It is crucial that you know what your competitors are doing to keep their products afloat. In very simple terms, liveops can be divided into two parts: Running events and adding new features to enhance the player experience.
Here at GameRefinery, our analyst teams track both changes in our platform.
New events/feature changes are called Updated Features.
Completely new features which developers add are called Feature Changes.
These data points are available in two places:
Game Overview pages – Individual game's updates
Game Update Impacts – Genre-level research
Game Overview Pages
Every analyzed game has an update history tab on its game overview page. You can find your competitor's update tab by:
Searching the game in the upper right corner
If the game is analyzed, select the 2nd tab from the right called Update History
Here you can find all the updates our analyst team has broken down.
By clicking show update, you can learn more about the update from our analyst's perspective, study screenshots from the update, and find more feature-level details about the update.
Our analyst's full breakdown of Cashman Casino's 2.58.0 update
Doing genre-level update research
Competitors always come in numbers, and they are most likely limited into individual subgenres or genres. To do a wider level of research, we can utilize Game Update Impacts which is the archive of all the updates our team has categorized in GameRefinery.
Game Update Impacts' core functions are broken into three pieces:
Genre taxonomy – Limit yourself down to the category, genre, or subgenre, whichever matters to you the most
Time frame – Do you want to see past 6, 12 months, or all-time updates
Update filters – There are five filters:
Content – When an update includes new levels, costumes, etc.
Event – Limited-time game modes or offerings for the users
Feature – When new features were added, or old ones were updated
Seasonal – Christmas, Halloween, new year, etc.
Fixes – Balance changes or bug fixes
Using Game Update Impacts is straightforward:
Select the category, genre, or subgenre you are interested in
Select a wider time frame if needed
You can begin browsing through all the updates the team has recorded in the selected time period.
All the latest RPG genre updates listed
Like with updates on the game overview page, you can click the "Show Update" to find more details about what happened.
Filtering by feature
Game Update Impact has one powerful filtering option which allows you to focus on specific updates you are after - The ability to filter by any of the features we track here at GameRefinery.
Hover the mouse over the funnel icon which is located in Features-column
Select your filter based on whether you are interested in updated features (the developer has changed already existing features) or feature changes (the developer has added new features).
You can further link any specific feature you are after by clicking the orange Select Features button.
Finding the filtering options
Filtering for feature-specific updates
For example, you can limit down to only limited-time IAP offers, which developers have recently changed. Here are examples of all limited-time IAP offers in RPG games in the past six months!
GameRefinery best practices tip #5
Please be aware that if the selected version update includes multiple features (e.g., limited-time IAP and new Battle Pass season), we can't isolate the impact of each of them separately. Don't forget that both download and revenue numbers are estimates, and therefore they should be used predominantly for analyzing trends and relative changes (e.g., D7 revenue impact +20%) rather than the impact reflected with total numbers.