The difference between dev and live ops

There is a lot of misunderstanding about live ops. It’s a relatively new part of the development cycle, which became increasingly important with the rise of free-to-play games. Traditional games are made in the following life cycle, shown in Figure 11.1.

Figure 11.1 – Premium game high-level development cycle

Practically 90 percent of the work is done before the game is published. After the game is out and released to the target market, there might be some additional content available for purchase (called DLC) or some major bug fixes. Of course, there will also be the possibility for player to reach player support. However, we will consider development work is done when the game hits the market. The game team that worked on the game is either redistributed to other game development projects or let go. Premium game development is somewhat similar to creating feature movies. The team gets together, spends...