LiveOps: it’s not just for games anymore! Season Two kicks off with a bang as Andrea Doyon shares his insights on how to make use of a great LiveOps tool stack not just to give flexibility and autonomy to game designers, but to advertisers, marketers, and so much more.
Make sure you never miss an episode! Subscribe on SoundCloud, iTunes, Spotify, BuzzSprout, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
LiveOps: it’s not just for games anymore! Season Two kicks off with a bang as Andrea Doyon shares his insights on how to make use of a great LiveOps tool stack not just to give flexibility and autonomy to game designers, but to advertisers, marketers, and so much more.
Make sure you never miss an episode! Subscribe on SoundCloud, iTunes, Spotify, BuzzSprout, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
James Gwertzman (00:05):
Hello, I'm James Gwertzman.
Crystin Cox (00:06):
I'm Kristen Cox. Welcome to The Art of Live Ops Podcast.
Crystin Cox (00:15):
I've been making games for 16 years as a designer and a game director focused on live ops.
James Gwertzman (00:20):
I founded PlayFab five years ago because I saw a huge gap in the kinds of access to live ops technologies game studios needed to be successful.
James Gwertzman (00:27):
We've put this podcast together because a lot of the information on how to do live ops effectively, just isn't out there. There's way more information about how to optimize your graphics pipeline, or how to put together effective game design than there is on how to do effective live ops.
Crystin Cox (00:39):
And since it's pretty tough to go around yourself and just find everyone that does live ops and ask them questions, we did it for you. We've picked together a list of some of the top practitioners in the industry, folks who we think are really pushing the boundaries and doing some cutting edge work. And we interview at different one every week and ask them about their experiences running live games, doing live ops, and even having live ops disasters.
James Gwertzman (00:59):
Yeah, trainers are the best. That's where he really learned how to do things effectively.
Crystin Cox (01:02):
So tune in, we have another interview for you today.
James Gwertzman (01:12):
Hi, Crystin.
Crystin Cox (01:13):
Hey James. So who are we talking to you today?
James Gwertzman (01:15):
Today we're talking to Andre Doyon, who is with Alice & Smith.
Andrea Doyon (01:19):
So basically I came from the marketing industry, developing website and platform for clients and campaigns, basically in the digital universe for 18 years. We started a little family business called Alice & Smith, which develop games, but also create transmedia project, alternate reality games. And at some point even marketing extension of universe that we create around game, around movies, around different types of topics. So we wanted to go from marketing and deep dive into a more intense relation with the consumer, with the players, with the fans. And from then on, then we got really passionate about gaming and decided to sell the agency and just focus on the game design, game development and the gaming universe.
James Gwertzman (02:07):
And Alison Smith is really cool, because they're a game studio and they're an ad agency. And in particular, they've been doing a bunch of alternate reality games for traditional clients, which almost all involve a pretty large measure of live ops.
Crystin Cox (02:20):
Yeah, I'm really excited about this one. They did the ARG for Secret World, which is a game I really like.
James Gwertzman (02:25):
Oh cool.
Crystin Cox (02:26):
And I actually played the ARG, which was very cool.
James Gwertzman (02:28):
Now full disclosure, they are a PlayFab customer, and I got to say, I think parts is interview may get a little bit love-festy, they're a big fan of ours, but that's not why we're talking to Andre, it's because the work they're doing at Alison Smith is really cool. And we frankly want to, I'm actually excited to broaden the focus of this podcast a little bit outside of just traditional games and start to look at how live ops is being used in other areas, which is kind of exciting.
Crystin Cox (02:52):
Yeah. I think this is going to be really fun.
Crystin Cox (03:00):
Yeah, that's really cool. I think that you have had experience with a wide range of media, basically, like games, marketing, gamification, of training, all of these things. How have you seen live ops used across all of those different areas? How have you seen this idea of continual engagement, data, process around community building work across so many different areas?
Andrea Doyon (03:31):
I think that the concept is that when we had 18 years of work on website, the first thing you learn is that 90% of the job is throw away code. At the end of the day, it's rare that the clients come to you and say, I want to reuse my last year campaign. It's not very what's happened in marketing. So the concept of throw away code was always there, and when we started Alison Smith with the gaming universe, we wanted to say, we want a strong stack that will help us be flexible and help us be adaptable to the concept that clients always want something new. They want something fresh, et cetera. But we want something that we can scale. And we want to have the ability to on demand, during a campaign or during an event, or during a project, rebalance the structure, change our game rule, think of something and come back to the office and say, we're going to design a new flow, a new activity and give as much autonomy to the storytelling team as possible.
