Building games faster and scaling LiveOps

venturebeat.com:

Presented by Beamable

Games were once a product, but now they are a live experience. And while “games as a service” aren’t entirely new, the realities of the market have changed dramatically.

First, the market of players has changed. Whereas once players expected frequent crises as games go live and struggled with demand, there are now far more players, and they all expect reliability and stability. Second, it’s become harder to build a live services team. Athough capital has poured into game development, these dollars chase after an increasingly scarce supply of LiveOps, DevOps, and server technology expertise — and the broader market of SaaS and cloud-based infrastructure vendors compete for the same talent pool.

In many ways, the state of LiveOps in 2022 mirrors what a lot of game studios struggled with a decade ago, when 3D engine technology was still making its way into most peoples’ hands. We used to code with DirectX, and you’d hire people with expertise in matrix math, quaternions, and shader graph programming. The problem then was not about simply providing APIs to this technology, but the complexity of the workflow. The 3D engines that succeeded figured out that it was about simplifying the workflow and democratizing access to the technology — not simply providing low-level SDKs.

One can also find this technological innovation outside of games. Web-based content management platforms replaced coding websites from scratch; off-the-shelf platforms like Shopify largely replaced coding an online store from the ground up.

Yet there are also substantial differences: LiveOps for games is simply a lot harder to create an improved workflow for. Not only do you have the complexity of a 3D engine providing the experience-layer