Embracing the "Forever Game" Philosophy

Ahead of the Live Service Gaming Summit, we spoke to Miguel Angel Pastor Manuel, Chief Technology Officer at Halfbrick Studios about shifting to a "forever game" philosophy has required a significant cultural change, focusing on long-term player engagement over short-term success.

What challenges have you faced in changing the DNA of your company to embrace a forever game philosophy, and how have you adopted a player-centric approach while fostering innovation and flexibility in game development?

At Halfbrick Studios, shifting to a "forever game" philosophy has presented several challenges. One major hurdle has been changing the company's DNA to focus on long-term player engagement rather than short-term success. This required a cultural shift towards continuous improvement and sustained player satisfaction.
To adopt a player-centric approach, we've prioritized gathering and analyzing player feedback. Utilizing services like PlaytestCloud and conducting surveys, has helped us understand our players' needs and preferences.
We've implemented small, self-sufficient teams that work on prototyping and iterating game concepts, supported by our brain trust group.

How do you leverage prototyping in the early stages of development to ensure the game is scalable and adaptable for continuous evolution?

At Halfbrick Studios, our self-sufficient small teams create prototypes with the support of a brain trust group. This group helps the teams focus on developing engaging core mechanics and exploring secondary mechanics and meta progression systems to ensure depth and long-term player engagement. Once the brain trust is satisfied with the prototype's potential for continuous evolution, we release an early access version to gather quantitative and qualitative data. During the prototyping phase, we use services like PlaytestCloud to engage with potential users and gather valuable feedback.

How do your existing products, expertise, and player data contribute to making informed decisions in the development of new games?

We've conducted numerous experiments with our free-to-play games, including A/B testing difficulty levels, different progression mechanics, and game modes, collecting extensive quantitative data. Alongside this, we use game surveys and personal interviews, combined with our past game development expertise, to inform decisions for developing new games.

How do you approach identifying and deciding on the target player base for a new gaming product?

At Halfbrick Studios, we use services like PlaytestCloud to conduct interviews and gather insights to help decide our target player base. We combine this data with extensive information from our existing games to make informed decisions. This approach ensures that we accurately identify and target the right audience for our new games.

What discussions are you most looking forward to at the Live Service Gaming Summit?

I'm particularly interested in learning how successful "forever game" companies manage the prototyping stage and build content pipelines to avoid the content treadmill problem. Understanding their approaches to using quantitative data for informed decision-making is also a key focus for me. Additionally, I'm eager to hear about strategies for maintaining developer morale and motivation when working on the same product for extended periods. These insights will be invaluable for us at Halfbrick Studios as we evolve our development practices and maintain high engagement and innovation levels in our games.