Andrea Doyon (04:44):
That's where we fell in love with PlayFab and the concept of having this ability for my puppet master, puppet master is the person who manage the ARG and alternate reality musically, because sometime in the case of the Blackwash man, which is the first game on steam that Alison Smith has publish, develop and publish. In the case of Blackwash man, we had half of our content written in real time with the community, and the mission and quest, and et cetera, will be changing based on that. So we wanted a backend platform that could help us deliver that pace in technology and not end up with, I need a new feature, I need a new drop rate, I need a new reputation system, and then have to go to my dev team and ask them to develop the full backend, develop the CMS, develop the whole thing, and then wait for them to do that.
Andrea Doyon (05:42):
So the idea here was that we were very limited. We had only one developer when we started, and we wanted to give as much control as possible to the creative and the storytelling team. And that was the choice of us saying, we want to go with a platform that gave us this flexibility live on demand, during the project is live, either for a campaign, either for an internal tools at our client, or for our own games. In all of those scenarios, we have to be able to adapt, change content, change the business rules, change the segment, create a new journey for a user, attach a new quest or a new storyline around that journey, and then roll it out without having to wake up any developers in that whole process. And that's what we do.
Crystin Cox (06:33):
So where do you see the parallels? I think that you're in a unique position to understand how this concept of live ops, this idea about engagement, real time, flexibility, agility, how that's affecting, not just games, but all these other industries as well. So where do you see those parallels?
Andrea Doyon (06:52):
Well, what's really cool, first of all, that we realized is when we started to have clients come to us, because we're gaming and we're also in the marketing, obviously our contact, our past contact were marketing people, so even if we had the game studio, they came to us with like, could we still do something together? Could we work on a project? And when they expressed their needs and we translated that into feature within PlayFab, it connected.
Andrea Doyon (07:22):
So I'm going to give you an example, in 19-4, I have a faction, we have a series of faction, which are, for example, the NSC, the GRU for the Russian, the MI6 for the British, so the secret services, basically. So we have faction like that, each faction has a reputation, which is statistics point in PlayFab toward that faction. This will put you in a segment when you reach certain threshold, because I put you in the segment, I can trigger a welcome kit to that segment. And I can after that have throw out table on a weekly or hourly basis for that specific segment, because we know that from the storytelling perspective, you reach a certain point in grinding repetition with that. When I take that and I transfer it to another client, for example, we have a client in the IT industry concerned about employee onboarding, basically. So an employee who joined, zero repetition with his faction, and has to learn skill and experience, and interact and network, and being teach about how to onboard, how to discover his partners, so gale matching, et cetera, how to reach a certain level and achieve something. And when he reached that, then it's time to drop new mission or new challenge or new quests, which is a segment, which is a welcome to a segment when you reach a certain stage.
Andrea Doyon (08:56):
We know that he's now 15 days into his new job. And at that moment, it's time to welcome him. Again, it's the same thing as the same live op system. We change maybe the word definition, but clearly not the mechanics that need to be in place to support this kind of execution. And that's where we're very excited to be able to support clients who came to us with training challenge, a client who came to us with gaming project, client who came to us with alternate reality game, because I have the same thing with a quest, a puzzle, a group of puzzle, reach out a certain level. The tender alternate reality game for Bloodline 2 was all operated with this. So this example I just made here are a great example of the concept that these principle of human interaction, onboarding someone, help supporting him through a progression, having key moment in that progression, developing those persona and having segment or action that are triggered based on that persona.
Andrea Doyon (10:12):
This is all the core principle of PlayFab that we can apply to not only gaming, but many other aspects of our storytelling challenge that we face, basically, as a puppet master or game designer or marketers or whatever you want to name it. But basically they are a communication channel.
James Gwertzman (10:34):
So first of all, I'm fascinated about this, because I love the way that which you're drawing these connections between these different industries, and firstly, and also thank you. I know it's great that you're a fan of PlayFab, but obviously PlayFab doesn't act by itself, we're part of a whole ecosystem. And so I'd love to hear more about the rest of the platform you've built off yourself. What are the other tools and services that you're using conjunction with PlayFab to provide your team with the full range of capabilities they need to run these kinds of campaigns and build these kinds of experiences?
