"Live ops is not a game with events, it is a game revolving around events"

Pocket Gamer Connects, the leading international conference series for the global games industry, returns to London on January 19th to 20th, 2026. 

The must-attend conference will bring together 3,000 delegates from 70+ countries, including decision makers from key international games hubs across the globe. Companies set to join the show include Supercell, Epic Games, Duolingo, CD Projekt Red, Tencent, PlayStation, EA, AppLovin, TikTok and many more.

PGC London will host 32 tracks across two days, including at the Apps Business Summit (January 19th) and the Beyond Games: Transmedia Summit (January 20th).

One of the speakers set to join the conference is Metaplay co-founder and CPO Teemu Haila.

Haila has long been a familiar face in Finland's gaming industry. As a teenager, he built some of the country’s first online gaming communities and established supporting charities.

He joined Wooga in 2010 and co-founded PlayRaven in 2012. After PlayRaven's 2019 acquisition by Rovio, Haila co-founded Metaplay to address a common challenge for game developers - scalable and customizable backend tech. His 18 years advancing the industry were recognised by IGDA with the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Haila will be a speaker on the panel entitlted 'Giving New Life To Established Games - Live Service Strategies To Boost Retention And Growth In Live Games'.

We caught up with Haila ahead of the show to discuss the importance of live ops and how to effectively manage games for the long-term.

PocketGamer.biz: Please give us a summary of what you’re speaking about and why it’s important.

Teemu Haila: I’ll be talking about how established games can unlock a second wave of growth through smarter live service decisions.

After years of working with studios running long-lived titles, I’ve seen how legacy tech, early live ops choices and tooling limits can quietly cap retention and LTV.

This panel is about what actually moves the needle in mature games: which systems are worth upgrading, how to modernise without risking the live product, and how to keep players engaged and spending years after launch.

What do you think the next big disruptor in mobile games will be?

The next big disruptor will not be a new genre or monetisation model, but operational agility. Many studios understand the value of long-running live service games, yet they are still constrained by legacy systems that make real change slow, expensive, or risky.

The teams that pull ahead will be the ones that can safely experiment, iterate, and roll out changes to progression, live ops, and monetisation while the game is live.

That ability to continuously adapt, rather than being locked into decisions made years earlier, is what will separate established games that plateau from those that keep growing retention and LTV.

What developments do you think have been undervalued by the mobile games industry?

Live service foundations are still widely undervalued, especially the shift in thinking around what live ops really is. Live ops is not a game with events; it is a game revolving around events.

In the strongest long-running titles, events are not add-ons but the structure that shapes progression, rewards, monetisation, and player motivation over time. Many teams still build static games and try to layer live ops on later, which limits how much the game can evolve.

When the core systems are designed around constant change, studios can refresh experiences safely, keep players engaged longer, and continue growing retention and LTV years after launch.

The mobile space evolves at a much faster pace than console and PC gaming, but is there a console or PC trend that you think has potential within the mobile space?

Ironically, modern PC games are more social than mobile games. Players have found ways to layer social networks on top of games to share live status, communicate, and capture key moments together.

On mobile, this has been harder due to platform limitations, but the opportunity is massive. If mobile games can become central hubs for social graphs rather than isolated experiences, they can keep friendships active inside the game itself.

For established games, this kind of social depth is one of the strongest ways to improve long-term retention and give players a reason to keep coming back together.

What key trend should we be paying attention to in the next 12 months?

We will see more revivals of existing games powered by modern live ops stacks. A strong example is how Supercell has continued to improve and refresh their games, showing what is possible when live ops systems are allowed to evolve alongside the product.

This approach will spread beyond the usual live service-heavy genres and into games and platforms that historically have not invested in live ops at all. In many cases, the biggest opportunity is in genres that do not yet have a dominant live service title, where even small improvements in retention and long-term engagement can unlock significant growth.

What are your thoughts on cross-platform games?

Cross-platform play is especially powerful for established games. It allows studios to extend the reach of an existing title, bring players back in new ways, and reduce reliance on a single platform’s economics.

The challenge is that cross-platform games demand stronger live service foundations, since progression, economies, and live ops need to stay consistent across devices. When done right, cross-platform support can give mature games a meaningful second phase of growth.