Live Service Gaming North America Summit
29th - 30th April 2025
| Austin Marriott South, Texas, North America
Ahead of the Live Service Gaming North America Summit 2025, we had the opportunity to speak with Adam Hafez, Project Technical Director - Tools & Pipelines at ZeniMax Online Studios.
Adam shared his experiences in building efficient content pipelines, balancing stability with development speed, and fostering collaboration across remote teams. He also provided insights into future-proofing development processes and how the evolving needs of live service games have shaped his approach.
1) What are the key considerations when designing and maintaining content pipelines that can support the continuous demands of live service environments?
For us, we had to figure out early on what expectations our content pipeline needed to support. Ideally the same project pillars that are guiding overall game development are guiding tools and pipeline objectives as well.
Understanding the effects of micro-release cycles (i.e. a developer making changes in their tool) on the larger project release cycle seems obvious, but sometimes it's easy to forget that how smoothly a single developer can push content through your pipelines has a direct correlation with how much content you will be able to release for a given time period for your game.
Everything affects this cycle - the efficiency of tools and pipelines are one important piece, but especially in a remote environment, you quickly start feeling the impacts of the developers themselves, team culture, and other non-technical factors as well. For live service development, we have found that the content release cycle quickly becomes a measure of the overall pulse and health of the project.
2) How do you approach developing and managing tools to ensure efficient workflows and seamless content creation for live service games?
The main focus for us is usually iteration speed - building tools and pipelines for developers that simplify making, reviewing, and sharing changes is key.
This includes, "owning" your game asset data or having full control and understanding of your data throughout all phases of tools and pipeline development. Understanding and controlling how that data flows through your pipelines should also be considered early on. A solid release management system ensures that game changes are smoothly integrated without disrupting ongoing processes.
One thing we have had to adjust in a live service environment is that our product pipelines are often required to support development of multiple sub-projects but aren't always designed to handle them effectively. Therefore, it's important to plan for pipelines and tools that flexibly support the needs of a team that are not necessarily working on the same deliverable and are spread out geographically across different time zones. Ensuring that your development environment is portable and accessible to all team members, regardless of their location, is essential.
It's continuously an issue of development resolution - putting a system in place that supports the overall game is great for cross-team collaboration but doesn't serve smaller cohorts of developers working together in isolation. On the flip side, only support smaller groups and collaboration suffers. One size does not necessarily fit all for smooth content development across a large project team.
3) How do you foster effective collaboration among stakeholders in content development pipelines to ensure alignment and a high-quality final product?
This requires strong production, product owner, and leadership groups - communication is key. Working with a large distributed team as most of us do is challenging and leads to the emergence of microcultures and isolation of different project efforts.
The ongoing question for us is - how do you best maintain a mix of people who are mainly focused on what's in front of them and individuals that are maintaining a higher level view?
At the end of the day, it comes down to a strong leadership group with a clear vision enabling autonomous development teams to do their best work together.
4) What considerations are most critical when structuring internal resources and team workflows to support the ongoing development and maintenance of live service products?
As your team continues to grow, ensure that your workflows and pipelines are tailored to make the best use of your organizational structure. This involves not only creating content but also tightly coupling the review and approval processes to maintain a smooth flow. For us, this includes aligning developers in different time zones for continuous progress and development across the (almost) 24 hour development cycle.
One of our biggest ongoing struggles is maintaining a continued balance between stability and velocity. This means finding the sweet spot where the team can move quickly without compromising the quality and reliability of the game.
At the end of the day, tools and pipelines need their fair share of QA resources to function reliably. This includes investing in robust support systems and thorough validation processes to catch issues early. More recently, we have also put a heavy focus on automating review tasks where possible to free up QA time for more critical activities.
For us, most engineers participate in supporting their coworkers both by engaging in our support channels and having dedicated support buckets. We've also taken the step to embed engineers within other teams and allowing them to become fully absorbed in that teams microculture. This approach fosters a sense of ownership and success, as engineers feel more integrated and aligned with the team’s goals.
Lastly, it's important to remember that people are not systems. Sometimes, to compensate for system limitations, we rely on individuals to fill in the gaps. This never ends up being as sustainable as we want it to be - where possible we've been forced to invest in documentation (hiring technical writers) and push for explicit knowledge sharing to increase our bus factor.
5) How do you anticipate the tooling needs of a live service game evolving over time, and what steps do you take to future-proof your development processes?
The decisions made early on will significantly impact the future of your tooling and development processes. It's crucial not to skimp on areas that matter most, though identifying these critical areas can be challenging. In the early stages, especially during preproduction, it's beneficial to keep things simple and low-level. However, it requires a team that is willing to collaborate and adapt during this challenging phase - workflows in this phase of development are never as easy to use as they need to be.
Don't close off doors too early or over-optimize your tools and processes. Premature optimization can lead to missed opportunities and inflexibility. Instead, focus on making decisions, failing quickly, and keeping the momentum going. It's important to leave room for change and not spend too long making every decision, as many decisions won't matter in the long term. Embrace the fact that tech debt is not the end of the world and isn't always a bad thing.
For tools and pipeline teams, it can be difficult to combat development fatigue because of the lack of proximity to the actual game - it's important to find ways to get continuous positive feedback from users to help improve things and foster a feeling of ownership and success for developers.
6) What are you looking forward to at the upcoming Live Service Gaming North America Summit?
I'm excited to meet with other people that are facing development challenges in the live service space. Additionally, I'm looking forward to understanding what others in this space are currently focused on and what solutions they are pursuing.
Developing live service games is a marathon - while building efficient technology to support this is important, it is equally important to maintain human connections and relationships within and across studios. I'm looking forward to doing exactly that!
Join Adam at the Live Service Gaming North America Summit! Download the agenda here and see what is lined up for this event.
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