Andrea Doyon (11:04):
Okay. So, in the stack we have, the stack itself has, the business layer, basically, is PlayFab for us. So when we are talking about designing business rules for any type of needs, like another example we have is fundraising, we're using PlayFab to support the fundraising initiative, they managed to raise more than almost a million dollars using PlayFab. And there's a notion of welcoming a new donation, seeing if that person recruits friend or support, basically, or is interested to go beyond that. So there's all the notional leveling up in the, not with those terms, but with mechanics different, basically. So in that case, and those cases, basically, the business rules, the principle of the experience, the flow, the navigation, the design, et cetera, it will be in PlayFab.
Andrea Doyon (12:01):
All the metadata, so what we will call maybe a content management system in term of localization and design and et cetera, is under our controls. We have our own custom content management system. And the idea here is that the PlayFab ID will define which rules item you have in your catalog. But after that, the visual presentation of that will be done in unity for Apple Watch, for PC, for a mobile app, for Apple TV, for a VR headset or whatever, will be done web based if we do go with a responsive website or something like that, and this one will simply query the inventory of the user, pull out all the item type, which could be for defining not only his inventory, but his state in the full flow of the journey, basically. And after that, he will pull out from the CMS which assets should should I apply to that, in term of visual.
Andrea Doyon (13:09):
So the system is not very complicated. We even trained with a client work on a client who wants to support an existing CMS, which is Drupal, for his CMS needs, could have been WordPress, anything. The point is CMS itself is not a challenge in 2019 anymore. The business rule engine is exactly where PlayFab take a role in that stack. And after that, we do have everything related to cashing, scaling, communication, decide when we should send the request to PlayFab, when we have to send it to our metadata layer, basically, our CMS to decide when that call is being made, basically. So that will be a typical stack in term of structure, but all those components are pretty simple by themself. And the beauty of it is that the amount of bug tracking and quality control that we have to do is very, very low because each of these black box are somehow very easy to stabilize and achieve a certain performance in quality, and connected together you will be concerned about the flow, but not about the integration of it that will create a really weird bug, which you will have if you code all of that yourself on your own stack, basically. So I don't know if it's answered your question.
James Gwertzman (14:41):
You did. Actually, the only question didn't talk about is analytics and data, and how do you measure what is going on and what your players are up to as they're going through these experiences. You mentioned, Black Watchman, you did a lot of the real time design as you were going. So that tells me that you must have had really good communication systems to understand your players.
Andrea Doyon (15:01):
Well, actually, if I go back, for example, [inaudible 00:15:04], which is the fundraising company that is using PlayFab with us, that we developed their fundraising campaign, the communication team, they are four people, they are social team and the marketing team. And every day, they login, they look at their PlayFab segment, they create new PlayFab segment themselves. They look at, for example, did the Southern Quebec region of Quebec, which anyone who login donate on the $10 didn't find any friends and haven't logged in the last three days, can we do something? So they create their segment. They make a new special mission for those segments specifically, they come up with a narrative, maybe a local sponsorship or something, and then they blast the contact and say, we could do something together, can you help us out? Can you help reach more people in your region for discos, et cetera.
Andrea Doyon (16:03):
This is an example in which the game designer has the power to live analyze his ecosystem and then design a response to that, which in this case is a custom crafted mission with rewards targeted to that segment of players. And then after that, in the metadata, he will customize the mission, he will decide the email push, the email trigger, or the SMS trigger, depending on the opt-in agreement of the players and whatnot. So all of that will be through, of course you have all your global analytics that we track, either to our system, we're using a lot of Google Analytics, we're using a lot of other analytics in gen. You have the segmentation tools and PlayFab, this is an insanely powerful tool to engage and develop conversation with people in a specific state, in the flow of your journey, and for distributing to people, that's where the powers comes in, the ability to design those segments and said, at that specific moment for people in this state, in this mindset, this is the conversation, and this is the creative, and this is the story I want to have with them.
Andrea Doyon (17:16):
That's where analytics or the data fuel the creativity. And then that's how we transform it into a natural event in the game or in the campaign, or I was talking about onboarding of employees, but if you have a 15 days journey with different task every day, then you can go in, design your saying amount about someone who did not complete their task, fall behind for three days, for example, and then decide that one of their coworkers will trigger an email, match him with the coworkers and said, "Buddy, there's a friend want to help you out. Do you need support or whatever?" And then we send them a special joint mission that they have to achieve together. And that is triggered only for someone that we're currently losing out.
