With metagames becoming a key component of player engagement and monetization, it’s more important than ever to get them right. Host Devin Becker welcomes Christopher Molozian, CEO of Heroic Labs, to discuss the evolving landscape of metagame systems and the technology that powers them. Christopher explains how Heroic Labs' platform integrates seamlessly into games, enabling developers to enhance live operations with scalable metagame features. The conversation also explores how metagame elements can boost retention and monetization, while also examining the potential pitfalls where these systems might work against player engagement.

Throughout the episode we address critical questions for developers, including where live operations most effectively tie into metagames, which features should be prioritized, and how to balance standardization with customization in mobile game development. Christopher also touches on the broader challenges of developing metagame features in today’s fast-paced industry and the trends that are shaping the future of metagames across all platforms. Whether you're a game developer, product manager, or simply fascinated by game design, this episode provides valuable insights into the evolving role of metagames in modern gaming.

We’d also like to thank AWS for Games for making this episode possible. AWS for Games aligns purpose-built game development capabilities — including AWS services like Amazon GameLift as well as solutions from AWS Partners — to help game developers build, run, and grow their games. For more information, visit https://aws.amazon.com/gametech/

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 Christopher Melosian, CEO of Heroic Labs.

Heroic Labs provides Cloud and open source game tech for multiplayer and Live Ops. And today we're going to explore the future of metagame related technology and live ops and how those two work together. Chris, why don't you introduce yourself and quickly go over your background, origin of Heroic Labs and, what Heroic Labs does specifically today.

Christopher: Thank you for hosting this, Devin. Great to be on the show with you. As you mentioned, I'm CEO, I'm one of the founding engineers on the team. I've been building our game tech now for just under 10 years. We were founded in the summer of 2015, and we build, broadly speaking, three different pieces of game tech.

So, we build what we call Nakama, which is our open source game backend. It's available on GitHub. You can download it and run it any way you like. We built our game framework hero which we provide to studios who want to sort of Eliminate a bunch of things that we'll talk about today what we call metagame features, you know, eliminate the development work that goes into adding those to your game.

And then lastly, we build our live ops And that's what we provide to help studios run live services games.

Devin: Cool. I mean, digging into one specific aspect here, I know there's a lot of different things that you guys do, but looking at one of the more unique aspects of it, what sets the Hiro product specifically apart from typical cloud game services.

And just for those listening, it's Hiro spelled H I R O and not H E just in case people want to Google it.

Christopher: Quick segue there. We name things off the Japanese words. So a lot of our products are named that way. So yeah, what makes Hiro different to other tooling that you might've seen in the space? So we see that problem around what we think of as common gameplay systems, you know, your shop systems, monetization, offer walls, economy modeling, inventory systems, event leaderboards, tournaments, all of those kinds of capabilities that you see in a lot of the best live services games in the market today.

We see that as something that is foundational. To what players expect, so the quicker you can bring those into your game. And start to bind them together to create this wholesome life services experience for the player. The better you can, you can find out whether your game is something that's going to be attractive to players.

Devin: And how actually is that integrated into games, both from like a technology standpoint and a design standpoint?

Christopher: Good question. So from a technology perspective, we have plugins for unity engine, Unreal engine, C++ native web projects with TypeScript, Godot engine as well. And so studios pull that package in, they run our open source game tech, Nakama and the two together,we've seen help studios eliminate about sort of 15 months of development time, just drop in a lot of functionality that will likely already be in their game design document, something that a game designer has said, we're going to need these systems because they make the game's retention much more attractive to players that, you know, alongside that cool, whatever that cool gameplay might be.

Devin: And is this a fully cross platform across a lot of different platforms in terms of integrating that, especially some that may be obviously like mobile, it's very heavy on metagame, whereas console, it's maybe a little less, is it still kind of across all of them?

Christopher: It's across all of them. We're working with, I can't speak too much about some of these projects, but there's projects that we're working with on console, with studios working on a couple of upcoming live services titles. , we're well helping studios work on telegram gaming, right? So discord gaming, so merging gaming platforms, we're helping studios on mobile, as you mentioned, sort of a, you know, kind of cutting edge of live ops and live services, game design. And then of course, we've got desktop and steam for, for studios that are distributing their games that way.

Devin: Well, cool. I mean, what is the main benefit for game developers when it comes to treating metagame elements, like as a service, whether that be like outsourced or actually using just off the shelf technology?

Christopher: Main benefit. It depends on the type of game that they're building. Right. I mean, ultimately there's really kind of three pathways that we see when it comes to building games in the market. Right. And this is just over our experience of working with studios over 10 years. Right. You've got solo experiential games.

Obviously they may have a small amount of analytics, a bit of player telemetry, that kind of stuff. They're not going to have much in the way of remote save. Remote services, because it's really, you know, 20 to 40 hours of gameplay or more that is meant to be story driven, narrative driven for the player, right?

That's one pathway, right? To that pathway, there's not really a lot that we help in on the game tech side of things, right? Because you're, you're unlikely to need anything beyond what you might be using for sort of platform level Xbox achievements or PlayStation network achievements and that kind of stuff.

