EA's four evergreen principles to keep your service games fresh
There are many considerations to factor in when planning how to update and expand a live service title, but chief among them is what players best respond to.
That's according to Electronic Arts' head of operations Arjun Balaram, who delivered a presentation at India Game Developers Conference in Hyderabad this week on the evergreen tenets of developing live service games.
Drawing on his extensive experience of such titles, particularly on mobile, Balaram said there were three lenses through which every update must be viewed:
Balaram kicked off with the player-centric considerations and the four key principles behind them, which we present below.
Balaram emphasised the need for developers and publishers to stay flexible, using the development of Bejeweled Blitz as an example.
The PopCap Games team behind the match-three game spent months creating a new feature called 'Encore,' which allowed players to spend some coins to boost their score. It was presented alongside other options via a pop-up that appeared at the end of each match. PopCap spent weeks fine-tuning the UI, but focus groups revealed it hadn't worked out as they hoped.
"What we found was that, after all the effort we put in for months and weeks, the thing that players did most was they just clicked the 'X' [to close the pop-up]," Balaram explained. "They didn't go through the other stuff, the only thing they cared about was the score boost.
"So we redesigned it to really emphasise that all the other stuff was not relevant. That score boost was the motivation for playing, and redesigning this really helped."
When Plants vs Zombies 2 was first developed, Electronic Arts planned to expand it every two to three months with a new 'world' that would be sold for $5. In addition to new levels, each world came with a set of 20 to 30 new plants players could deploy, as well as additional zombies to face and different challenges related to these additions.
Balaram reported that each world would take three months to build and
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