Borderlands developer Gearbox uses the cloud to change how it makes games

When you imagine the kind of work a game developer does, you probably think about someone designing a level or programming movement and physics. But a huge part of modern development is live operations, in which studios build tools to connect a game to a variety of online platforms and backend services. Borderlands 2 developer Gearbox Software recently wrote an internal case-study about its efforts to shift more of its workflow into the cloud, and it explained how some extra upfront work can save a lot of trouble once a game launches.

“We at Gearbox have been making our games more cloud-centric for quite some time,” Gearbox executive producer Sean Reardon wrote in the case study provided to GamesBeat. “Today’s players expect games that can change dynamically without having to repeatedly download large, unwieldy patches. They expect games that can recognize and adapt to when and how they like to play. And they want online games that just keep working.”