This year’s Live Service Gaming Summit highlighted many of the problems the games industry faces today. The Attention War shows no signs of slowing as users are asked to split their time between games, short-form video apps, and streaming entertainment. Meanwhile, revenue and retention are decreasing even within the biggest live service games, while layoffs across major studios seem set to continue.
But in the face of such industry headwinds, leaders in the live-service industry are reinforcing a core belief that the solution to these challenges lies within data. Namely, finding the key insights and executing on them, thereby successfully creating closed loops.
ThinkingAI's Solutions Expert, Dan Usedom, was able to address the Live-Service Gaming Summit audience directly when he presented Agentic Engine to the audience, and how it can find these very insights, and craft custom actions to make the best use of them. "The analytics and LiveOps workflows that used to take days and weeks can be completed in minutes. That’s not just speed. That’s a structural advantage your competitors don’t have yet."
The response to our talk at the Live-Service Gaming Summit confirmed that ThinkingAI’s Agentic Engine platform is exactly the solution that app developers need. Whether it’s optimizing data analytics workflows, growing their products, or achieving long-term success.
Why Data Analytics Is Critical for Live-Service Game Growth
Between speakers from EA, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and many more, was the acknowledgement that data analytics is one of the most important requirements for a development team looking to grow their live-service game in these current hostile conditions. As many in the space already know, live-service gaming has been trending downward thanks to a variety of factors that includes competition from non-gaming apps, player fatigue, and an oversaturated marketplace.
With this in mind, paying close attention to your playerbase to find success becomes all the more important. Several presenters spoke about the key industry metrics like Daily Active User (DAU), Retention (D1 - D365), Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU), and Cost Per Install (CPI) that they track to plan their next strategic move to grow their games.
These are all metrics that Agentic Engine monitors autonomously, delivering daily dashboards and alerts if there are significant changes to any of these metrics. The same metrics that the largest game studios are tracking are the ones we’ve spent the last decade building best-in-class systems to monitor, and could be the difference between your app’s success and failure.
How AI-Powered LiveOps Turns Data Into Action
However, gathering data is just one half of the equation, and the live-service industry understands that there will naturally be periods in which retention and DAU and MAU drop during periods when new content is slim, or if users choose to take a break. Analytic leads at companies like Sony Interactive Entertainment and EA are anticipating these natural highs and lows, but they’re not idle about it. Instead, they’re plotting winback strategies to re-engage lapsed users.
Re-engaging users is a cost-effective way to boost the revenue of a live-service game. Industry experts say that it is 5x more expensive to acquire a new user than it is to retain existing ones. Furthermore, the cost of ignoring churned users can be massive. For example, a mid-size live-service game could have a minimum of 50k lapsed players and the average annual ARPU in 2024 for a mid-size live-service game is $58. That's an annual loss of $2.9 million in unrealized revenue.
This is where Agentic Engine’s Engagement Agent can help. While our Analysis Agent is able to alert you to real-time changes in your users’ behavior, the Engagement Agent is able to call on a decade of industry best practices to craft the perfect message or campaign to win back users who’ve taken a break from your app, or fallen off completely.
Our Engagement Agents are able to automatically identify high-risk churn users and generate customized recall paths that are triggered during their peak activity times.
See how our Engagement Agents work.
Why Self-Hosted Data Security Matters for Live-Service Games
There are dozens of data analytics solutions available, and hundreds of different ways to create a tech stack that can collect, track, and visualize your data. And as your company and game scales, the amount of data grows exponentially. The largest live-service game companies are often measuring data by petabytes. And depending on the solution, that data could be moving between different vendors, creating new risks to data security.
Agentic Engine’s self-hosted capabilities mean this data never leaves your environment. Our unified platform features AI agents that are able to analyze, visualize, and execute on your data, all while being self-hosted on your servers or cloud.
Our platform is also compliant with every international data standard, from GDPR, PIPL (China), APPI (Japan), PIPA (Korea), and PDPB (Singapore).
Learn how Agentic Engine keeps your data secure.
How Agentic Engine Solves Live-Service Gaming's Biggest Challenges
The conversations we heard at the Live-Service Gaming Summit confirmed to us that ThinkingAI’s Agentic Engine is able to meet the moment for the live-service games industry. Whether you’re looking to expand the scope of your data analytics, create campaigns to win back churned users, or safely scale your data management, Agentic Engine is the right choice for your app. Book a demo with us today to see how we can help your game or app succeed.
