The product life cycle : it's role in marketing strategy/some evolving ...
It's not a product, it's a service!
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Transcript of It's not a product, it's a service!
Focused on synchronous multiplayer games for most of our existence
Office in
Kraków
city center
Online
gaming
company
60+ people and growing
Social casino, arcade and skill games
Online
gaming
company
About Us
Founded 10+ years ago
Office in Kraków city center
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Social
casino
Casual
Multiplayer
• Social casino
• Casual multiplayer
• Multiple platforms
• Web
• Social networks
• Mobile
Our Products
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More than game development
Community management
Server operations
Data analytics
Marketing
Web development
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Making it work
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Development Process
Data
Technology
People
Development Process
“Lean startup” approach
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Validate your game idea first
•Everything else usually can be deferred
•MVP is probably half of what you think it is
Every game is a learning opportunity
Be prepared for the unexpected
Careful about future proofing by developers
Team dedicated to a game may actually grow post release
Users expect new content/features to be delivered on regular basis
A lot of effort spent on optimization • A/B testing
experiments • Exploratory analytics
Successful games are serving players for many years
Development Process
Release is only the beginning...
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Development Process
Scrum in game production
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Development Process
Scrum in game production
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Does not apply to prototyping process (ad-hoc 2-3 person teams)
Dedicated Product Owners and Scrum Masters
External training/coaching absolutely worth it
Getting it right is very challenging
Development Process
Scaling game development/operations
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Game teams are independent of each other
Shared technology •GitHub-like development model
•Some oversight necessary
Teams handle big part of operations
Data
Analytics = process + tools
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• Leaning more to the process side
• Tools are a solvable problem
• Collection/storage is cheap
• Analysis is a significant investment
• Data science know-how takes a lot of
time to develop and is hard to acquire
• Third party tools are getting better
Data
Scientific approach to product development
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Don’t guess if you don’t have to:
• The answer may be in the data you already have
• Or in the data you can easily get
Guessing is fine, but:
• State your assumptions
• Validate afterwards
Data
Information flow
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Well defined common KPIs:
• Accessible to anyone in game team within <24 h
• Comparative analysis of games
Raw data access for game teams
• Can’t predict all needs upfront • Deep product knowledge required for
meaningful insights • Per-game internal KPIs
Technology
Shared technology
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Cross cutting concerns
• Scalability, availability, infrastructure monitoring
• Build, deployment
Know-how and skills can be brought
from one project to another
Services shared between games • Analytics, payment
processing
Standards for local
and production environment
Technology
Continuous Integration
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Everything has to be in source control!
Frequent local releases
•Fully automated, based on development branch
Always ready for production release •Merge to master
•CI prepares release, but pushing it to players is human action •Anyone on the game team can do it
Technology
Production environment
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• All new games in AWS
• On the surface it’s not the most cost effective solution • A lot of added value (RDS, DynamoDB, ELB, CloudWatch …) • APIs allow us to automate tasks traditionally done by human administrators • Bigger percentage of engineering efforts focused on core business
• Production release takes <10 min for any project (usually much less, we cache prebuilt binaries)
• Quick rollbacks (<1 min)
Technology
Multiple client platforms
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• A tax on development cost • “Mobile” is much more than one platform: on the
OS side there’s iOS/Android/WP + tablet vs phone form factors (different design, possibly functionality)
• Cross platform client technologies help
We currently use Adobe AIR May switch to something else
Technology
Software quality
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Server problems are often much worse than client problems
• In online game if something breaks once per million sessions, it is sure to happen!
Good engineering practices pay off, bad ones come back to bite you
• Sometimes years later
Balance vs development velocity is necessary!
We are in it for a long run
People
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People
We are in it for a long run
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• Successful games will entertain players for many years • People need to be prepared for a marathon, not a sprint • Crunch is not an option, we work 40-hour weeks • Teamwork is critical • A lot of know-how is only in a person’s head • Happy employees stay with us longer
People
Killing products/shifting focus
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• Not everyone handles it well • Conflicting points of view are unavoidable • Always a tough decision • Treat it as learning opportunity
People
Hiring
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• Not only about technical competence! • Collaboration and knowledge sharing, critical to our success • Communication skills • Personality fit • Industry knowledge • Passion!
www.ganymede.eu
