Continues updates (or: after-launch support)

Update: newest addition to article series is State of gaming.

A big con against using Agile with Continues Deployment in gamedev is for me the question: ‘is it feasible as a business model’? Because at the end of the day the amount of work put into continues updates must be profitable to run a business.

This is an article in the ‘Research’ category where I dive into a subject on game production.

The case at hand

I am currently thinking a lot about how to continue in developing Find the Gnome, but a lot more ‘Agile’ and User-centered.

I am a professional software developer doing Agile/DevOps/Google design sprints/CI&CD/Metrics driven development/what-else, and I think this is one of my strong points that I should emphasis while developing games. (See my other blogs for more on these subjects)

Recently a Youtube of GDC 2019 caught my attention (thanks google suggestions!) It is a case study from Nick Popovich (Monomi Park), explaining his success. These are the points he made:

• Keep your game essential (refine on it). And aim these essentials to provide an experience that is able to sell over time.
• It is all about concurrent players (online, or offline) that are using your game. By using it they are advertising it (through conscious or unconscious updates to friends that they are liking this game)
• It revolves around a continues game update cycle that keep the ‘concurrent users’ train going (and accelerating, if possible).

His points align very well with my Agile approach to gamedev I want to take.

The cons

However, I spotted some flaws already on my experiment. For me these flaws aren’t that of an issue, but time will tell.

• Nick Popovich is making money using this approach, but will others? Or was he just lucky?
• You can’t just keep updating games, you will run out of money eventually. Or, on the contrary, you can’t just stop updating your game if you had just 1 bad month. In this talk the motivation behind the decisions sounds a lot like voodoo magic: the cause and causality of things aren’t analyzed well.
  A start could be in the Q&A part of the YouTube (https://youtu.be/DTvBgmNL-p0?t=3533) where Nick Popovich gives a rough guide on how he uses sales data to space out content updates. I think the ‘something’-like-a-service business model (through all kind of business) are in a maturing stage right now, and more guides on this subject are going to hit the markets in the coming years.

Next

Well, see it for yourself in this YouTube vid and decide if it is worth trying.