Mastering Games as a Service
For free-to-play, episodic, and subscription-based games, a wide-scale release has always marked the transition from creating a product to running a service. But nowadays, even for premium titles, a degree of post-launch support is mandatory, and the days of shipping a box and immediately moving on to a new venture are over.
In this chapter, we will attempt to distill the knowledge required to turn your game into a successful service by establishing an update strategy, running events, addressing game balancing, working with analytics, customer support, and the tools required to operate your games sustainably. This chapter also acts as an important bridge to the next one, which is focused on the business side and monetization.
Now, to better understand the realities and challenges of live operations, we ought to first establish a common language!
We will cover the following topics in this chapter:
- Terms of engagement
- Live operations ...
