Terms of engagement

Before you begin thinking about designing, deploying, and running a live game, you ought to familiarize yourself with a large set of keywords and abbreviations used to describe various parts of the business. At first, these terms may seem a bit unwieldy, yet common language is essential when speaking about increasingly complex and fine-tuned products driven by dozens of people and hundreds of moving parts.

The majority of the list is dedicated to key performance indicators (KPIs). These are the metrics used to evaluate the performance of the game. KPIs often revolve around financial data, marketing performance, as well as the current size, health, and overall trends governing your player base.

We’ll now unpack several key terms and use this as an opportunity to provide additional insight into the challenges of building and running live games.

Basic stats

We’ll start with some of the most critical KPIs that almost every member of the game...