Design principles

Define measurable and achievable objectives for game operations teams and adapt as necessary: Due to the hits-driven nature of games, it is difficult to determine ahead of time how many players will play your game when it launches or what expectations players will have for your ongoing game operations. It is important to set ambitious but achievable goals with stakeholders and design an approach that can be scaled up if your game exceeds projections and scaled down while game development teams optimize the player experience. Adequately prepare and test ahead of time to meet these requirements and align your business and technical stakeholders on target objectives for operating the game. With targets defined, the game teams can achieve an appropriate balance between cost and performance during planning, designing, provisioning, testing, deploying, and operating the game backend infrastructure.

Use operational runbooks to plan for scaling activities related to game launches and special events: Game operations teams should coordinate with business stakeholders to model projections for anticipated peak player concurrency for events and perform proactive planning to pre-scale infrastructure capacity ahead of time. Due to the fluctuating nature of player traffic during events, prior planning and pre-scaling activities should augment your existing automated scaling systems to improve your chance of success during an event and verify that you have enough resources to provide a positive player experience. Implement performance engineering practices to develop a baseline of your resources and a data-driven understanding of your system's capacity, which will assist guide pre-scaling activities and automated scaling configurations. Develop operational runbooks to provide consistency in the process. This advance planning and responsiveness to player demand is especially critical for live service games, which must maintain reliable performance and infrastructure to support an active, engaged player base over an extended timeframe.

Establish an operating model for receiving, investigating, and responding to player support requests: After a launch, monitor reports of complaints and issues with the game. Implement appropriate systems to interact with players in a secure and effective manner to adequately resolve player issues and such as community forums, social media, e-mail, ticketing systems, call centers, or automated chat bot solutions. This is especially crucial for live service games, which require ongoing communication with the player base, responsiveness to player feedback to address evolving needs, and maintenance of an engaged community over an extended lifespan.