Andrea Doyon (18:13):
Same goes for the power user, and we're talking a lot about [inaudible 00:18:16], but you can imagine all of that for power user, ambassadors, people who've done all their mission, in the case of Tender, we're connected with the Twitch drop campaign. So we know we're able to say, if you follow that many stream, you earning points basically, or if you're streaming the game, you're earning points in PlayFab, basically. And we can develop mechanics like that for ambassadors, for even mission or collective mission or challenge, and can be only achieved by a group of 15 people in the raid mode if you want. This is, again, mechanics that you develop with the inventory, the rule management, the scheduled task, and the drop rate and the segment, and et cetera. So it's, it's pretty simple at the end of the day, and that's the beauty of it.
Crystin Cox (19:12):
So a couple of times you've made reference to trying to give the storyteller as much control as they possibly can. I think a lot of times when I talk to game developers and we talk about live ops, there's this idea that live ops is about data and numbers and very cold systems design and optimization. But I think it's fascinating you have a different perspective, especially working on so many ARGs, about the way that live ops can be used to unlock the ability to tell great stories. I'd just love to hear more about that.
Andrea Doyon (19:45):
Well, so alternate reality games are games very complex in some sense that you have kind of a onion skin system in which you will have hardcore ERG player who will spend literally week-long, 3:00 AM, they're going to be in front of their keyboard digging in and trying to find clues and ideas and stuff and whatnot. And you still have people who will say, I'm going to be there only one hours, or I want to follow up, and you still have to be entertaining for the spectators of an ERG or the casual player of an ERG. So this is where a live op, like PlayFab, enable us to cater for those different segment in this different profile, and having a complete quest system, a mission drop item, a chain quest, because with the PlayFab automation, when you consume or if I trigger a custom event in the ERG, because I find out the secret phone number and I call on the phone number, got the code on the phone line, and then I go in to my mission hub. And I enter the, the code answer, for example, that can be a custom trigger that will be flagged in your profile in your statistics.
Andrea Doyon (21:09):
And then I can group you and know exactly what type of, how deep you are. And I can adapt the storytelling based on that. So, for example, if I take Tender, so Tender you had to login to this fake dating platform. And when you log in you, you receive quests, those quests where I can drop in your item inventory, and they drop with different drop rate, they drop based on different rule set, those rule sets, some of them are based on how you play, but other rule set are based on how the collective has played. So for example, there's a chatbot in the system. And when you actually chat with the chatbot, you will have a certain conversation, when you reach that conversation, have the custom even calling PlayFab to drop a consumable item with 24 hours delay.
Andrea Doyon (22:08):
So when it consume, it auto trigger another item that will actually send you a message 24 hours later that you reach that moment. This is the stuff you design with the game design, this is story telling design, because I can come up and say, I want when my player have reached that conversation, 24 hours later, I want this, this, this consequences, and this whole chain of activity triggering throughout all my touch points that I can control, either in push or in pull, I can design all of that with the storyteller without having to involve any developers. The focus of the developer is how much feature set I can enable in PlayFab by integrating a touchpoint, whether the touchpoint is the game itself, is any other of those components across the web, or the ecosystem for transmedia, it's goals even with the life theater, in which you will have actors in a physical event, it could be, we had an escape the room in New York.
Andrea Doyon (23:17):
All those touch points, the idea is, can you integrate that touch point in the consumer journey? And can it be exposed for the storyteller to use it in the design this story wise, and then after that, which is cool with PlayFab is you always have both aspect. You always have, you did not login since that amount of time. You did not achieve that. You did not do this, therefore I can take action, and you have the other side, you have achieved this. You have, therefore you can take that action. So I can come back and said, this is for the people who got that deep in the ARG, managed to break clue A, B, C that was very, very deep and hard. This is what I'm going to do with them. And for everyone else who missed that completely, this is how we'll carry my narrative and carry my immersion with them, so they are not completely lost and I'm stuck with only one narrative to operate and work with. But ARG design itself is more, it's a challenge [inaudible 00:24:22]. We could have a two hour podcast just talking about ARG design.
James Gwertzman (24:27):
Oh, maybe we should.
Crystin Cox (24:28):
We should. I think that it's a fascinating point of view, because when we talk to developers who have traditionally made single-player story focus games, they're looking at a new landscape where their games might be live. I think that having that kind of perspective, that actually these tools can allow you to do a lot of what you're talking about, which is, it's not just about managing competitive multiplayer games, it's also about managing a world where, hey, I'm going to have some players who want to go this deep into the story, and I want to make sure they have a great time, but there's also going to be other players who just want to do this, and I want to make sure they have a great time.
