Rovio's Anastasiya Kara on how live ops took over mobile's biggest games

• Kara said live ops has shifted mobile from a core-first to an event-first model.
• Nearly every feature in today's biggest games can be traced back to Slotomania, she argued.
• Her next big thing: hypercasual cores now running full live ops, led by Color Block Jam.

In 2013, Candy Crush had almost nothing running alongside its levels. Today it has at least 10 live ops on the go at once. That shift was the subject of a session from Anastasiya Kara, lead product manager at Rovio, at Pocket Gamer Connects Barcelona.

Kara's definition came with a disclaimer, "this is me trying to be poetic", before landing on live ops as "an orchestra of time-limited events, offers, content updates and retention strategies".

To explain how the industry got here, Kara traced the lineage from the first paid power-up to today's crowded screens, taking in the studios that invented each feature and the many that copied it.

It started with a paid eagle

Kara, who joined the industry at Gameloft before working with Product Madness, Scopely's Monopoly Go and now Rovio, took the audience back to the App Store's premium era. Rovio was among the first to break it. "We were the first ones to introduce this add-on Mighty Eagle booster for $0.99."

Then came social casino and the studio she credits most. Slotomania was "a very successful slots game, but a very simple core", she said.

"You spin and you get coins, and this is a challenge, because what else can players do once they're bored of this core?"

The answer became the modern toolkit: social features, time-limited events, tournaments, missions, milestones "that everybody who is not lazy have them" and the first seasonal albums. "It's copy-paste. Everyone has it."

Clash of Clans supplied the other half with clans and clan wars. Combine slots with attacking and you get Coin Master - though "let's be real, Coin Master was not the first. Pirate Kings by Jelly Button hugely inspired Coin Master".

Running out of screen space

Coin Master became her case study in escalation. "In 2018 they didn't have much going on," she said. "In 2026, they don't have space on the screen." Everything in its session design funnels towards energy, "the wall in the game that will let you continue your session or stop your session".

The inflection point, though, was marketing. Revenue climbed 161% when the UA boom began around the Kardashian campaign in 2019 and "after that, nobody can stop them".

Coins are king

Royal Match, she argued, is Coin Master without the attacking. Where Coin Master gates sessions on spins, Royal Match gates them on coins, and its albums, side games, tournaments and streak events all result in more coins. "So coins are king in Royal Match, if anybody had any doubt about that."

She singled out the Super Light Ball as genuine innovation, promptly copied by "everybody who were not lazy". Candy Crush included.

The contrast with Candy Crush is where her thesis lands. There, "levels are the king" - "you can play for 50 times, you will be still stuck".

In Royal Match, "events is the driver of your progression", so the game helps you through. Her record for being stuck on a Royal Match level is 18 attempts. In Candy Crush, "it was days, maybe 100 times."

Her verdict: "it is match-3 2.0."

What Monopoly Go changed

On Monopoly Go, where she was part of the core team, Kara credited nostalgia plus best-in-class live ops and social features baked into the IP. "You cannot play Monopoly by yourself," she said.

The smartest call was refusing to copy clans, where "half of them are churning" and two people end up "basically doing the whole team event". Instead, "for every event you choose who you play with, if you have a good partner, you may make sure that they will come back to you".

Hypercasual grows up

Her headline call was what comes next. "For the first time in the history of the top grossing games, we have hypercasual core with live ops." Color Block Jam is the example: a year ago it was "only the core" with "zero live ops". Now 10 months later it has albums.

Beyond that she expects mini-games, merge mechanics and pets to keep rising, plus more social depth. She gave a special shout out to Royal Match's Champions Clash as a "real money-maker".

And the copying will not stop, she said. "Everybody will copy-paste. If it works, it works."

Her wrap-up was the thesis in one line: studios need "the shift from core-first to event-first experience", because live ops "has become the primary driver of engagement and monetisation".

Want to see where the next live ops trend comes from? PGC Summit Shanghai lands on July 29th with tracks on publishing, funding and market access. Get your ticket here.