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75 Lessons Learned from Live Game Development

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75 Lessons Learned from Live Game Development

I conceived of and shipped live services games to 20 million players; here's what I learned.

Jon Radoff
May 25, 2023
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75 Lessons Learned from Live Game Development

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In the course of making games for over 20 million players—based on popular IP like Game of Thrones and Star Trek—I learned a lot of lessons. This is just a few of them, although this includes some of the most painfully learned lessons.

Metavert Meditations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

BIG PRINCIPLES

  • Every "rule" in gamedev has a great exception

  • You probably won't be the exception

  • Hard: Shipping; Harder: Shipping fun game; Hardest: shipping fun that scales.

  • What few are willing to hear: making a great game is unreasonably hard, and therefore makes unreasonable demands of the team

  • Shots on goal (trying ideas, shipping, iterating) matters most

PHASES OF PRODUCT

  • You can only build 1 game vision; converge team & purge fiefdoms

  • 0 to 1 is about shared vision

  • Data is everything in the Live Ops stage; velocity of insight -> product improvement is predictor of success

PEOPLE

  • Be wary of hiring people who harbor deep reservations about making money

  • Be very afraid if the team building the game isn’t playing it

  • Toxic / abusive team members suck

  • Cynical team members suck

  • Veteran devs are AWESOME, but beware of jaded veterans with a sense of entitlement.

HIRING

  • Many people will say nearly anything to land a job at a game studio

  • Hire optimistic people because game development is incredibly hard

  • Work with people who want to make a great game right now more than anything else in their life

  • Focus on “tell-me-about-the-time-you-did-X” questions (behavioral interviewing) and don’t waste time on hypotheticals

TEAM MIX

  • Great teams with experienced craftspeople are foundational

  • Adding fresh blood who need to learn/prove (e.g., interns) has a high ROI and better connects you to current culture

  • Live Ops teams who run great games are usually not right to build a NEW game

FEATURES

  • Smaller is almost always better than larger

  • But “large enough” is even more important

  • Replayability is gold

  • It is better to cut mediocre features

MARKETING

  • For mobile games: what Kotaku says doesn’t matter

  • Meta critic score is one of the worst-designed metrics that exist

  • App store featuring will not save you

  • The sins of design will not be countered by marketing spend

TOOLING & TECH

Tools need to be native to the user (Unity for programmers, spreadsheets for designers, website forms for PMs, etc.)

  • Manual processes suck

  • Don’t build backend yourself

  • Don’t build a 3d engine

  • Technology prowess doesn’t win

PRODUCTION

  • Games look like a mess until at least 90% done

  • People think they are close to 90% when it's actually more like 50%

  • It will take longer than you think

MORE ON VISION

  • Reiteration of the Vision is a constant effort; don't take for granted

  • Create the simple definition of what’s important

ITEMIZATION & ECONOMY

  • Good shop design is critical—needs as much attention as any other part of the game

  • Getting a rare item should be clear and awesome for the player

  • Don't cap the size of your economy / monetization

  • Pay attention to what people buy

UX

  • Show your game to people IN PERSON, and take lots of notes on what happens when they play

  • Pay attention to how performance scales as the size of data (inventories, etc.) grows

INNOVATION

  • Innovation is good for capturing new markets, attention to craft craft is good for capturing established ones

  • UX is often the difference between good and great

  • You can’t really “lean startup” a game because too much of it is based on a complete experience

NARRATIVE

  • Storytelling on mobile must connect with the audience within seconds

  • Narrative != Dialog

  • Narrative is represented through game systems

  • Humans find meaning through story

DATA

  • Instrument everything, you’ll probably want the data at some point

  • Make it easy to access data

  • Dashboards that don’t display actionable intelligence might be cool but aren’t useful

PLAYERS

  • Love your players. (Contempt for players is doom)

  • Players will speed run content faster than you expect

  • Your most valuable cohort will probably be the people who show up in the beginning.

  • Optimize single player experience before multi

DON'T PANIC

  • Don’t panic if things look like a mess for the first 80% of the development timeline

  • Panic if things look like a mess when you’re about to ship :)

CURIOSITY

  • Team members should be really curious about what successful games like yours have done before

  • Pay close attention If people on the team are experts on your target audience, and they don’t like the game

  • Pay close attention if more junior members of the team aren’t learning from the more senior members; all of the reasons this might be happening are bad

  • Be wary of know-it-alls.. unless they've shipped top-revenue games🙂

MORE ON PLAYERS

  • Your most vocal players are good to listen to, but be careful because they’re not necessarily representative of your market

  • Even bad games have their fans

  • Intrinsically-motivated players are your core customers

  • Extrinsically-motivated players (esports, live streamers, collectors, “play to earn”) may be valuable too, but are not your core

VELOCITY

  • Any feature that depends on more than 1 programmer will be exponentially harder and riskier to implement

  • The best features can usually be prototyped in days if not hours

  • Code in the fewest languages possible, ideally just one

LICENSES

  • Aligning incentives is critical

  • Licenses can break through noise when nobody else does it; when everyone does it, worse

  • Avoid over-licensed IP

  • The IP biz dev person’s incentive is usually short-term (annual bonus) your incentives are long term (decade+)

  • Walk away if licensor demands % of gross rather than a % of net (of UA)

  • Walk away if licensor demands unreasonably strong control over when/if you ship

MONEY

  • Debt for UA is like taking treasure from a pit of vipers — more ways to die than win

  • Biz models that work in largest games may not work to scale your much-smaller game

  • Be wary of backers long on money and short on gamedev experience

  • Backers who don’t understand games will lose hope at your darkest hour

  • Every game development process has a “darkest hour”

  • Your forecast will be wrong

SHIPPING

  • It is better to delay than ship before it is ready

  • But it is better to ship before you run out of money than not ship at all

  • If you can’t ship before running out of money, the culprit is probably that your scope was too great—not that the capital was too small

FINAL THOUGHTS

  • If some stuff on this is contradictory, that’s OK. Games contain multitudes.

  • If you haven’t failed in game dev you haven’t been at it long enough

  • When someone declares the future of games, it usually isn’t

  • Fear is the Mind Killer

Other Reading

Here are just a handful of my articles that I think you’ll enjoy if you’re a game developer:

  • Why Scaling Games is Hard is about why games are so hard to make and succeed with.

  • 42 Game Designs for Generative AI is about some game design ideas that benefit from the latest revolution in artificial intelligence.

  • Game Economics, Part 1: The Attention Economy is the first of a 3-part series on the economics of games.

Metavert Meditations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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