Effective talk: Releasing a game
Year of Talk: 2021
Warning: Not meant to be a ‘How to release game’ talk.
This talk is meant to talk about the other side of launching a game and the feelings and emotions that come out of releasing games.
When working on a game that takes a year or more makes many of the devs feel exhausted and stressed from working hundreds of hours on a single project. But at the same time feeling excited to be able to release the game to the public so they can enjoy.
At the same time there is a lot of anxiety to prove that the work done throughout the project was worth it or not.
Pain Point #1:
All of this feelings tend to collide and collapses on everyone in a very short time frame after release. Which is then finally lifted allowing for relief to enter everyone. Although this changes depending on the game as some require continues support post launch with more information and content for the users. This can vary from patches coming out shortly before release to seasonal content and battle passes.
Pain Point #2:
Some companies/project cycles can have very tight production cycles where shortly after a game is finished and released then work is started on pre-production for the next game. This leaves less time for people to process the fact that their work is finally released and people are enjoying it.
Pain Point #3:
Many games are expected to preform at a certain level no matter the team and recourses backing it. This means that many indie teams will feel a lot of extra pressure to make their game even better and spend a bunch of overtime to reach it. Especially given the fact that many people buying games don't pay as much attention to team sizes, budgets or other similar factors that tend to affect the quality and size of the game.
It is important to also consider that some teams might be developing in different time zone. Which means that audiences primarily in North America and Europe expect releases inside those time zone which can force teams from other time zones to drastically affect their sleep schedule to make sure updates are released properly.
Pain Point #4:
When a wash of bad reviews comes in for the game it can cause demoralization of the team. As not only have people poorly received the game, the team still needs to go through the reviews and determine if any of the problems are with features that can be fixed and spend time doing so. This is since it brings down the score for the game which can drastically affect future sales and might desensitize people to continue trusting in the studio and the games they release in the future. Which can be done by fixing bugs or adjusting certain features/values.
At times the pressure of social media and the negative reviews can cause people to feel forced to push a solution outside of normal working hours. This pressure can push multiple team members to spend a lot of extra time and effort to solve problems in hopes to change the negative reviews to positive.
Improvements for future projects:
Change #1:
Do more peer feedback on systems early on. This will allows the team to have as much people help think through different design decision and systems as possible. Which can allow them to catch possible problems in the future or prevent a feature being added that people don't normally enjoy/find difficult.
Change #2:
Hire more help around the launch window to better mitigate time zone problems. This way you can have a smaller team still working on the project during their day while the main team sleeps. This means that there will still be a team working on bugs or features and doesn't require people to lose sleep or ruin people sleep schedule by too much. Helping drastically smooth out development even more through out the 24 hour period.
Change #3:
Making more realistic/down to earth expectations will help with the team be better prepared for what the public will react to the game. It also helps for if it ends up being a huge success then the whole team will feel way more exited and feel better with the game passing their expectations.
Change #4:
Creating a better post launch release will allow the team to be better prepared to pivot into fixing the game, celebrating, and relaxing. This comes down to the fact that if the team is better prepared in case something comes up then they can start working on the plan they have in place instead of spending time worrying about what they need to do to fix the problems.
Comments