GAMEOPS01-BP01 Use game objectives and business performance metrics to develop your live operations strategy
Consult business stakeholders, such as game producers and publishing partners, to determine objectives and performance metrics for a game. This can assist you develop plans for how you will manage the game, including defining your maintenance windows, software and infrastructure update schedules, and system reliability and recoverability goals.
Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: High
Implementation guidance
These metrics can also assist you determine at which stage of your game's lifecycle you should incorporate a live operation steam (Live Ops) to monitor game health, collect direct game feedback, and build streamlined and automated release processes. For example, a new game might wait until a certain scale is achieved, measured by active player count, revenue, or another set of metrics, before setting up a dedicated live operations team. An established game development studio might already have live operations experience, perhaps for their other games, so they'd only need to onboard the new game.
Implementation steps
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You may define the targets for player concurrency (CCU) and daily and monthly active users (DAU and MAU) that the game infrastructure should be capable to effectively support, your infrastructure budgets, financial targets, and other performance goals, such as the frequency for release of content and features to increase player engagement. These objectives and metrics feed into decisions about the game design, release management, observability, and support that is needed for efficient operations.
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Your game might have an objective to release new content updates at least once each month with no downtime during release. This information assists you to define your release deployment strategy and coordinate the scheduling of required maintenance that may require downtime at other times throughout the month and contribute towards your availability SLA.
