you find it's a progress thing.
Elad: There is a reason, there is a reason for everything. Right. Trust me, there is a reason for everything. Most of the time you can get it from the data. Some of the time you won't, and if you have a channel, like a Discord channel or something like that, or somewhere that you can talk to the players, that would be even better because it will help you understand faster what's going on.
Devin: Do you look at like user reviews then for like the one stars and things like that to see.
Elad: Yes, of course. We used to have, in Playtika, we have, we had this, uh, process that every morning someone would manually Gather all the one-star reviews from all the stores and create a document and send it to the product managers.
And then the product managers would go one by one with the QA trying to figure out, is it a bug? Is it a problem? Products are perfect because someone worked under them, you know? Right. Someone polished them, and the polish, polishing a product to perfection is, is art. Like, seriously. This is... When something... It's, it's so funny, but most of us, we just want things to just work.
Devin: Right.
Elad: We don't wa- we don't want more than that, you know? Yeah. Sometimes we don't need more than that. We just want it to work.
Devin: Right.
Elad: You know? There's like, if I click on a song on Spotify, I want it to play. If, you know, the, the, the basic function that it was designed to do, you know, that's all I want. That polish takes time and-
Devin: Yeah ...
Elad: Takes time.
Devin: Well, it sounds like it's even more important in, like, the live ops world because you can break that polish now. Like, you could've polished up the launch version of the game perfectly, but some piece of content six months in, a year in, or more, could somehow break something about the game or change the way the b- it's balanced, things like that, and suddenly you've gotta look at player churn as a fresh thing.
So, you can't really just say you're done. "Okay, we've, we've optimized the game. The loading times are fine. All the crashes are fixed. We're gonna keep updating the game and hope it stays that way." You have to keep looking for that, right? You have to kind of keep those, as you mentioned, dashboards to set-
Elad: Someone owned it. Someone likes... Some people likes calling it the GAAS, G-A-A-S, Game as a Service. Mm-hmm. And it's so true because it never ends.
Devin: Yeah.
Elad: It never ends, seriously. I mean, look at the stats of Candy Crush. The revenue's still going up and you think they would saturate the audience and every- but somehow they find new ways to, you know, to upsell and convert and optimize. And such an old game, it works amazing.
Devin: I guess that's the value of re- reinvesting your money that you're making and making sure you can keep making more.
Elad: Yeah. Many, many game studios, they tempt to, like, create another game or another game, and if you found something that clicks, just scale it, you know?
Devin: Right.
Elad: It's really hard find- finding that something that clicks. Seriously, like really, really hard.
Devin: Are you finding that people are using some of these tools that you're talking about in, like, the soft launch period a lot then as well? Like, with the period when you're maybe more, most concerned with polish and, and scalability?
Elad: I think we had a podcast about that, you know, about soft launching.
Devin: Yeah.
Elad: But, yeah, I mean, crashes are definitely number one priority, and every game is different. For example, you know, um, we had this game that they had, like, this PVP mechanism, and they launched, but there was not enough players to match which each, with each other, and the bots were kind of sucky, so players started churning. So, we created dashboards of, like matches versus players, like mar- matches versus human and matches versus bots. And then we started to check if matches versus bot leads to churn.
Devin: Right.
Elad: Because you realize that it's a bot. You know, you see some patterns repeat or, you know, something that is really obvious, you should have done it and you don't do it, you're like, "What the fuck?" You know, like…
Devin: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like there's some stuff that's obvious that the data's just gonna tell you, and then there's some stuff where you have to actually make the data tell you what you're looking for, like, instead of just expecting it to show up, right?
Elad: Well, it's not my quote. Someone else made that quote from the industry, but games are part art, part science.
Devin: Right. Dash- dashboards are the science part, right?
Elad: Yeah. Data, live ops, the tech parts, of course. Yeah. There's a lot of tech parts. It's one of the most challenging industries in terms of scale and complexity.
Devin: Well, hopefully we can figure out some things that, that work more, consistently outside of just improving the loading times and, and maybe get back to being able to keep players around longer, because it does seem like probably not fixing the player acquisition anytime soon, and we gotta, gotta keep people playing as long as we can, especially with so many games out there now that are free-to-play games.