But then you've got the other two pathways. You've got solo plus meta. And then you've got social plus meta. And so these two other pathways, they both take advantage of a game backend of some kind. Because both of them, you want to build a live services experience, build a player, progression loops and retention loops that drive them to come back every day.

Ideally make your gameplay habitual. And to do that, you want to be able to introduce achievements and challenge systems and daily tasks, reward systems, all of those kinds of meta. And then if you start to think about monetization, however, you might be doing it in those types of games. You want to keep players data safe.

So you're going to need to be storing it somewhere in the cloud. It can't live on device. So that's where we see that we are most helpful to game studios today. Those two pathways.

Devin: Okay. That makes sense. Pulling back a little bit though, we're, you know, we're talking about metagame stuff, but also live ops.

Obviously they're not exactly the same thing. Like you can have. As you mentioned, kind of no live ops at all and still have metagame and vice versa. Where's the, the, the big overlap between the two and why should people care about this, especially going forward as more games are kind of pushing into more live ops, live service models, and also at the same time pushing into more metagames and things for retention, whereas where's the big overlap and what should people be paying attention to there?

Christopher: That's a great question. So first of all. LiveOps, it's an extremely overloaded term, unfortunately, in the space, as I'm sure you know intimately. So, what do we mean by LiveOps? When we think of LiveOps, we think of it as a combination of roughly five things, right? Your event capture and analytics, your event calendaring system, so scheduling, Player activity, player events, remote configuration, experimentation, and messaging, right?

Reaching out to players, either in game or out of game, maybe remote push notifications, something like that to draw them back in, right? To help build that kind of habitual experience for the player. Most studios that we've spoken to, they fall somewhere. Outside of that spectrum, actually, and they see live services is maybe introducing leaderboards or competitive game design is a form of live services, and it is important to a core game loop that you might think of as multiplayer, but in pure play live services and live ops, we see it is an experience that you bring around continuous content creation.

And then bringing the player and experience tailoring or customization to that play experience. So being able to know what content you need to change to make it more impressive and more interesting for the player, that's for us, that's the way that we see live ops.

Devin: So what do you think are the core metagame features then that people should be paying the most attention to?

Especially though, I mean, for the live ops perspective, like in, in going forward and making sure that like they're actually targeting the things they need to be, especially with the concerns around retention and making sure that monetization is also there?

Christopher: Good question. So depends on the kind of, distribution platform you want for your game.

If we start on something like mobile, then some of the most interesting feature requests or functionality that we've been helping studios implement at the moment is the full range of variations of what we call event leaderboards, bringing together groups of players over some time window. That time window might be over a weekend, or it might be in the week.

They play against those opponents, there's rewards that go through their economy system to grant them to the player, and there's a competitive element to whatever play experience, whatever the core loop is for the game, right? We're seeing a lot of that at the moment. But if you start to track maybe towards desktop and console, , what we see is important from a LiveOps experience there, the little bit.

Behind on that curve, it tends to be, working on things like challenge systems, achievement mechanics, but repeating behavior, right? Some games call them contracts, like, they're there to express a portion of the game world the player has to reach and unlock to be able to keep playing together and unlock new content.

It's, it's that kind of progression mechanic that we see is, is being asked about a lot.

Devin: So it sounds like a combination between event driven stuff and social driven stuff in terms of the social, especially the competitive aspects to drive the event, maybe to matter or for people to show up at a specific time.

And then the event stuff, of course, being the mix of like fresh content, as well as like real time events happening. I mean, are those, are those two things you think sort of intrinsically linked there? Or is it just, you're seeing a strong, like penchants for that overlap, or at least in terms of success rate or what people are asking for?

Christopher: I think it's success rate. I think it's success rate. I think there's both what people are asking for, what studio teams are asking for based on what they're seeing other games in the market do that they perhaps are taking inspiration from and how those games are maybe leading the way on the particular platform that they're on.

And then I think there's an element of, fast follow. You know, like particularly on mobile at the moment with games like Royal Match from Dream Games. They have, I think, 17 different live events that are variations of an event leaderboard game design. And a lot of studios are taking inspiration from that at the moment.

Devin: You mentioned the fast following nature of mobile game development. In general then, obviously there's like a lot of sort of copy and paste mentality, but how much do you think it's beneficial to sort of standardize a lot of these metagame features, like you're talking about almost a specific way of implementing it, versus every game kind of doing their own thing, experimenting, trying stuff out.

I mean, how, how useful is it to do off the shelf or copying from existing successes versus customizing to your individual experience?

Christopher: Good question. I think it always has to be customized, right? I think it always has to be customized, but what makes the way that we approach building the technology slightly different is that it is expected from the way that our tooling is integrated into the game, that there will be elements that are unique and differentiated, but there's an undifferentiated foundation that it can live on top of, right? So what the scoring mechanics are that go into that particular competitive event for the player, what the rewards are that are distributed to them, how you think about the phases of the active event. Is it over a weekend?

How do you stagger your events to prevent player fatigue? All of that kind of information is unique to whatever the core mechanic of the game world is in the first place. So we try to provide tooling that, that lifts the abstraction, but then there is still always, I think, an important, almost expectational element of like, your game design is going to be creative.

