EA's four evergreen principles to keep your service games fresh

There are many considerations to factor in when planning how to update and expand a live service title, but chief among them is what players best respond to.

That's according to Electronic Arts' head of operations Arjun Balaram, who delivered a presentation at India Game Developers Conference in Hyderabad this week on the evergreen tenets of developing live service games.

Drawing on his extensive experience of such titles, particularly on mobile, Balaram said there were three lenses through which every update must be viewed:

1. Players: How the new content will encourage them to keep engaging with the game
2. People: How your team is kept informed of the goal and business context of each update
3. Process: How you create each addition in efficient a manner as possible

Balaram kicked off with the player-centric considerations and the four key principles behind them, which we present below.

1. Be ready to change, no matter how much work you have put in

Balaram emphasised the need for developers and publishers to stay flexible, using the development of Bejeweled Blitz as an example.

The PopCap Games team behind the match-three game spent months creating a new feature called 'Encore,' which allowed players to spend some coins to boost their score. It was presented alongside other options via a pop-up that appeared at the end of each match. PopCap spent weeks fine-tuning the UI, but focus groups revealed it hadn't worked out as they hoped.

"What we found was that, after all the effort we put in for months and weeks, the thing that players did most was they just clicked the 'X' [to close the pop-up]," Balaram explained. "They didn't go through the other stuff, the only thing they cared about was the score boost.

"So we redesigned it to really emphasise that all the other stuff was not relevant. That score boost was the motivation for playing, and redesigning this really helped."

2. Give the players what they want

When Plants vs Zombies 2 was first developed, Electronic Arts planned to expand it every two to three months with a new 'world' that would be sold for $5. In addition to new levels, each world came with a set of 20 to 30 new plants players could deploy, as well as additional zombies to face and different challenges related to these additions.

Balaram reported that each world would take three months to build and the team soon got into a cyclical process of updating the game. But as they paid closer attention to how players were interacting with the new content, the developers realised there was only one particular feature that was getting the most traction.

"Players really enjoyed the new plants and the quirkiness in them," Balaram said. "So we shifted to making premium plants, and instead of all the effort going into this world and so many different characters, every month we would have a plant we would sell for the same $5 – and that worked well.

"We'd then have a system where there were quests and events associated with the plant, and that worked well too. So we went from this heavy content treadmill to [focusing on] what the players really cared about: having these new plants that they could play with."

3. Ritualise your updates

A regular cadence of updates, and even notifications that build anticipation for those updates, can really help keep your players engaged. Live services games thrive when they become part of the players' regular routine, when players know what to expect and can plan for new additions.

This can work on a mid-term basis, such as the two to three-month expansions mentioned above, or even on a daily basis. Balaram gave another example from Plants vs Zombies 2, whereby a timer would pop up at the top of the screen to let players know when the next daily quest would kick off.

"The simple thing of adding this timer basically stabilised our DAU," he said. "And we would see our DAU spike when the new quest was there so that was pretty cool."

4. Players care more about what they get than how you make it

Balaram said that live service titles should be designed with expandability in mind from the outset, but that your strategy should adapt around how players engage with those expansions.

When designing new additions, it can be easy to get caught up in what the team thinks will improve the game. Equally, it can be tempting to share more and more detail about what you're working on and how you're making it as your community grows.

"Remember, the game you make is only as good as players say it is – that's all that matters."

However, the EA exec said that in his experience players are primarily concerned with what he described as "the three hows." In order of importance to your audience, these are 'how often', 'how much', and 'how'.

"Players care most about how often you're engaging them," he said. "What comes next, which they care slightly less about, is how much new stuff you're providing them.

"What they least care about is how you're actually doing it, what's under the hood, and so on. Is it a reskin? Is it something built from scratch? Is it a client update or a service-side push? They don't care, they just want something new and interesting to engage with."

Above all, Balaram urged developers and publishers to pay attention to player feedback, and adapt their strategy and development processes accordingly.

"Remember, the game you make is only as good as players say it is – that's all that matters."