Personalization
8 min read
By
Phil Mohr
CEO and Co-founder
Nov 11, 2024
What Does Personalization Feel Like?
Personalization should be exactly what it sounds like—tailoring the gaming experience to each individual player based on their behavior, preferences, and interactions. Imagine every player feeling like the game was built just for them. Personalization adjusts game elements like content, difficulty, rewards, and offers in real time to make players feel seen and understood, resulting in a more engaging experience. By adapting to each player’s unique journey, players spend more time and increase spending, as the game delivers a more satisfying and immersive experience. Plus, it provides games with insights to drive smarter marketing and optimize user acquisition. Everyone wins. This has been the dream, and now it's becoming a reality.
How AI Is Driving A Shift In Personalization For Mobile Games
The way we approach personalization is evolving fast. At Metica, we’re one of the companies leading the way and are here to guide you through it. Traditional personalization strategies through segmentation just don’t cut it anymore. It’s like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. We’ve written a detailed article about how and why segmentation-based systems for players don't scale. Rather than going into too much detail again, we recommend reading this article here. It puts into context how the technology we have developed for player personalization has evolved over the past 14 years, and why they are now stale and haven’t scaled.
The real deal is what we’ve all been dreaming about for years: personalization that treats each player as a unique segment of one. This wasn't something we could do at scale before, but with AI in the mix, we're making it happen now!
Old Personalization Strategies Are Stale and Unscalable
Let’s break down what is changing with a quick recap: Traditional segmentation divides players into groups based on shared traits. While this seems logical and had its moment in the industry, it got messy fast. Segmentation quickly becomes unwieldy as the number multiplies. At King, we saw this firsthand. We had over 15,000 permutations of player segments in Candy Crush, leading to thousands of overlapping groups. Once that happens, consistency in player experience is lost. Instead of fixing the root problem, we had to build complicated prioritization systems—basically, band-aids on a broken leg.
How This New Age of Personalization Works
True personalization treats each player as their own segment, with just them in it. Why? Because every player is different. They come from various ad campaigns, different countries, and possess unique skill levels and preferences. Trying to stuff them into segments doesn’t do them justice.
This is where AI steps in. Humans set the boundaries, and the AI does the heavy lifting, analyzing each player's behavior from day one. It tracks gameplay, session frequency, monetization patterns, and more to create an accurate predictive LTV (pLTV) model for every player. This equips you with the tools to understand your players better.
Another key part of this approach is our use of Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits, which are decision-making frameworks that help optimize real-time actions within the game. Bandits continuously experiment and learn by selecting actions (such as offering rewards or adjusting difficulty levels) based on current player data. Instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach, the system adapts in real time, personalizing every intervention based on a player’s immediate context—like skill level, recent gameplay, country, or in-game purchases.
This allows for constant fine-tuning of elements like offers, LiveOps rewards, Ad placements, or game difficulty, ensuring each player gets a tailored experience that maximizes engagement and retention.
While online reinforcement learning drives real-time optimization, the pLTV acts as a guardrail metric to ensure long-term success. It helps us avoid cannibalizing the game economy by constantly monitoring and predicting the lifetime value of each player. By keeping pLTV at the forefront of every intervention, we make sure that we’re not just driving short-term gains but continuously improving overall LTV. This balance ensures that both personalization and monetization efforts work in harmony to grow the game’s economy in a sustainable way.
If you’re thinking, "Do I really need this?"— the truth is, you can’t afford not to.
5 Reasons Why Personalization Will Help Games Win
By adopting this new personalization strategy, your game will see improvements in:
Retention: Deliver exactly what players want, boosting engagement. Players expect unique, immersive experiences. Personalization creates that connection, making them feel like the game “gets” them, increasing session lengths and keeping them coming back. Less churn, more fun.
Insights: Stay ahead of the competition with smarter data. Data-driven personalization gives you insights others can’t touch—whether it's retention, LTV, ad buying, or game development. You’ll understand player trends in real time, keeping your game a step ahead of the pack.
Monetization: Retention is key, but maximizing player value is survival. With rising Ad costs and shrinking margins, keeping players engaged and monetizing them is more important than ever. Personalization drives higher retention and engagement, ensuring every player’s value is maximized.
Growth: Level up your Ad campaigns. Traditional Ad buying relies on basic day-7 metrics, but we can do better. AI-trained models factor in play patterns, session data, purchases, Ad views—everything relevant to truly understand your players. This supercharges your ROAS and takes your campaigns to the next level.
Don’t Miss Out: Personalization Today is Like the Early Days of LiveOps
Remember the early days of LiveOps? Back then, many teams doubted the value of running events outside the core game loop. But when our King team saw how daily, time-limited events in Korea were boosting engagement, it became clear: LiveOps was the future. Today, LiveOps is a cornerstone of game revenue, and personalization is about to do the same. It’s taking LiveOps to the next level.
Our early adopters are already seeing significant increases in LTV and reduced churn. By tailoring every step of the player journey, they’ve created experiences that keep players coming back for more—and spending more.
How to Start Integrating This New Age of Personalization
We get that scaling personalized experiences can feel like a daunting task, especially if your resources are stretched thin. But the good news is, we’ve made this very easy.
From the game’s point of view, this experience is delivered in real time at each decision point in the game, via a single API endpoint or an SDK. Integration for the first use case is straightforward. You can find our developer documentation here.
Conclusion: Don’t Wait—Supercharge Your Game with Personalization
We’ve spent 15 years solving the personalization puzzle from every angle, and here’s what we’ve learned: it’s a problem only AI can solve. The sheer number of variables and permutations involved is beyond human capacity; let AI do the heavy lifting, exploring and optimizing within the boundaries you set. We’re already seeing incredible results (+16% - 34% LTV), and we’re barely scratching the surface. The full potential of AI and the value it will unlock for games is yet to come.
If you want to get into the weeds with us on all things optimization for games, ROAS optimization, or just to learn more, email us or schedule a call.