Different, creatively unique to some extent.

Devin: Do you find that like helping multiple games across different genres, different platforms, even helps provide sort of a base of best practices and standards that you can sort of develop on your guys's side, or just a level of expertise, potentially that even that comes from, you know, giving advice or, Hey, here's how you guys should implement or customize this based off what we've seen be successful.

And based off of also the services we provide, things like that.

Christopher: So that's a really good question. So there is a lot that we get as an opportunity to kind of suggest, suggest, change, suggest feedback, almost work with game designers within the studio team, irrespective of what particular audience they're targeting on what device platform, because we've been working on lots of different projects on lots of different genres on lots of different device platforms.

We've had the opportunity. To be able to see things that work, but also see things that don't work and hopefully try to get across to the studio where we can actually just tailor this slightly different approaches, slightly different because the route that you're approaching this from is going to box you in.

And you're not going to be able to lift the ceiling on what that game can do in that particular area of whatever the metagame might be. , so yeah, it's something that we're really proud of being able to do is look across massive amounts of genres. I mean, match merging. Block puzzle, , battle royale, mid core RPG, collectible card games, grand strategy, social casino.

We've seen a lot of different game genres over the years.

Devin: So do you find that you have to try and stay ahead of metagame changes and features, not just to see brand new ones, but also emerging changes in the way the metagames are being developed partially, not just because of like. Innovation, things like that, but also player fatigue from certain things and shifting tastes or different generations of players.

Is that something that is a constant thing you have to do or have some strategy for?

Christopher: Yeah, we're, we're constantly, so we're doing two things. We're deconstructing upcoming games, right? Understanding what they're trying that we think might have merit. What might be differentiated in some way. And then what we're doing is we're taking our own internal sort of game design lens on where the market is going and anticipate and trying to anticipate what new.

Gameplay design features we can provide that may not be used by studios, but it gives them more freedom of choice.

Devin: I mean, overall, obviously like this stuff is meant to help with retention and monetization. What kinds of effects do you see these types of metagame features having on there?

Like it more specifically, like, what is it, what is it doing for the games? Why is it worth investing both time and money into this? Why should people consider using services to boost us if they're not already doing these things?

Christopher: Good question. So we can see massive lifts in both engagement, sort of retention and revenue, just through the lens of something like, let's take, a casual social game that is implementing some kind of competitive guild mechanics.

So it's a form of event leaderboard, but it's not player V player. It's guild versus guild, right? So there's an element of layering to it. So players play on behalf of their own. guild, their own group of players, and they together compete through some kind of scoring mechanism to get rewards against other guilds.

That kind of game design over the active phase of a live event can create something like a 300 percent lift in, in revenue over that period, so we've seen huge amounts of monetization impact to, you know, building these kind of engaging competitive game features in a game world. Now, I think there are two pathways to think about when you're thinking about metagame and live services.

You've got retention, keeping the player interested and engaged, and you've got monetization. And on one level, They look like they are the same thing, right? And they belong together, but they are actually two sides of the same coin, but they are two separate sides. So you can do things that build fantastic retention, but then still end up with a game that does a poor job of generating revenue for the studio.

And so, but then on the other hand, you can go down a route that's, you know, pay to win or to predatory. And then ultimately, you know, Cannibalize a bunch of the retention that you had achieved by the kind of game design that you'd implemented. So it's a balancing act between whether you skew focus at any given time between what can I do to create greater engagement with players and what am I doing that would actually help drive some sort of success for the studio.

 And that's something that is, it's a hard knife edge to, to, to, to balance off with any game team.

Devin: Now, do you see, because you mentioned these, these competitions and social events, things like that. Do you see any difference, in terms of success rate or, or like feasibility of these things when it's real time competition, meaning like players are actively competing against each other in a more real time sense, either like literally, you know, In a realtime match or just very, like much more realtime synchronized than sort of asynchronous events where people are kind of competing on this leaderboard where they're just kind of leaving a high score and like by the end of the event you just kind of are where you are.

Do you see like any big difference, especially on the realtime side or no?

Christopher: I don't actually, yeah, we don't particularly see a difference because both of those, they, so one gives the player the freedom to play a little bit more in their own time. A little bit less, you know, less demand on their time based on the kind of multiplayer experience that might otherwise exist, that they need to be partaking in, in real time together, but with that freedom of time, they're still able to create the kind of habitual behavior that says, okay, I know that this event activity is coming up this weekend, so I want to be able to make sure that I can find some time in my weekend to play it, right?

So we've created that kind of, fear of missing out within the player that we can then see turn into, you know, the, the massive success in the life event. Yeah. Whether it's actually real time multiplayer or not.

Devin: Outside of the competitive elements, what sides or, or, or components of the social, just different ways of doing social.

Do you see getting the most traction, especially for a game that might not be competitive minded? Yeah.

Christopher: So it's going to seem crazy to talk about something that's been in Candy Crush for 10 years, but friends and gifting, getting the right kind of gifting mechanic right, is actually incredibly powerful.

