Lessons Learned in the Trenches: Developing Games as a Service

In this 2019 GDC session, Certain Affinity’s Richard Vogel discusses his journey as a studio director building Fallout 76, Battlecry, Star Wars the Old Republic, and Star Wars Galaxies—talking about how each of these titles changed the way he approaches development and running games-as-a-service.

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[killermelga]

"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"

[Rumu]

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

[kamenraider]

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 :)

[ktthross]

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.

[Syphorce]

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

[asterisk]

Games as a Service, the ideology of prioritizing microtransaction and playtime over making something that's actually fun or narratively moving. Having high interaction time with a game, or as the talk puts it "engagement, " doesn't mean it's fun interaction in reality, but the developers of these types of games see any interaction as positive. A player putting in 20hrs while not having a good time is equivalent to a player who had an absolute blast during those 20hrs to them. The only other metric they care about is did Player A or Player B spend additional money, and if not, how can we further develop the game to bake in enticements to get them to spend? It's the same crap social media and other app developers prioritize on mobile devices. How do we maximize the amount of time a user stays on the screen? AutoPlay on TikTok, Instagram, Youtube. Recommended sections popping up constantly. Daily login counter or incentives, etc. None of that is good. It's all marketing study and manipulation to treat the users as something to be optimized for their gain.

[fersis]

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

[skribblestyle]

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.

[PlebNC]

Pretty brave to have comments enabled on this talk.

[schallplaefh]

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

[aavius]

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

[InfraredVisuals]

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

[Estradarsaysmoo]

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

[addcoding]

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

[musikalniyfanboichik]

Developing games as services: Don't

[DpzLuna]

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

[edhero]

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

[megatiny]

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.

[TruthIsToBlame]

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

[REXanadu]

"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.