Gordon Rowe was a product manager on Mafia Wars, and then served as Zynga's only product manager on the 3rd party publishing team working with external studios to help them improve the performance of their games. He also worked on PC f2p as the Director of Product at Daybreak games. He's currently working at Facebook as an in-house consultant. Gordon has worked with dozens of external studios and has problem solved their products, and evaluated their chances of success. These are superpowers you can develop by listening to this episode... We dive deep into product management frameworks, rule-of-thumb KPI, common free to play errors, the evolution of monetization beyond pay-to-win, how to implement an analytics stack, and much much more. If you work in, or have interest in, free-to-play games, this interview is absolutely unmissable.

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Gordon talks fast-- blink and you might miss some of this:

The hypothesis, test, iterate framework for moving KPI
The importance of using funnels to understand player behavior
The team composition on Mafia Wars
Anti-cheat considerations in competitive mobile games
Zynga monetization tricks
Game currency "hangovers" and how to manage them
The nuances that allow teams to avoid "pay-to-win"
Why League of Legends has elements of "pay-to-win"
The importance of analytics, and why many companies get this wrong
The four elements needed to have real, actionable, analytics
How to evaluate the prospects of any given f2p game on any given platform
What d1 retention you need before you can launch your game
How to fix retention, and when you won't be able to
D1 retention for premium games vs free-to-play
The minimum level of engagement needed to have a successful game
The relationship between engagement and conversion
How to evaluate a game concept before development
how to create the cornerstones of your game economy
How to balance progression mechanics with skill mechanics
The advantage of players who are in your game's "golden cohort"
What players need to feel after the spend money in your game
Why you shouldn't add too many monetization mechanics
How to get the right monetization "levers" in a game
When to put the "pinch" into a f2p game.
The importance or purpose of retention mechanics
The role of "power spikes" and why they matter
When in the player journey to monetize
How to evaluate the ratio of D1 retention to D7 retention
When to ask for push notification permission
The maturation of the mobile market
The differences between mobile f2p and PC f2p
The importance of Steam reviews
Why speed matters in testing and optimization
How Rocket League evolved through testing and iteration
The future of f2p on consoles
And yes, believe it or not, much more...