LiveOps Is About Relevancy Stupid
Clash Royale ran a Lil Wayne "halftime show" around the Super Bowl, and it should have nailed the butt crack. It's a fun brand activation, and going back to a talk I haven't stopped thinking about @Teut Weidemann's the rhythms of free-to-play, the CCU butt crack occurs at halftime.
CCU is strong before football kickoffs, collapses during play, and then at halftime, a clean vertical spike appears: the butt crack. A perfectly predictable surge as players pick up their phones for a few minutes before the game resumes, and then drop again.
Clash Royale clearly recognized the window: they built a halftime activation. This is the right instinct, but they didn't engineer around the spike. Something that's really perplexed me: the event went live on Friday, not during halftime. There was no moment-specific nudge tied to the surge.
This is where most teams misunderstand LiveOps. It sometimes gets defined as updates, UA bursts, events, offers, yada yada yada. It's taken me a while to realize this since listening to Teut's talk and thinking about mobile user acquisition, but really, LiveOps is about relevancy.
The whole point about "live" is that it captures fleeting moments. This is why so much of LiveOps is about holidays. This is how you immediately become relevant to the player. Lunar New Year, St. Patrick's Day, and Easter: we build events around these because they have a time-limited meaning in a player's life.
The butt crack talk reveals that we haven't considered relevance on a micro LiveOps basis. In mobile, a lot of this is because teams rarely check CCU. It's something that's been reserved for HD games, mostly to ensure it's high enough to sustain matchmaking, while nearly anything on mobile is reviewed on a daily cadence.
With March Madness and the World Cup coming up, it's a good time for mobile teams to plan how they'll structure their LiveOps to cover dead periods and stay relevant to players during those gaps, which is central to the mobile game thesis.