Um, so friends lists, being able to send donations, you know, they clash. Clash of Clans do it inside their clan system, right? But it could be on a friends list instead. It's actually being able to get that good feeling of sharing resources you don't need, but also acquiring resources that you do need from other players in the game world.

If you can build that kind of relationship in, to the mechanics of the design of the matter, then yeah, it's incredibly powerful, but it's not anything particularly new because Candy Crush has been doing it for a long time.

Devin: Well, on that note, then do you see any effect outside of like the, the friend gifting stuff you're talking about where, , these meta games are assisting in user acquisition or virality, obviously the friend gifting, well, that goes back to Facebook wall.

Posting and stuff like that. Now one's being a little more obvious, but outside of that.

Christopher: So you mean referral schemes, sort of incentivization, that kind of thing?

Devin: Just anything that helps with user acquisition, since that's the other piece of this puzzle that we haven't really talked about.

Christopher: Yeah. So the challenge there is that Facebook, not Facebook, Firebase dropped their deep linking APIs.

So they made a lot of this sort of a little bit harder, especially across devices on mobile. And it's even harder outside of mobile. You've got to think about alternative mechanism from marketing to players. Is there value in it? Definitely, but it's, there's still a bit of trickiness to get it right.

Basically, um, getting that message out to your friends through mobile or whatever else, and then getting them to install game and then play together. Yeah, if you can make it work, I think the Gameberry guys, I've done a great job of it at one stage, , with their Ludo game. And if you can make it a fundamental part of the design of the game, , even in terms of the collector's mechanic, , that players ascribe to, where they want to unlock all content that's available to them, , you know, that kind of Pokemon collector's type of behavior, then if you make it intrinsically related to that, then I think it can have real merit and it can really drive a lot of organic.

Very hard to bind that to your, to your, to your game design.

Devin: It sounds useful if you could pull it off. Right. Cause obviously anyway, it's not cheap these days.

You mentioned other platforms though, and some restrictions on them are some of these metagame features, ones that just don't work very well on other platforms.

Mobile seems to be kind of the one that has probably the most, I would guess. Partially just because of the platform itself and all the interconnectivity and everything. But outside of that, like, especially on console being a big one, , do you see some of these just not working or being difficult to implement besides, you know, obviously Facebook posting is not going to work very well on PlayStation, for example, right?

Christopher: Yeah. So a lot of it is just, as you say, it just, it just doesn't work or those games that are able to take advantage of it, go through special sort of APIs, the special relationships with the platform holders. So otherwise it can be quite tricky to be able to create that kind of, incentivization loop or install loop steam is okay.

Desktop is fine, but yeah, you're right. Consoles are a lot trickier in that regard to how to get players in organically.

Devin: You mentioned desktop. Is there, is there any integrations or anything that like working with something like discord or some of these outside applications, you know, obviously steam itself you're working with, but like to, to be able to reach out.

Integrate metagame elements with other applications or even maybe other APS, other platforms, things like that.

Christopher: So absolutely. We've got, we've got a lot of integrations that we can help with on those areas. There's also interesting things that I'm seeing studios doing where they're building a discord gaming experience.

This may be sort of a, an entry way for the player to get into the larger game world and then distributing that through discord gaming, and that way the player. is both able to immediately drop into a play experience, if it's the right kind of game design, amongst their friends in Discord, but also then get pulled into the bigger game experience.

It's not like a cut down version of a game, it's almost like a companion game. It's almost a better way to look at it. That then draws them as a group in and there you get kind of that organic lift that comes out of where they already are in discord and having already been able to play together in discord carrying forwards into the main main game experience.

Devin: You mentioned sort of cross platform play and being able to play on multiple platforms for like the same game or a companion game. Is there any considerations around Metagame development and LiveOps stuff that ties together with games that are on multiple platforms can be played across both, you know, with your friends across, but also switching platforms yourself between, I'll go over to this platform play.

I'll go over to this platform play, like just thinking about metagame in general. Is there, is there stuff that, uh, you know, is it, is either a concern or is interesting in that space?

Christopher: In terms of metagame, I'm not sure the metagame we don't see it being deeply affected by crossplay gives you access to a much wider pool of potential players, obviously, but, , in terms of its ability to be impacted by or impact the metagame design itself.

I would say it's not too impactful. You might have incentives that you give to the player when it comes to things like account linking, social connectivity, that kind of stuff to be able to bind it to that cross play world. , in terms of whether or not I would have to design, I would see the design of the metagame itself intrinsically different because I'm in a cross play world.

Probably not. No, I would say not at the moment anyway.

Devin: Cool. And one thing I think we didn't touch too much on, around the metagame stuff, cause we were talking more about the social and event stuff is the ones that are tied directly to monetization, like gotcha elements and things like that, which I believe is something that, you know, hero also does some stuff with what thoughts you have on monetization focused, you know, metagame tools and things like that.

Christopher: So I think, I think there's a, this is a challenging question because I think there's a bit of stigma. Accepting that to be a successful studio, you do need to encourage players to be able to contribute to the studio success, right? That means you have to figure monetization out in some way, right? Now there's different major different pathways that you can take subscription models.

