QUO VADIS - Game Development & Business conference

This talk will give you an overview of the technical and organizational challenges we faced while growing from a small game centric build engineering team to a full-fledged DevOps department operating a self-published live game. We will show why a microservice approach and infrastructure as code not only fits from a tech perspective, but also from the business side.

Always-online games are rapidly transforming the video game industry. Video games entail complex and interesting problems, and the actions performed by their players generate extremely rich datasets that constitute an ideal playground to understand human behavior.

Data-driven game development has extraordinary potential both to provide players with an optimized game experience and to increase user engagement. Machine learning methods can be used to predict individual player behavior, revealing information such as the moment and game level at which any given player will leave the game, when they will make their next purchase and which virtual item they are likely to select, in which in-game events they would like to take part or which playing style they would find most enjoyable to compete with. This allows developers and game planners to take customized preventive actions aimed at maximizing player engagement and lifetime.

I will review the main artificial intelligence techniques that will revolutionize the mobile game industry, focusing on deep learning and ensemble learning methods that are crucial to provide a customized player experience through personalized game events, marketing campaigns, and in-game item/action recommendations. I will then discuss how the ability of these methods to deal with really big datasets (petabytes of data) and easily adapt to different kinds of games and players allows for their use in an operational environment.

LiveOps are a big driver behind King's long-term success as a leader in mobile gaming, encouraging players to return day after day (and year after year).  At a high level, King achieves this by focusing on finding the very best content within its games and then showcasing this to a global audience.  This talk offers insights and key learnings that can be applied to any game, regardless of genre, and will cover topics including how to find "good" levels, design philosophy that drives LiveOps at King, and insights into the tech that is used to reach a global audience every day.

Building and using online services for games is usually not the first choice of aspiring game developers. Neither is it for seasoned ones. Why is that and can we help it? We take a good look at what's at the table, what hurdles are commonly faced and how we can make it fun.