The Iceberg Economics of Game Development - Part 3
Unless you are building a single player, offline game with premium monetization on just the PC platform, the cost to design and build the core gameplay is just the tip of the iceberg.
Catch Up
If you’re looking for the other parts, here are the links!
Intro
As a quick reminder, years ago I stumbled across a spreadsheet that captured all the essential tasks necessary to create a movie. IMO, we deserve the same kind of nice things for game development, so we need to make a list of All The Thingstm.
Part 2 of this series filled in the first five areas beyond the core gameplay artifacts of client, server, and persistent storage. In this article we'll do the next five. Yes, the graphic above contains spoilers. 🙂
Here is the usual disclaimer: the systems listed here are drawn from conversations with colleagues and from my personal experience across four game genres, three game engine technologies, and four game companies. If you have suggestions for additions, please let me know!
In our continued journey in enumerating All The Thingstm, the next five delve into making money and keeping players happy.
Engagement And Revenue
Driving engagement and revenue is supported by a variety of systems to provide players with new and exciting content, rewards and incentives to play. They also generate revenue by providing visibility of new things to buy (e.g., emotes, skins, sound packs) or new content to participate in (DLC, new releases). These systems require additional work in the game for content loading, respecting the calendar and possibly the wall clock (because downtime is a non-starter today), and integration with external and/or third party systems.
Major and minor content updates
Seasonal and limited time events
Battle passes
Recruit/Refer-a-friend
Twitch streaming drops
YouTube streaming drops
Amazon Prime drops
Monetization Infrastructure
Game monetization infrastructure is the set of systems and tools needed to generate revenue essential to fund the continued development and operation of your game. It also allows players to support the games they love. If you can't accept money or don't have something the players want to buy, then you don't have revenue.
Your in-game stores will benefit from a wider variety of features than you imagine. Players should be able to see what they have already purchased, so they don't repeat. And if they have one or more items in a bundle, that bundle should be discounted appropriately.
The in game store work doesn't stop at a scrollable list. It should allow filtering, show you what you already own, and also be able to show you what the regular and sale prices are, not just the current price.
Payment processing
Stores: in-game, website, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Epic, Steam
In-game advertising platforms
Microtransaction support
Player spending data and analytics
XBox Game Pass
Playstation Plus
Apple Arcade
Community Infrastructure
All gamers have rage quit at some time for various reasons. Community tools are essential for creating a positive and engaging gaming experience for all players. By providing tools to combat cheating, toxicity, and other problems, community infrastructure systems help ensure players have a fair and enjoyable time. And that increases retention.
The list of desirable and useful features in your customer support tool is long. For example, the ability to search records by player id, date, game instance id, and even game mode. Searchable records should include the player accounts but also all the recorded games, in-game events of interest, like quest completions and boss kills, and so much more. Community tools, like your in-game store, have extensive feature sets that could qualify it as a standalone product.
Anticheat systems
Bot detection systems
Toxicity detection: text, voice, behavior
Customer support tools (fixing accounts, mass make-good actions)
MOTD and other notifications
ESports systems
Live Infrastructure
We have yet to discuss deploying and running a live game, of importance right after having a fun game -- players need to be able to play. You can build, buy, or mix and match, but you will need these. An enumerated list does not do justice to the complexity of and effort required for building and running live infrastructure.
Each of these categories have multiple options for build or buy, and the team needs to make choices. Note that we only touch on the tools needed for deploying the game artifacts (containerization, monitoring, message/service busses) without diving at all into the complexity of scalable system architecture. To go down that path we'd first want to know more about the game server requirements, especially whether your multiplayer needs are 2, 5, 100, or 1000 players.
Version control systems
Build tools
Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tools
Infrastructure as code (IaC) tools (because manual deployment is death)
Containerization and orchestration tools (so you can scale at will)
Monitoring and logging tools (so you know what goes wrong and why)
Message/service busses (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, and the like)
Live response management systems (so we know who is on call)
Crash management systems (critical for solving serious problems)
Content delivery networks (distributing the download costs around the world)
Independent region data centers (distributing player load and reducing latency)
Data collection and analysis (so you know what server systems and players are doing)
Live Service Operations
There are a number of nontrivial and regular cadence tasks that are integral to running a live game service. These are not sexy but the players care deeply about them because they impact the quality of the experience.
Note that the list captures work that needs to happen both in a cadence related to your release cycle(s), but also driven by the unforeseen. And currently does not include all the things that can happen in or to your data centers due to nature, or bad actors.
Player sentiment assessment
Emergency patches (server and client crashes, service blockages)
Responsive balance updates (monthly/regular or emergency)
Patch note update media (written, tweeted, or live streamed)
Prioritized bug fixes (less than emergency, but sooner than next patch)
Legally compliant Personally Identifiable Information (PII) deletion
Technical debt servicing (accumulations create increasing update friction)
Outro
We have captured 94 tools by adding these five areas, systems, or concerns to the previous five. Again, some are needed as development gets closer to launch (e.g., setting up live infrastructure), but can be done without during pre-production or early development. But for most games, you need some or many of these.
Because these are generally needed later in the process, their priority or importance is too often underestimated. The team is in the throes of creativity, making the game great and even more fun. No one wants to divert attention to these more mundane things.
But they will be critical to a successful launch and operation.
Here is our updated graphic. 🙂