Embedding LiveOps and Navigating Global Collaboration in Game Development

Ahead of the Live Service Gaming Summit, we spoke with Nelle Stahl, Technical Producer at Klang Games. Nelle outlines the importance of embedding LiveOps considerations into the core gameplay from the beginning, highlighting the difficulty of aligning globally oriented yet locally sensitive roadmaps.

Given your experience in supervising day-to-day operations for multiple engineering teams, how do you ensure that LiveOps considerations are embedded into the core gameplay from the start?

By ensuring that any feature or major change can be toggled off in the event of unforeseen emergency issues, studios can minimize downtime and recovery time. This approach is crucial for live service games, as it ensures that players experience minimal disruption due to faulty features or systems.

Can you share the major challenges in developing and synchronise globally oriented yet locally sensitive roadmaps in collaboration with multiple co-developer teams?

What advice would you give your peers to be successful in this area? Always verify assumptions by double and triple-checking to ensure alignment. Hold stakeholders and collaborators accountable by questioning their requests and ensuring they understand the implications of their demands. It is common, especially when working with tech teams, to encounter stakeholders who may not fully grasp the consequences of their requirements. Navigating different cultural communication styles can on top of that add an additional layer of complexity, so it is important to adapt one's communication style to accommodate global collaboration and cultural diversity.

You will be part of a panel focused on different ‘types’ of liveops across different platforms and genres. Why is this such an important discussion to have?

There is no universal formula for LiveOps, even within a common platform or specific genre. Discovering a game's unique approach is an ongoing process that demands companies to consider various factors, including technical innovation, player maturity, and the influence of both direct and indirect competitors. This is why discussions on this topic are crucial—they provide valuable insights and opportunities to learn from others, helping to identify and refine a game’s unique LiveOps strategy over time.

And following on from that, what trends are you seeing from gaming studios as they seek to build robust, sustainable live products in a competitive market?

Gaming studios are boosting player engagement and sustainability by prioritizing regular content updates, increasingly leveraging AI for content generation. They are also focusing on community engagement, advanced monetization strategies, cross-platform play, and live events. By embracing data-driven development, social features, ethical practices, and technological innovations such as cloud gaming, LLM/ML, and Web3, along with offering diverse content, studios aim to ensure long-term success and cultivate a loyal player base.

Why does infrastructure management play such a critical role in enhancing player experience across different game genres and platforms?

A game may be exceptional, but if its infrastructure fails to deliver the necessary speed, quality, accessibility, scalability, and security, it can significantly impact retention and concurrent user numbers. Inadequate infrastructure can make or break a game, regardless of how outstanding the gameplay is.

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

I am particularly eager to engage in discussions centered around LiveOps, with a focus on platform, infrastructure, CI/CD processes, and release management.