Crystin Cox (25:08):
You talked a little bit about your experience in the marketing world, where you started working with Fund Com, who is an MMO developer.
Andrea Doyon (25:17):
Yes.
Crystin Cox (25:17):
And they had very different desires out of what they wanted from marketing than a traditional game.
Andrea Doyon (25:23):
Yes.
Crystin Cox (25:25):
Have you seen the rest of the industry catch up a little bit? How have you seen what we expect out of marketing chain? Wow.
Andrea Doyon (25:33):
Yeah, I think that in general, the VP marketing today versus the one that was meeting 10, 15 years ago in the gaming industry, they are gamer above everything else. They know their thing, they know their audience, they know their community, and they are more closed, I feel, the one I have the chance to work with, at least. More close to the product, to the universe of the products. So now the game is more about an extension, the marketing is more about how do you extend the universe of the game before and after the campaign, and how do you build up this [inaudible 00:26:24] system, rather than just saying, we're going to blast banner ads until they throw up and they decide to click.
Crystin Cox (26:31):
Right.
Andrea Doyon (26:33):
Which is the old the way of doing it. So when you look at the team, like I said, we've done it with Fund Com, we've had the chance to do it with Hello Game, and Paradox with Tender. When you look at those campaign, especially, I think the latest one, the Tender ARG, you had a game, first of all, that that has deep lore. And you can imagine the expectation of an audience like that. The wall of darkness audience, the vampire audience, the bloodline audience, this is not an audience that will be happy with just banner ads and stuff like that. Well, personally, I don't think so, and the chance to have the ability to create a transmedia narrative in which you will live part of the universe of the game in the campaign, and you will be able to discover those secret screenshot and component of the game, but share through a narrative that is almost a quest or a mission that you could be playing in the game, that's something very immersive, with thousand, and thousand, and thousand, and hundreds of thousand of players. This is, I think, something that make the players discover the game, the universe, and bind with his community because you discover ARG and you solve ARG by collectively teaming up with Twitch, Discord, players, online, et cetera.
Andrea Doyon (28:17):
This kind of introduction of onboarding of someone in your universe is something that will create fans, rather than just views or visit or clicks, and people who will have a memento or a lasting experience that will go way beyond the click or the banners. So game-ifying, or extending the narrative universe of the game into the marketing storytelling will more and more become the norms, I think. And the challenge is the one who will not do that, and rely just on spamming banners until everyone throw up will have a challenge, because they will not have developed that care taking of their fans, care taking of the universe, give their chance to the creative universe to expand beyond the game and go on different other social touchpoint and social interaction. So yeah, experiencing the game universe in different ways is, for me, a better return on investment. And just in case of Tender where a month, almost two months after the last live event, which was an interactive theater in San Francisco. And this weekend, there was a one hour podcast of people just talking about the event and how they felt and what it meant for them, and what's the next step, and why they love the game and et cetera.
Andrea Doyon (29:55):
In 18 years of marketing, I never had people one hour podcast talking about my banners and my newsletters, so I think it's a different audience. It's an emotional audience, and you have to talk and engage in a very different manner, and that's why we end up with a gaming company using a live op platform to roll out the marketing campaign of a company versus a traditional digital agency who will have that same mandate and will not have those variable or not took those tools to create something, basically.
Andrea Doyon (30:46):
And I just have to say that the client was a very big key in it. The notion that Paradox trust us with that and involve themselves so much, because that's different. You have to onboard the team at the writing level. We have to get white wolf writer, we have to get people who knew the white wolf universe, et cetera. It's much more complex than designing a banners, but it's also a statement of how they wanted to care for their fans and how more different they wanted to do these things.
James Gwertzman (31:20):
What I loved about that whole story is how, what you've just done is you've so perfectly tied together two or three different threads that we've been seeing across all these conversations we've been having, which is number one, the importance of community and the importance of not just engaging with players as players, but the realization that when those players coalesce into a tight community, games take on lives of their own. And that's really when you see that thing. So there's that trend of community. There's also the notion that marketing itself has become the entertainment. The game starts with the marketing, the thought that the goal of market is not to get you to buy the game. The goal of marketing is the experience and seeing your descriptions now how the community and the marketing so seamlessly interact like that, I think that's phenomenal. I think we rarely see that. I think we're going to see, hopefully, more of that in the future. Because I think you're right, you can engage new players and existing players and give them experiences that will create that emotional engagement, which is ultimately the goal of all this.
