Metica Solutions
4 min read
By
Lancelot Lacharte
Product at Metica
May 9, 2025
Calling All Game Devs
If you’re a game developer planning your next game, you’re already thinking about long-term success and scale. You know that early technical choices can make or break your ability to adapt and grow.
At Metica, we believe in building for future leverage—just like Amazon’s philosophy of operating leverage, where early investments in scalable systems become tomorrow’s growth accelerators. The same applies to game development: if you assume real-time in-game personalization will become a necessity, what choices should you make today to add it later at the lowest possible cost?
Let’s break it down.
When to Introduce Personalization?
Wait as Little as You Need—Not a Moment Longer
We get it—finding product-market fit is tough. Your team is focused on nailing core gameplay and ensuring your game can acquire users profitably before worrying about personalization. That makes sense.
But once you hit an acceptable profitability threshold, don’t delay. The longer you wait, the harder and more expensive it becomes to integrate personalization.
Why? Because retrofitting personalization into a live game is painful—it’s slow, it requires changes all over the place, and limits your agility to test and optimize.
What Technical Choices Set You Up for Personalization?
Expose In-Game Parameters instead of Static IDs
Too many games hardcode personalization parameters client-side, locking in experiences that should remain dynamic and iterable. Instead, move most of the personalization logic to the server for greater agility and faster iteration.
For IAPs: Use reusable App Store product IDs instead of static, hardcoded ones. Instead of creating 50 different purchase items, unify them into a single product ID per desired price point:
com.mystudio.spaceminingwars.offer_xxs ($0.99)
This allows personalization systems to dynamically adjust offers without needing new SKUs.
For Game Balancing: Instead of defining hard-coded experiences like “Experience A” vs. “Experience B”, allow personalization systems to explicitly tweak in-game parameters dynamically:
rewardValue: 10 vs. tutorialLengthV2
This flexibility lets you iterate quickly and introduce original experiences effortlessly without being trapped by rigid, predefined experiences.
Instrumenting Rich Signals: The Key to Long-Term Growth
Personalization Starts with the Right Data
A personalized experience is only as good as the data behind it. That’s why capturing rich behavioral signals from Day 1 is critical.
What makes a signal “rich”?
It captures intent—not just outcomes.
Bad: Tracking only IAP purchases.
Good: Tracking shop visits, because players who have started browsing more frequently might need a personalized nudge.
It captures the full context of an event.
Bad: Tracking only a level failure.
Good: Tracking how the player failed. Did they burn through 3 paid boosters? If so, they may need a targeted reward to recover from this disappointing moment.
Example in Metica:
Sending a shopVisited event with information about the tiles displayed.
Personalization Complements Game Design—It’s Not a Substitute
Don’t Learn to Rebalance the Game, Tweak It In Real-Time Instead
Great personalization doesn’t replace thoughtful game design and balancing, instead it enhances it by providing every player with a subtle tweak of the experience tailored to them.
Think of it as a +10% yield boost on top of an already well-designed game. If personalization compounds across multiple touchpoints, those small uplifts add up fast.
📈 Seven 10% uplifts can double player LTV.
This is multiplicative growth—not just an incremental tweak.
The best personalization scaling factors include:
Dynamic shop pricing – adjusting prices for each player to increase participation in the economy
Difficulty multipliers – matching players and a challenge level that’s calibrated for them
Reward scaling – finding the right reward level to motivate a player at that very moment
These interventions work because they scale across the entire player experience—making personalization a force multiplier rather than a patchwork fix.
Before:
After (real-time personalization):
Example: Personalized Difficulty in Metica
All of this can be configured then later managed directly through the Metica UI.
Data dictionary: Define your analytics events, their properties, and any real-time aggregation.
Smart config: Create a rich real-time personalization scenario using multiple contextual multi-armed bandits.
Playground: Request a personalized difficulty config for player ed8b2a3c-d8bf-49e5-98a3-b13ca8628227
Build Today So You Can Scale Tomorrow
If you assume real-time personalization will be essential, you can future-proof your game with a few strategic technical choices:
Move personalization logic to the server for agility.
Use dynamic pricing, difficulty scaling, and reward multipliers to personalize experiences at scale.
Capture meaningful player signals—track intent, behavior, and context to drive smarter optimizations.
These choices will increase agility, result in original experiences that feel personal, and unlock exponential growth potential.
Real time personalization is no longer a luxury. It is a fundamental growth engine for modern games. By integrating server side logic, capturing nuanced behavioral signals, and iterating continuously with data driven insights, you will elevate the player experience while future proofing your game for AI driven innovation. Most importantly, personalization should enhance, not replace, strong core design. Build a solid foundation today and you will have the agility to experiment, refine, and delight players at scale tomorrow.
Want to future-proof your game for AI-driven personalization? Let’s talk.
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