LiveOps Excellence in Marvel Snap

Marvel Snap’s designers have one of the hardest LiveOps challenges imaginable: launching gacha offers that give you compelling reasons to buy the battlepass every event without turning the game pay-to-win.

From the jump, Snap has prioritized long term player joy (and therefore retention) over the P2W style monetization of a standard mobile gacha game. And having given themselves this difficult challenge, Second Dinner has found success and retained their fans across years of live operations.

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Matt Ricchetti, Second Dinner’s Senior Director of Product Management, for a fireside chat at Pocket Gamer Connects San Francisco. Here’s a lightly edited highlight from our conversation:

Ethan: “What tactics does the team use to ensure new cards are worth the player’s investment in time & money, but also don’t upset the meta? How do you make sure they don’t turn the game pay-to-win?”

Matt: “Yeah, that’s a challenge. Anybody who’s worked on a live service game with an ongoing release of characters knows that you don’t nail it every season. Sometimes, everything on paper looks awesome and then it comes into contact with players and you’re like, ‘oh no, we didn’t realize that card is actually not as powerful as we thought.’

“We try to use a mix of qualitative and quantitative measures. We have (1) a weekly team playtest. It’s an important part of our development philosophy that the entire team sits down and plays all the new cards. We play them in a realistic setting. We prebuild decks that match how we think players are going to use the new cards, and the full team gives us feedback.

“(2) We have a couple exclusive player groups where we invite longtime players who really understand the meta to play with the new cards over multiple weeks and months. (3) Quantitatively, we live in a world of tons of data and [that data]’s only as good as how you use it. So we do a lot of monitoring on metrics like ownership rate, win percentage, and then also more sophisticated metrics like cube gain rate. If you play Snap you know it isn’t just about winning matches, it’s about earning cubes that progress you up the rank track.

“And critically, what’s really helped us over the years is we’re very aggressive about balance updates. So we’re super transparent with the playerbase that we don’t want cards to be overpowered... we try to have a contract with them that we’re going to keep the game balanced, we’re gonna try to make as many different archetypes viable in the metagame as possible. So we release extensive patch notes with bi-weekly updates to explain the balance changes. So even if we are nerfing one of your favorite characters, you understand the reasoning and the long term thinking behind it.”

This was just one snippet from this delightful fireside chat with Matt. To learn more from Marvel Snap’s example, you can view the full fireside chat from Pocket Gamer Connects: San Francisco embedded above.

Apologies about the audio quality on my mic for the first few minutes of the recording. I’ve tried my best to repair it but we were having audio issues in the room at the event.