Andrea Doyon (32:15):
Yeah, absolutely. And the proof of that is to achieve that, we needed a live op infrastructure, which is the interesting part, because it was a form of a game, basically, in term of what it demands for the user.
James Gwertzman (32:29):
Right. And your own story is an example of how that everything we just talked about, the great thing about this is now it goes beyond gaming. It's not about gaming. Almost any business in the world that has to touch customers can benefit from this example of seeing customers through a different lens. They're not just walking wallets to monetize. These actually are people with emotional connections and communities that we can totally engage with.
Andrea Doyon (32:51):
Well, the reason why I was initially very passionate about marketing is the notion of a human social science, basically, and not the commercial science of marketing, but the communication aspect of it. When you say about the engagement, about the concept of going into a conversation and the story and their journey, with, again, maybe not the consumer, but partners or fans, because it's almost, it's very personal for many of them in terms of the emotional experience they have with those products and those brands. And this applies not only to an external employee, it applies also twin to an external client, but also to an employee or a partner. So all of this ecosystem is requiring much more agility, the concept of live op, the concept of ongoing operation, ongoing conversation, and the concept of agility in term of this ecosystem, the storytelling ecosystem. So to achieve that, you really have to rethink the tools, but this is what the entertainment generation, or the generation who has lived more into the universe of Twitch, of Discord.
Andrea Doyon (34:17):
For us, for a small company like us, all my staff login in the morning have to go on Discord, say hi to the community, and it's mandatory, we have to be on Discord. This kind of connection, even if it's small, is the basic notion that we have to be there for them, and we treat them as colleague more than a consumer or exactly a wallet. A couple of years ago, we went into a lot of automation, marketing automation, and the notion and we hated it, personally I hated it because it was about that at the end of the day, the consumer was a transaction, a bank account, a wallet, and all the marketing automation was that we're going to automate all of that, we're going to know who needs what, we're going to make the transaction and if we could even remove the consumer from the equation and just deal directly with the bank, that will be great.
Andrea Doyon (35:20):
And we're like, okay, well, it's time to change industry now. So we left a little bit that when the wave of marketing automation was all about that, and we wanted to come back to emotional and platform to do storytelling and to brand, to develop cult and passion and tribe, not cult, but more tribe.
Crystin Cox (35:45):
Culture, community.
Andrea Doyon (35:47):
Culture, and tribe, yeah.
Crystin Cox (35:49):
Now I've had a colleague who used to say, we could fix all of our problems with this game, if we could just get rid of all these players.
Andrea Doyon (35:55):
Yeah.
Crystin Cox (35:58):
Which, it's funny, but you have to remember not, you have to actually remind yourself not to get into that mentality.
Andrea Doyon (36:03):
Of course.
Crystin Cox (36:04):
These are people, the community, we're making culture. Well, this has been an awesome conversation, thank you so much for joining us. This is really fascinating stuff. We really appreciate you coming on and giving your perspective.
Andrea Doyon (36:15):
Thank you so much for having us, and thank you for giving us this opportunity. I was saying it, I'm not saying because I'm on the podcast, but Alison Smith will not exist, could not exist if we didn't have you guys to support us with a platform. Everything we've done, the [inaudible 00:36:35], Black Watchman, and 19-4, and the other game, or every product we've done for our client and the training and the fundraising and the marketing campaign, we've done the ERG campaign, everything is operate. Give us the ability to be the storytellers we want through the notion that we've been able to build or develop on your platform as our foundation and create our stack over it. So, thank you, actually.
James Gwertzman (37:04):
I have some humbled, because you made my entire week, because that is exactly why we started PlayFab, was to give creatives tools to compete on a level playing field in a world where the technology now is so important and so hard to build, that unless you're a massive EA or Zynga, it's very hard to build these kinds of technologies. And so, you've just made my week. So thank you, that's wonderful. All right. Thank you.
Crystin Cox (37:34):
Thanks for listening to The Art of Live Ops Podcast.
James Gwertzman (37:36):
If you liked what you heard, remember to rate, review and subscribe so others can find us.
Crystin Cox (37:41):
And visit playfab.com, for more information on solutions for all your live ops needs.
James Gwertzman (37:46):
Thanks for tuning in.