Elad: And it's really, really easy to test. It's really, really easy to test. So, in Dive... Hmm, sorry, I'm just gonna finish with that. At some point we realized that data is not enough, and we started creating the whole live ops dashboard that we have on segmentation, and we added A/B testing, and we added the,, campaign management.
And I think that A/B testing is probably the biggest thing, because you get rid of pop-ups for, I don't know, 10% of the population. You change the loading funnel for 10% of the population. You see what happens with that group. You track it. Did they retain better? Did they not? Did their retention was better?
Did they end up paying? Did their session length was higher? So, it's-- You can test everything today. It's really, it's really easy.
Devin: Yeah, so test your hypothesis, right? Like actually see if that's true.
Elad: Yeah, exactly, exactly. You can make a gazillion changes, but you just test them, and if you cannot A/B test them, then you can test them on like stores with less traffic.
So, for example, in, in Playtika, we used to use, Amazon because it has a very low traffic. Or some unknown store, and then we see what happens there, and then we apply it to Android and iOS. Over time, we developed an A/B testing system that helped us paint a population and track it better, but...
Devin: I guess that gives you like an alternative way to look at A/B testing if you don't have the setup for it.
Elad: Yes, of course. Or you filter by country. That's another easy way to do it.
Devin: Well, cool. I appreciate you sharing all this experience and, and that you've had as well as the things that you're doing now. A lot of valuable, I think, insights for people because this is kind of... I- if, if you screw this up, it's kinda hard to go back, so it seems like an important thing to be, it's doing now.
Elad: It's more, it's more expensive to make mistakes these days.
Devin: Yeah, exactly. Well, cool. Well, thank- thanks very much for joining us today. I appreciate all those, those insights. Definitely a lot of, kind of a hot topic at the moment, I think, for people. So hopefully it's-
Elad: Yeah, not only in games, by the way.
I, I work, I personally work with other industries, so... And that's, I'm just gonna wrap up with this part. So, if, you know, you can find us in dive.games or in my email, [email protected]. But I, I work with other industries, also in mobile apps and different industry that has nothing to do, and those same patterns repeat.
Devin: Right.
Elad: Seriously.
Devin: Products and customers, right?
Elad: Exactly. It, it's a B2C in general. It's a whole B2C-
Devin: Right ...
Elad: Challenge that, but games are very sophisticated, I think- ... compared to other industry. Seriously.
Devin: Lots, lots of metrics involved, definitely. Because you have data, 'cause you're actually seeing what people are doing as they're doing it, so.
Elad: Yeah, I mean- It's awesome ... if you compare it to like, you know, booking a flight is, is dumb, and it's like, you know, you search for the flight, you find it, you click. Or, you know, Amazon, you add item, add item, and check out. That's really, like, basic. Now try to, try to track what's going on in Boom Beach when you upgrade your headquarters, and you get attacked, and the barracks is like spitting out.
And then you have, like, the harbor. You have, like, someone atta- attacking you from sea, and at the same time you do upgrades of buildings and expanding to a new, like, part of the world. And imagine all the moving parts that you have there versus add item, add item, checkout.
Devin: So- Purchase, now purchase.
Elad: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's a very... Subscription, it's a, it's a way more simple than games are, are fascinating because of that, and this is why I'm, I'm always-- I need to always stay in games in some, some way
Devin: Keep learning.
Elad: Yeah, exactly.
Devin: Yeah. Well, hopefully people, that don't, that don't know the, the technical aspect of that as well could definitely leverage what Dive is doing to help figure that out, so.
Elad: Yes, of course. Of course. Yeah, they can contact us. They can meet us in the conferences, in GDC, in Pocket Gamer. We're always present in those conferences as well. And I really enjoy talking to the new generation because it's, it's fun. I don't know. They're like-
Devin: A lot to learn. Well, thanks very much for joining us today, and thanks to all our listeners out there as well.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this. Thanks, and thanks, uh, and we'll catch you guys on the next one.
Elad: Amazing. Take care, man. Thank you so much.
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