Live Service Gaming North America Summit

Ahead of the Live Service Gaming North America Summit 2025, we had the opportunity to speak with Nick Chapelas Live Operations Director at Kabam

Nick shares insights on building a sustainable game economy, balancing short-term gains with long-term growth, and the importance of understanding player preferences. He also emphasizes using player data to inform monetization strategies and maintain engagement.

1) How do you design a game economy that supports player engagement and monetization plans for years to come, balancing short-term gains with long-term growth?

In my eyes, there are 3 key factors that work together to ensure you can run your game for years. You need value in your economy, you need a roadmap of player progression, and you need a sufficient stockpile of unreleased materials to let you chase short-term gains. If players don’t find value in the items you are putting in content or in offers, your players won’t stick around. If you haven’t plotted out player progression and don’t know what challenges players will be tackling with what level 6 months from now, you’ll either have players outpacing your economy which risks churn from the perceived lack of progression, or you’ll release your items too quickly and run past your economic runway.

Generating short-term gains is a trade-off of the other 2; simply sell those valuable chase items at a discount. That will shorten your runway by devaluing your chase items and hurt in the long run, but you will see short-term gains. All 3 of these work together to maintain a healthy game, and the ability to chase short-term gains only comes from keeping a careful eye on the effect this has on the long-term.

2) What strategies do you employ to ensure spending in-game feels rewarding and enhances player experience while maintaining a positive environment for non-spenders?

Each game is quite unique, so what works for one will likely not work for another, but there is one note I find essential in any game, and that is “time is a currency”. There are only so many hours in a day someone can play your game, and with constant new games on the market, time is the most competitive currency around. Non-spenders will generally spend more time playing your game in a day than a high-spender will. As such, if someone is spending 4-5 hours a day grinding your game for rewards, those rewards must be worth their effort.

For a spender, you likely want to spend less time grinding, so you spend to keep up or advance without the grind, and again those rewards must be worth that spend. You have to figure out what you value your players' time at and ensure both spenders and non-spenders see value and feel valued in their play and purchases.

3) How do you maintain a healthy balance between incentivizing spending and keeping non-spenders engaged to foster a thriving player community?

Players should never feel like they are forced to spend to enjoy a free-to-play game. They should want to spend because they are enjoying what they are playing and spending can increase their enjoyment. Many times I’ve been a couple of hours into a free-to-play game and purchased an offer because I was having such a good time that I wanted to show appreciation for having an enjoyable few hours.

Wanting to spend creates trust between players and the developers that forcing spend does not. That trust is that you will not suddenly devalue previous purchases a spender made, or force spend from those who can’t or won’t. That trust helps set up a strong relationship between your players and you, and that relationship will help your product (and future products) last for years.

4) How do you stay attuned to player expectations and preferences, ensuring your monetization strategies remain relevant and appealing over time?

5) How do you use player data to inform game economy adjustments and predict future player behaviors or spending trends?

I believe there is a balance between utilizing data and using your internal design sense. Using the above note about item value documentation, there is a data-driven part to that process where you can look at conversion rates or time spent to obtain items or even by split testing various configurations which can help assign values to those items, but having your finger on the pulse lets you look at those values and say “does that align with where I would value it as a player”.

Data is a very important tool to use in maintaining your games economy and Live Operations, but it’s not gospel at the end of the day; use your internal design sense to validate that data and come to your own conclusions.

6) What are the biggest challenges in developing a monetization strategy for live service games, and how do you overcome them to maintain long-term player engagement?

The biggest challenge of balancing monetization in a live service game is how closely tied it is to engagement. Tip the scales too far on either side and you either end up creating a pay-to-win economy (by having offers that are much more valuable compared to the time spent obtaining them in gameplay) or you remove all desire to spend (by having gameplay rewards that are far superior to any offer that you release). Offers and events need to work hand in hand to create demand for a player while providing the supply at a reasonable cadence, valuing a player’s time and efforts while also not allowing spenders to progress at such an accelerated level that it leaves everybody else in the dust.

Finding the sweet spot for this is different with each game, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution here; know your game, A/B test whenever you can, and use your design sense. If the rewards you get from an event feel like they’re not enough for the time and effort you put in, they probably aren’t and you should increase them. If that offer that you tuned looks way too valuable for the price, it probably is, and you should tweak it.

7) What are you looking forward to at the upcoming Live Service Gaming North America Summit?

There are a lot of great talks planned that I am looking forward to, although I am most excited to connect with other show-runners in the Live Service space and learn about their experiences. Every game has a unique way of how they run their show, and though we all hit relatively similar challenges, the solutions that come about are always unique and different in each game. I am most looking forward to those chats.

Join Nick at the Live Service Gaming North America Summit! Download the agenda here and see what is lined up for this event.

Return to Home