This fireside chat will elaborate on how studios can achieve great live ops success in-part by aligning new game seasons and themes, with fresh level design concepts. This conversation will also explore the importance of:

• Level design strategies and methodologies that contribute to the success of live service games
• Organising and supporting your teams to give them the best chance of success delivering live season content
• Leveraging analytics to and creating content for a diverse player base

Michael How

Expert Level Designer
Sledghammer Games

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Creating a distinct and consistent visual identity is essential for a successful LiveOps game. Panellists will outline their best practice and strategies for establishing a memorable visual art identity, maintaining aesthetic consistency, and achieving clarity that satisfies players by:

• Establishing a visual hierarchy to enhance the player experience and visual satisfaction.
• Utilising automated tools and AI to streamline content production, while making the most of your talented team and managing player feedback.
• Managing budgets effectively to deliver quality visuals without compromising on impact.

Rachele Doimo

Art Director
Square Enix

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Alex Perkins

Art and Technical Art Director
Avalanche Studios - Liverpool

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Prashant Patil

Art Director
Look North World

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In the fast-paced world of LiveOps, localisation must keep up with constant content updates and evolving cultural trends. This session will explore a variety of ways studios can successfully integrated technological automation into their localisation workflow, simultaneously improving efficiency, maintaining quality, and engaging players while also navigating the legal risks of automation by:

• Implementing technology-driven localisation tools such, as machine translation and AI, to streamline content updates and reduce manual workload.
• Mitigating legal and technical risks associated with automated workflows.
• Balancing automation with quality control in LiveOps localisation.

Tamara Tirjak

Head of Localisation
Frontier Developments

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Ewa Dacko

Localization Team Lead
Ten Square Games

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In this session, we'll explore how a well-established studio with a globally recognised IP has evolved its live ops strategy over time, adjusted to a growing player base, and adapted to changing player expectations. Drawing from a use case of live ops evolution, we'll touch on:

• Outlining steps studios can take to successfully evolve live ops strategy.
• Expanding live ops games onto other platforms and adapting to cross-platform challenges.
• Catering to a variety of skill levels as the player base grows.

Matthieu Burleraux

Senior Director, Puzzle Games
Rovio Entertainment

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As one of the longest-standing publishers in the mobile space, Gameloft has undergone a strategic transformation: evolving from a mobile-only catalogue to a diversified, cross-platform portfolio spanning mobile, PC, and console. This session will explore how multi-platform growth impacts live game management, how different lifecycle stages require different strategies, and how performance turnarounds can be achieved. Through two real-world examples, dive into:

• Organizational implications of managing across platforms.
• Mobile-First to Cross-Platform: Gameloft’s Strategic Shift.
• Live Games at Different Lifecycles: The 1-Year vs. 15-Year Challenge.

Dimo Dimov

Vice President Live Games
Gameloft

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This session will detail how teams can strategically embed IP partnerships and collaborations across multiple aspects of a game while balancing creative ambition with financial viability and measuring success beyond initial hype. Gain a deeper understanding of:

• Integrating IP collaborations holistically to enhance gameplay, marketing, and monetisation.
• Evaluating partnership potential by aligning brand synergy with long-term player engagement.
• Mitigating costs and risks by assessing real impact versus surface-level appeal.

Session to be announced

Get an inside look at how putting data at the heart of every product decision will elevate your live service game. In this session, data experts will share quantifiable take-aways that outline their top-tier results achieved by:

• Embedding data into decision-making to meaningfully influence product direction and player satisfaction.
• Applying clustering techniques such as K-means to uncover actionable engagement patterns.
• Demonstrating measurable impact by aligning data-driven insights with successful product outcomes.

Creating a robust game system and economy is an essential part of operating live games. In this Talking Tom case study, Mykola Akulov, will not only dive into how to design a balanced resource flow and economy that enhances the player experience and maximises monetisation, but he will also outline actionable steps to take if your initial system design doesn’t deliver the desired results. Gain a deeper understanding of:

• Designing a seamless resource flow that supports both progression and monetisation.
• Balancing in-game currencies and rewards to maintain player satisfaction and retention.
• Adapting and refining your game’s economy if initial designs doesn’t to meet expectations.

Mykola Akulov

Principal Lead Monetization Designer
Outfit7

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The monetisation landscape has been fundamentally disrupted by recent changes in the Epic v. Apple case, opening the floodgates for direct-to-player strategies around webshops. This session, led by Dave Mata, starts from his years of webshop experience and jumps to now, unpacking what worked, what is working, and what's next in this quickly shifting environment, such as:

• Development of the smart webshop
• Mitigating liability and risk through Merchant of Record partnerships
• Leveraging Agentic AI to hypersegment and scale dynamic revenue-generating storefronts

Dave Mata

Head of Product
Maglev Industries

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Not every live service game can run forever, but knowing when and how to transition from active development to sustained support is critical for long-term success. This session will explore how CD PROJEKT RED successfully made such a switch for its popular live service card battler by involving players in the process:

• Identifying the right time to transition a game to a self-sustaining model or phase it out.
• Optimising monetisation for a self-sustaining model while keeping players engaged.
• Aligning development, LiveOps, and business strategy to provide players with game management tools.

Vladimir Tortsov

Director of Live Ops
CD PROJEKT RED

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