You can take DLCs and therefore do kind of periodic revenue lift when new. game content that you want to deliver, is made available to players on some kind of cadence. And then you've got your sort of free to play models, right? That might involve on mobile might involve in a hybrid mix of in app purchases and ad revenue.

 I think it's important to think about. Monetization from as early as possible post core mechanic, right? You know, I, you want players to enjoy the game. You don't want the game to be paid to win. You do want to create the right balance between what players could be able to achieve with maybe a low spend or just an initial acquisition of that player and their kind of initial purchase of the game, if it's sort of not on mobile. But then as the game world evolves, how are you going to steer that monetization story for players? No one's going to get it perfectly right from day one. I think it's too hard to do that, but I do think you need to go into it with that in mind.

And I think sometimes there's a sense of when we're doing stuff that's deeply creative. We shouldn't have to think about that problem. And I think in an ideal world, that would be true, but you know, there's, you know, there's the world that we want it to be in this, the way the world works. So, we've got to be pragmatic as well, I think.

Devin: Yeah. Well, on that note, then, what do you think are the biggest challenges in general to developing metagame features in modern games? Especially modern games being the emphasis that where it's, these seem like kind of a must. Like, where's the difficulty? Because you're seeing, you're helping with, with games.

So you're seeing like where they're struggling as well as where you maybe struggle to adapt to what the needs are. Where do you see that most of that focus going?

Christopher: Okay. So great question. The way I would answer that is let's take a specific game feature, right? Let's go back to event leaderboards, whether we structure it the way that it's done in Helldivers, or whether we think about the way that it's done in Royal Match, for example, in both cases to make that feature really shine, you essentially need to cover, you know, broadly speaking, sort of four or five different components. You're going to have to have the leaderboard system. You're going to need to have economy and rewards. Some kind of event calendaring system to drive the scheduling of it all players themselves.

So see, we need accounts. We need to be able to access data for players and then matchmaking. So something that looks like one feature. Is five different problems, five different problems that we need to layer together in the right way to create that one play experience that the player comes into, clicks in and partakes in, right?

So that's, I think, where we see things like the tooling that we put together is, is so helpful to studios is because otherwise you will have to layer those pieces up anyway.

Devin: Does it help them to be integrated with, and I know this is really obviously like, in your guys product, but I just mean, as a general concept, does it help to have that integrated with the sort of cloud services and like multiplayer real time, for example, aspects or other handling of that multiplayer outside of just the metagame aspects of those two being able to be a little more integrated tightly without having to, to have the studio doing all of that in their game clients and stuff.

Christopher: Good question. So I think for matchmaking data, basically, for the, to create the right play experience that is going to be meaningful to players, you need to be able to match them together, depending on whether you're in an event leaderboard.

And therefore you don't even think of matchmaking as being a problem you need to consider in that, in that scenario, or whether you're in a… I'm going to be doing something that's fleet management based sort of high fidelity Unreal Engine five. Headless instances running in the cloud, maybe it's going to be first person shooter or battle royale, or maybe it's going to be mobile game design.

In those scenarios, the closer I can bring my core game data to what I use to match players together with and be able to bind those two together, and then all of the remaining game services that might influence that core game data, that is going to make my development experience far more fruitful, right?

It's going to be, you know, bringing as much of these tools together because some studios will build out tooling. And it will be sort of a proliferation of services to solve different parts of the problem. But these problems are so intrinsically linked, that if you think about the matchmaking story, I might need player stats, I might need to use save game data for players, I might need to use, there's all sorts of elements I need to bring together to be able to match those players.

And so the closer it can live together and scale and still scale, the more effective you're going to be able to evolve the game over time. That's our experience. Anyway.

Devin: Is there any, any specific use cases? You don't have to name the game or anything that you've seen that you find particularly interesting in implementing these metagame features, maybe even ones that drove you guys to implement new metagame features or something like that, where it's just really been like pushing you guys and pushing them to develop and explore that space.

Christopher: Okay. So it's common in MMO, but it is actually extremely complicated to get right, as you could probably guess, but the kind of marketplace or auctioning system between players, right? So it might be a collectible card game. It might be some kind of mid-core RPG. It might be something that's MMO based, but being able to create an economy system You know, correctly managed liquidity, but you understand the value of these items across the game world so that they are priced in a way that other players can competitively acquire amongst each other.

, And manage all of that transaction logic and auctioning behavior, time limited bids, that functionality is, is hard to build, and so, yeah, we recently added that in to our game framework into Hero. But that was something in response to a couple of studios, one working on something that's in the kind of collectible card space and another working.

And funnily enough, the kind of, um, sports simulation game space basically. So, yeah.

Devin: Does that sort of tooling allow you to then potentially do simulations for these markets for the, for the market dynamics? Cause I know that's one area where there's not like a ton of tools out there necessarily for simulating these markets, like in terms of multi person markets.

 Obviously like You could do it, run it, your, your game client. But I do wonder, is this something that maybe would help people be able to do that? Because I find, you know, someone, myself involved a lot in the, the economy side of things for games, that that's a difficulty where it comes down to like, how do I really plan this out?

