Lessons Learned in the Trenches: Developing Games as a Service

Developing games as services: Don't

I guess 'Learning to Manipulate Players with FOMO Mechanics and Excessive Grinds to Extract as Much Money as Possible From Them' doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Prefer games as games tbh

Fuck game services

"Rule #1: you're not developing a game, you're developing a service". Good start.

Anyway, the talk is pretty interesting and focuses on the technical challenges of developing such products which is quite a bit different from the usual "how to use analytics to extort 1% more money from our whales"

number one tip DONT even try to make a live service game

The community boiled everything down to "making money = bad", and it's really sad. A burger CAN be good and healthy, even if McDonalds ruined their image by prioritizing speed and profit margins.
This was a good video but people here have a hateboner for anything of sort. I see a similarity here between CEOs blindly chasing the dollars, and people in comments blindly commenting.

There are awesome types of experiences and gameplay that can only be made with games as a service. But the companies decisions while making them show they have little interest in making awesome experiences or gameplay.

"you're not developing a game, you're developing a service"

Just
Like
Make
Game

Actually a good (non-predatory) talk, well done :3

My favorite active game company, Project Moon, is developing a mobile game to build capital fund for future projects (like a themed cafe they run). It seems good games alone just don't make enough money nowadays. And they need it to make better, more ambitious games. (words of the director himself)

Another example, Final Fantasy 14 is carrying Square Enix on its back, funding FF16, and remakes of the earlier games. If we're gonna be focusing on the outliers, let's focus on both sides of the coin :)

I think this title should be redefined as "developing ONLINE games as a service"

no one asked for games as a service.

I look forwards to this experience and knowledge being put into good practice for Transformers Rise! ^-^

This was such a great talk with so many nuggets of info!

This is a genuinely interesting talk but holy god this guys credentials are four games with hilariously obvious faults at a basic design level. What's even more amazing is he seems to have gotten worse at it over time. Starting with cult MMO Star Wars Galaxies and finishing on Fallout 76.

The recent launch of Battlefield 2042 definitely validates Richard's points. Great talk.

Got to know about a lot of things that I didn't know about, thanks for the awesome coverage Certain.

what is the game in the thumbnail? mg42 in a recent looking graphical world, with a left 4 dead UI?

Pretty brave to have comments enabled on this talk.

Very good talk about lessons learned. If you think about the rough start (or crashes) of some big IPs in recent time there is some valuable experience that can be extracted from this talk. Well done Mr Vogel

Reminds me of many things that are talked about in software. TDD, BDD, DBC, MircoServices,... Looks like game dev is still also software dev.

After crunching to develop a saas model at a startup up, I really feel the weight of his warnings. Tech debt will obliterate team motivation if you don’t manage It correctly. Thanks for the talk even if it stirred up some past trauma.

Really well done, easily one of the best GDC talks I've ever seen.

"A full build should take no more than 4 hours"
Bungie: cries in Destiny Content Vault


This is the point where some random game dev tells me I'm wrong, I ask what did go wrong, and the random dev disappears off the face of the earth.

Wow I learned so much. Thank you!!!

All you need to know about developing Games As A Service: Don't.

"I didn't crunch. I had 550 people." 😂 Much easier to not crunch when you have an army.

OMGWTFLOL?!
Halo: Infinite needs this guy to take over at 343 Studio ASAP!!! 😭 Because Halo: Infinite (you know, Halo? You've probably heard of it...) is supposed to be a, 'Live Service' that's Free 2 Play and they are just messing up what should be an easy slam dunk being based on a flag ship franchise for multiple platforms but they can't even pull themselves together enough to just get what they got out of beta yet with the game still crashing in the middle of $100,00 tournament matches lol!
They need someone experienced to show up on site and take control and triage this 343 team to at least put them on track and pointed in the right direction! I mean they got Microsoft backed people hose and still can't put anything productive together and producing progress of some type!
Like lots of people, I have special place for Halo and still like to play it! But if they don't get their house in order I'll be back to grinding Valorant again... which would be sad..

Come on! Superheroes are NOT the death of cinema. A lot of people like them!

Before watching this. if you get salty when someone says games as service. simply replace the sentence "games as service" in your mind with "online game" you will get all of the exact same information out of this talk because the sentences are interchangeable