It's not a product, it's a service!
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My presentation from Digital Dragons 2014 conference on organization of online gaming company with high level coverage of development process, technology, data analytics and human factors.
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It's not a product, it's a service!
- 1. It’s not a product, it’s a service! Maciej Mróz CTO, Ganymede mmroz@ganymede.eu
- 2. Focused on synchronous multiplayer games for most of our existence Office in Kraków city center Online gaming company 60+ people and growing Social casino, arcad e and skill games Online gaming company About Us Founded 10+ years ago Office in Kraków city center 2
- 3. Social casino Casual Multiplayer • Social casino • Casual multiplayer • Multiple platforms • Web • Social networks • Mobile Our Products
- 4. 4 More than game development Community management Server operations Data analytics Marketing Web development 4
- 5. Making it work 5 Development Process Data Technology People
- 6. Development Process “Lean startup” approach 6 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
- 7. 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... 7
- 8. Development Process Scrum in game production 8
- 9. Development Process Scrum in game production 9 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
- 10. Development Process Scaling game development/operations 10 Game teams are independent of each other Shared technology •GitHub-like development model •Some oversight necessary Teams handle big part of operations
- 11. Data Analytics = process + tools 11 • 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
- 12. Data Scientific approach to product development 12 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
- 13. Data Information flow 13 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
- 14. Technology Shared technology 14 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
- 15. Technology Continuous Integration 15 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
- 16. Technology Production environment 16 • 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)
- 17. Technology Multiple client platforms 17 • 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
- 18. Technology Software quality 18 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!
- 19. We are in it for a long run People 19
- 20. People We are in it for a long run 20 • 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
- 21. People Killing products/shifting focus 21 • Not everyone handles it well • Conflicting points of view are unavoidable • Always a tough decision • Treat it as learning opportunity
- 22. People Hiring 22 • Not only about technical competence! • Collaboration and knowledge sharing, critical to our success • Communication skills • Personality fit • Industry knowledge • Passion!
- 23. www.ganymede.eu
- 24. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION mmroz@ganymede.eu