Test it out, really like make sure the thresholds are there. Outside of just a spreadsheet?

Christopher: It's a good question. So that's something that's an area that we're looking into quite heavily. Now that we've got sort of a structured approach or an opinionated approach to how we think you could model an economy and reward systems.

And we can try to encourage where we can help studios use that technology. Then you get into that ability to simulate. Yeah. We could start to run simulations, figure out where the correct taps and sinks are, where players acquire rewards, where they then spending and consumer was how to model out economy, liquidity in the market, basically, because every game world virtually Is ultimately managing an economy much like the real world does.

So, we haven't announced tools around this yet, but it is something that we're working in.

Devin: Well, excellent. Excellent. I mean, on that note as well, is there any thought around these metagame features and implementing more user personalization, A B testing, those sorts of things where users for different reasons might see different things on their client that is related to the metagame properties.

Christopher: So that's for us, that's where we think of Satori, our LiveOps server coming in, right? It's designed to allow studios to sort of bring their own data models. It works with existing game studios and existing game projects, as well as new projects that are being built from the ground up. And there, we actually, we consider the concept personalization.

That's how we refer to it. So it is, it does involve doing experimentation. It does involve remotely configuring data for players differently, depending on which, uh, segment they fall into, which audiences we refer to them, they fall into, and all of that is ultimately for the sake of tailoring the player experience.

And then once you're at that stage, you can start to explore some of the areas of ML, sort of machine learning based models. For things like a lifetime value prediction, churn prediction, level completion prediction, if it's a level based game, for example, or, you know, world exploration prediction and understand to what extent this player is going to, or that you believe based on a confidence model, that this player will, how far they will get and how you could help them get further over whatever hurdles that they encounter in the game world.

And therefore you're truly tailoring that player experience into something that's unique to them. So that's something that we separate out. Yeah.

Devin: As another player personalization then, you talked about sort of ML applied to, you know, being able to, to tweak it and figure things out. Is there like some tooling or interest around developing something where, you know, you're taking these meta games and you're You' re probably not going to get them right the first time as much as you'd like to, you're having to, to tweak them and tailor them.

You know, we talked about simulations and ML. Is there, is there some way to potentially look at ways to figure out how to improve them through these systems? Looking at all the data and being like, wow, what do I do with all this information? How do I maybe use ML or something to figure out how to tweak this metagame to improve that rentation?

Like you talk about, you know, the churn predictions, for example, I would imagine could be part of that.

Christopher: I think, yeah, I think you'd have to approach it. And this is an area that we're exploring at the moment. You'd have to approach it for a, from a platform by platform audience, demographic perspective, as well as.

A game genre positioning as well, so it's not just going to be block puzzle, but it might be block puzzle targeting this particular audience demographic that I'm distributing on mobile, for example, that might give you the opportunity to then start to build a model. that will help with that kind of game.

Unfortunately, I think it's very tricky to build these more generic models that say, Hey, games on mobile can now use this churn prediction model because it really is so dependent on the play experience in the game world itself. And so we were exploring that area at the moment, but we also see that a lot of The, the answers are going to come from partners in the market as well.

And our, our ability to bind our technology to enable that, that, that solution, those solutions to be built is going to be extremely useful to game studios.

Devin: You mentioned a lot about. The, you know, the focus on social and event driven stuff. I think the event driven stuff might be a little obvious, but the social, especially the competition side, why do you think that's been so prevalent and so effective in terms of driving, you know, retention and monetization outside of the obvious, like I'm just competing for status or power?

Christopher: So I think it's two reasons. I think one is because we are social by nature as people. Right. , I think we're social, but in we're, we're most effective in small communities. And I think gaming allows you to build that kind of small, uh, personal community experience, right? So I think that's a huge part of it.

Second piece of it is it's still so important to talk about how relevant and interesting it is today, because it's really hard to build those kinds of game systems, right? Building a social graph system that allows you to express things like show me friends of my friends who are not yet my friends, or.

I played with these friends in this multiplayer match. How many of them are not yet on my friends list that I might send an invite to, you know, creating those constructs, you're talking about sort of social networking style. APIs, right? You're talking about the kind of scaling challenges that you get in any social network.

There's achieved sufficient escape velocity and that makes them difficult to scale, and they require a sort of a style of engineering thinking that is very much more like less web engineering, more social networking engineering.

Devin: Yeah, I imagine like we, I obviously like Facebook's not brand new or anything, but you know, they've, they've definitely spent a lot of time just trying to stay around and stay relevant, uh, in this day and age.

And it's like, you know, we have had a little bit of new stuff like through tick tock and a few other things, but most of it's still kind of under meta. , when it comes to then these sorts of systems of, trying to make new friends, I found that really interesting what you said about, there's a lot of these games where, you know, I might not play the same games as my friends, right?

But I, then I maybe need to make new friends in these games that will, will play with me, right? Where obviously there's guilds and other things that were that sort of. around kind of club mentality. Have you found, you know, some interesting metagame systems or systems that you guys have, have built or sort of been experimenting with to help facilitate that there's obviously there's like the friends you've recently played with kind of thing, or some games will recommend, Hey, this guy played really well.

