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How Will Game Services Evolve to Meet Our New Working Reality?
Recent world events have challenged the way the video game industry operates. Success demands that service companies evolve to become nimbler in their delivery methods, but this isn’t a simple process.
Neil Long, Senior Director of Global Player Support; Nee Nguyen, Global Head of Player Communities; and Victor Alonso Lion, Director of Localization addressed this topic at the latest Game Quality Forum, providing their insight into how PTW delivers quality services across multiple locations and languages efficiently, utilizing a combination of people and technology.
Clearly, adaptability is the key to survival in an ever-changing industry. Organizations must consider many factors when determining a winning strategy. What drives continued excellence? Which delivery models should be discarded, and which ones should be adopted or adapted? What are the technology trends, and how do we evaluate their strengths and weaknesses? How do we prepare for the future when it is constantly in flux? As poet and playwright Jessica Hagedorn says, “Adaptability is the simple secret of survival”. But how does a large, global business like PTW achieve this?
An important driver will always be cost. For many companies, this is the bottom line when planning release timelines, as it affects delivery schedules and post-release support options. Cost also leads directly to another important driver, flexibility. When finances are an issue, both large and small studios and publishers must allow for changes to carefully-laid plans, to properly react to evolving market conditions.
Talent and the availability of talent are two drivers that co-exist and can radically alter proposed timelines. Often studios must scale up to handle a quickened development timeline, which requires seeking outside assistance. But if the required talent is not available for this, it can throw a wrench into these plans. There is also a link between the drivers of player expectations and the uncertainty of the market. Despite the best market research, it’s impossible to know with 100% certainty what the game playing audience wants. Social media is full of gamers giving their opinions on what they’ve liked and disliked about various titles, but it’s extremely difficult to ferret out significant meaning from these, in such a way as to inform a solid direction for any game studio.
Finally, consideration must be given to the related drivers of technology and institutional knowledge. These drivers interoperate and inform each other in a continuous loop, and it behooves development studios to keep refreshing their ability to keep up with trends and ensure their team have the capacity to keep updating their technical acumen.
Historically, work has always been executed in an office environment. Obviously, the global pandemic forced a radical structural change to this operating standard, and businesses either adapted or shut down. The switch to a work-from-home model was a bit easier for companies already operating digitally, with employees taking laptops home to work. While this may have eased costs for supporting in-office employees, it forced IT departments to restructure security and support policies, with attendant costs of their own.
Over time, this model evolved into a work-from-anywhere scenario, both for people who were unable to configure their home environments to work in and for those who traveled for work purposes. This gave rise to an extremely mobile workforce, further exacerbating the need for IT staff to lock down their procedures, but it allowed business to proceed at pace.
After the period of freewheeling experimentation, we seem to have arrived at a stable methodology, the hybrid delivery model. Here, the core team operates in-studio and from home, while a secondary team of freelancers operates from wherever they happen to be. This grants the ability to ramp staff up and down as needed, with access to a much larger pool of talent.
The elements that enable these models are the cloud-based technology that makes it all happen, combined with the skilled workforce that execute the work. Teams operate using machine translation tools and carefully applied automation to augment their existing skills. Virtual workspaces allow for greater reach and engagement because they obviate the need for physical locations to accomplish objectives.
Security continues to be a concern. For the on-premise workforce, the standard procedures apply: ISO-certified hardware is strictly regulated and never leaves the building and client proprietary tools are used to satisfy regulatory compliance. At the same time, cloud security continues to evolve, utilizing everything from strong firewalls and encryption to whitelisted IP addresses and use of VPNs. Employee endpoints are protected as tightly as possible, with secured devices and cloud repositories, and asset access only granted on a need-to-know basis.
The complexities of servicing the video game industry will likely only increase in both volume and depth as we move into the future. On the support side, things are trending toward being multi-platform, available 24/7, on-demand and in real time, which carries with it concomitant increases in talent availability. The need to scale up and down as needed puts pressure on IT to administer hardware and facilities to cover a wide range of platforms, from PC to console to mobile.
As video games become enculturated in more geographical regions around the world than ever before, the need to scale services also becomes a driving force. Culturalization from one country to another is a painstaking and involved process that can’t be automated, requiring the use of local expertise and a sensitive touch. The ability to bring games to a wider audience is a huge opportunity, but also a huge responsibility.
As much of an upheaval the past few years have been for the video games service industry, it’s easy to see that the years ahead will also bring new challenges, even if we can’t yet imagine what those issues will eventually be. Flexibility is the key to both success and survival for all businesses concerned, with adaptability being the watchword. Technology will both exacerbate and relieve upcoming difficulties, but technology alone is an incomplete solution without the guiding minds of compassionate team members.
IMAGE: Game Quality Forum 2022