GDC 2025 Session Viewer

Genshin Impact, Destiny 2, AFK Journey, War Robots – what do these games have in common? They are all GaaS, designed for long-term play. To maintain engagement, they must regularly offer new content: heroes, weapons, robots, etc. However, developers eventually face the question: "Okay, we've already created 100 weapons in our game. Why would players need the 101st?"

At War Robots, we encountered this challenge in the fourth year. Now, eleven years into the game's life, we believe we have found the answer. And it may not please everyone: to maintain players' interest, sometimes you need to force them to engage with different content. For that you have to change the current meta. And this, unfortunately, is always gonna hurt.

We will explore different approaches to balancing content in GaaS, take a look at the analytical "toolbox" that we use for monitoring metagame, and share our best practices for changing it.

Takeaway

Attendees will learn why changing the game meta is crucial despite being painful for players, how to analyze and improve new content's appeal. We will show different approaches to content rotation and share results of our new method we just introduced in our game.

Intended Audience

Game designers, producers, and monetization managers who work on Game as a Service projects will benefit the most from this lecture. But it may be entertaining and interesting even for players of such games. At least they will finally understand why their favorite character was eventually nerfed.