Do you want to make a friend out of him? Those, those sorts of things there.

Christopher: So I think the usual suspects that you've mentioned are extremely relevant, even today, extremely important for the kind of social constructs that you want to build as a foundation of a kind of social plus meta game experience in terms of interesting, unusual things we've come across that has come up that we've helped studios achieve in this area.

I think some of the more recent stuff is being able to traverse the friend graph, , and being able to allow you to be able to bind the friend graph to the guild system, , to allow players to sort of, , effectively transfer themselves to the set of friends that might have come from the real world that are now in the game world and transfer themselves around to be able to play.

Consolidate their play experience around those players, right? Move themselves around and to form that kind of link through things like discord gaming as well, bring those things together, so I think that, I think that's an interesting area that we've helped it.

Devin: Yeah. I found interesting that I see occasionally sometimes just full guilds move between games.

Like we're all moving over to this game now because the other games dying or whatever. And obviously like, you know, that's, that's a bummer for the game you're moving from. And I imagine you're probably not helping. That sort of process, you know, because that would probably be not great for games, but it is interesting to see that like that is something that may be like training, especially, you know, if it's the same genre and it's just something that appeals to them because I see it in the physical board game space and things like that.

Tabletop gaming as well. People will kind of group migrate. So that's, that's interesting that I mentioned discord can provide sort of a pivot to that. Point for that. Yeah. Now, outside of the social stuff, what are some of the bigger other trends that you've seen or shifts in metagames that you've seen just these over the time you've been doing it or where it's kind of starting to trend towards, , as well as live ops, the live upside of things and how those two kind of interact.

Where has it kind of been going over the, over time? Just outside of the one specific one we've been kind of talking about.

Christopher: So I think from a LiveOps perspective, so we've been doing it for 10 years, and from a LiveOps perspective, I think there are still only a handful of companies that do a really great job of understanding how to bind the concept of player fatigue to this sort of live, event calendar experience.

So by scoring live events with particular, , fatigue values, using that, scale fatigue scale to make sure the players enjoy the game, maybe on a habitually weekly basis with different amounts of content that they consume, but in a way that doesn't overwhelm them because they could be churning out because they actually played too much and got burned out on the game.

Um, there's not a lot of that yet that we're seeing being understood like broadly by studios that are building live services. Sort of, you can end up putting too much content that can grab the player on a retention sort of basis that just Cause them to drop the game. Basically, it's just too much to keep up with.

, MMOs have been classically difficult at getting this balancing right. But there's also alongside that MMO experience, it's kind of, it attracts the kind of player that is prepared to, To be that engaged for that length of time, whereas with the wider mobile space or sort of access to more casual games, you've got to think about how to keep the gameplay content engaging, create some amount of habitual time based interaction, but not in a way that's going to fatigue them.

So I think this is an area that I'd love to see more happen in the way the game teams think about their game design and we're building tooling into our LiveOps tech to try to help with modeling that out, right? What does it mean to consider a player to have, engaged in something that might fatigue them?

How do I measure fatigue in the games? It's, it's, it's. Difficult, but it's, it's interesting.

Devin: Are you finding then that you're having to kind of diversify the types of metagames in terms of like short term, medium term, long term arcs that the players then have to consider so that you can avoid that where players can be like, I'm in, I'm engaged in these sort of short, medium term ones, the long term one, maybe I'll kind of opt out of, but that you're layering them.

Christopher: A hundred percent about layering and also those larger ones that they might opt out of. How else can they get that content? Because they as a player don't want to be missing out on content that they have no other way to get hold of. Right? Whether it's new gear or loot inside that game world. They could only have otherwise acquired by playing that event that might be good for some players, but what portion of your player base is going to be engaged by that?

And how much of the rest of the player base might be put off by that, right? How do you get that layering? Right. I think that it's speaking to exactly what the challenges are that we're trying to help with studios solving.

Devin: Have you, have you run into anything interesting around the idea then of like trying to pull back players who either have churned or might be like weaning towards churning through things like, you know, communication outside the game, through emails, notifications, push notifications, things like that, events that are being run sort of that, that sort of place between like metagame and live ops that might be sort of reaching out to the player or trying to sort of bring them back into the game.

Christopher: You mean, how do you pick up? Where these churn points are happening and where this sort of fatigue has overwhelmed players.

Devin: Yeah. If you guys are seeing that a lot, like, is there something that you guys are kind of trying to do to sort of find ways to use these tools, the live ops and the metagame to sort of bring people back regardless of the communication method?

Christopher: So in bringing them back, we're trying to help with things like sort of messaging to players, you know, helping to understand through sort of polling mechanics, how, you know, the player I felt about the play experience as they got through it, try to make that polling experience be gamified, right, actually make it live in the game world.

So it's not like, you know, having to, you know, a bit like the old runescape model where you can go to runescape, you go to a polling station, you give your feedback, and it actually affects, you know, the community management actually says, Hey, you know, Eight weeks later, you know, we've decided we're going to work on these game features for you guys because that's what you as a community told us to do, right?

But building that kind of gamified experience and even for the way you acquire feedback in terms of figuring out whether or not you're fatiguing players, it's mostly figuring out through discord and Reddit at the moment, basically like ending up with a Reddit community for your game and finding out by observing.

Player comments there about what is driving them out of the game. Basically. It's still very much just listening as best you can to what players are saying.

Devin: Well, you mentioned the, the aspects of like, obviously social has been a big part, but also you talked about polling a little bit and I wonder, have you seen any trend towards any of these Medicaid features around governance outside of just bog standard?

Guild features to where it's like, obviously like 4x games, maybe have a little bit of that sort of like layers of hierarchy. Is there, is there a metagame trend at all that you're seeing or anything interesting towards that governance idea as part of the game?

Christopher: I think in a lot of sort of web three gaming, there's a strategy sort of trying to be tested out that might align the governance of the actual web3 structure of the company to how the governance works within the game world. I don't know that they've been successful yet, so, but yeah, other than that, you're right. Forex tends to be the absolute top end of how you build a governance structure that goes beyond these skill systems.

Everything else is, is. It's got to be more casual than that, I think, at least that's what we've seen.

Devin: I guess I was thinking along the lines of like some of the MMO stuff that used to be tried, and just that sort of integration into the game systems or not. Like, I've definitely seen it, yeah, more so in Web 3, but I was just curious if any of the Web 2 side of things had tried to push that direction, maybe a little inspiration from the Web 3 side of things, but in maybe not a tokenized way or anything like that.

Outside of the trends that, you know, we just talked about, I don't know. What does the future look like beyond those that you at least, you know, feel free to just go crazy, but like, where do you see things going from here? Like, obviously maybe stuff you can't even build in the next year or two. What does it look like five, 10 years from now?

You think for metagames and live ops and especially the overlap between the two.

Christopher: Okay. So I think, I think, I mean, we, I think we can all agree on this one. I think it's going to be, I think it actually went not too far off it happening, but introducing content creation pipelines. That are bound together to your metagame experience alongside generative AI so that you can create a sustainable, engaging model for both the development studio to be able to generate that content because it is so time intensive and time consuming to create the right kind of content.

And there are escape hatches that companies are trying, right? They're those companies are going down user generated content are trying to use the community to drive the creation of content that keeps the world itself engaging and fresh for players, right? And that is one pathway. But I think with, strengthening emergence of better tooling within the generative AI space, we will get to a model whereby smaller studio teams can compete against the very large players in the space by creating.

Content experiences that can start to think about, you know, like the next generation of living franchises, those games that measure player attention, LTV, and sort of years rather than days and weeks and months, you know, and to do that, I think the tooling that's emerging in the generative AI space and how you think about binding that to your meta game. It's going to be really powerful way to create small studios that move to create extremely powerful value outcomes for players. So I think that's where I see the biggest piece of it coming from.

Devin: It definitely seems like it's been trending that way, especially with the cost and the high overhead, as well as the failure rate of a lot of these live service attempts.

This does seem like it might be a good strategy to see if you, so you could streamline that just a little bit. Uh, I mean, we're definitely seeing that I think MapleStories, sort of, I mean, it's a web three project, but they. Sort of echoed what you said, where it's maybe player creation is a lot more efficient than their ability to create and how do we integrate that into the broader metagame and the game in general and the economy.

, in this case, they're doing it through a web, web three, but I think like your point kind of stands of how do we do that more even, CCP as well, looking at that for, for E frontier, how do we integrate these things more deeply so that it's not just about UGC in the typical sense, right? It's like about how does player involvement in the broader metagame Like actually influence, you know, people's engagement as well, because they're obviously bought in for maybe longer periods of time, as you said, hopefully years, if they've created stuff, they might want to stick around longer if they're actually embedded in it in some way.

Christopher: Yep. Yep. They feel like they own a part of that play experience.

Devin: Right. Definitely. Well, there's a lot of stuff I think, worth exploring still for a lot of people out there. And I think a lot of cool things that could be done. Hopefully people can, can find some utility as well from the services that you guys provide, as well as just broader thinking about this space and how to continue to expand it.

So we don't all just repeat the same. Stuff we've been doing since the Facebook days, maybe we get a little creative from there, but I want to thank you very much for, for taking the time to talk. I think there's a lot of cool stuff and hopefully LiveOps can kind of figure itself out and define itself a little more clearly, but hopefully this gives you a chance to reflect on a different aspect of it in terms of at least metagame and be some of that economy.

And it sounds like social competition. So, so thanks again, Chris, uh, for coming on and, make sure to check out, uh, heroic labs and see what they have going on as it sounds like they have quite a few different surfaces on a one roof, , with checking out in this case, we were talking about Hiro and you wanted to mention the other ones again, just so that people know what the names are for the light bulbs side of things and knock over for the game backend.

Christopher: Yeah. And thank you so much, Devin.

Devin: Yeah, definitely. Thanks again and then hopefully we'll see you guys all for future interviews here. Of course, we have plenty of them coming down the pipe, so make sure to check those out. Stay subscribed or however else you are for, you're getting this.

And, uh, we'll catch you guys on the next one. Thank you very much.

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