Presented by Google Cloud
There’s a lot riding on launch day, including reputation, revenue and long-term relevance. A battle royale game can make $1 billion in its first ten days, or $4 million in revenue per hour of downtime over that sustained period – and that doesn’t even include the lifetime value of the customer. Just ask the developers of the highly anticipated Suicide Squad or Payday 3 how their launch days went, and buy them a drink while you’re at it.
When problems occur, they always come down to the fact that a game launch – especially when it’s a game-as-a-service — is a wildly complex, highly technical undertaking. Enter Google Cloud’s “Game Launch Council.” For years, this crack team of engineers has guided some of the biggest and most surprising games to success by ensuring they stay up and running, for millions of players.
Building the Google Cloud “Game Launch Council”
“Game launches can be nerve racking. The fundamental mission of the Game Launch Council is to de-risk game launches,” says Moe Sy, cloud architect, Google Cloud for Games. “We start with understanding the type of game we’re dealing with. A [first-person-shooter] has a different technical profile than a MOBA, fighting game, etc. From there, we begin developing options with the studio, ultimately to balance objectives with player experience.”
The council is a cross-functional team at Google Cloud, spanning cloud architects, technical account managers, product managers, engineers, account leads as well as others that have been in the game launch trenches. Their collective experiences spawned a launch framework built from years of launch data and statistics, best practices and real-world experiences.
“Not only does a clear process help ensure a smooth game launch, it also helps identify deviations, and ultimately, learning points,” says Damian Lance, technical account manager, Google Cloud. “We continue to grow and evolve our process going forward.”
The framework isn’t just for triple-A games. It can be applied to big game moments of every size. That includes games with million-dollar marketing budgets, out-of-nowhere hits like Palworld, or in-game events, done well after a game’s initial launch. Even Google itself, which launches the occasional game as a Google Doodle. To cover this gamut of scenarios, the council shares their lessons globally, across Alphabet, which means smaller game studios get that same kind of attention and expertise.
The pillars and process for a successful launch
“If a game is having issues, gamers are not shy about making their opinions known on Reddit or X. You can imagine how that can help or hurt the game in the long term,” Sy says. “That’s why there’s a lot of onus to remedy things as quickly as possible and get the game running as smoothly as possible.”
The launch council has built its strategy around four pillars: architectural readiness, reliability, operational readiness and resource planning. “We use these elements to construct a shared playbook between us and the game studio,” says Thabata Oliveira, technical account manager, Google Cloud. “Considering game launches can be unpredictable, this helps introduce discipline, giving us clear and tested milestones leading up to a game launch date.”
Architecture
Google’s game engineer specialists review and evaluate the technical design of a game. Their initial findings include an inventory of key products used, adherence to best practice and ultimately, a readiness evaluation for launch day. They’re also keeping an eye out for potential roadblocks. An interesting one they watch for is product and feature dependencies; an errant product update could change a feature, introducing downstream risk.
Reliability
This is not about technical or infrastructure reliability. Rather, this is about communication, team structure and process. Nearly every launch requires a “pre-mortem,” which itemizes key details that anyone on the support side might need as the game kicks into gear, and ensures everything is prepared to get back up and running as quickly as possible if catastrophe strikes. But this is reactive. This pillar also enables proactive risk identification and mitigation. For example, if the team foresees a scenario with a hard spike in activity, they can institute a sign-in queue.
Operational readiness
This is part of the communication strategy. The council ensures that the support and product teams are alerted to the launch, and that best practices have been communicated ahead of time and are being followed. The launch council facilitates this communication throughout a launch period in a number of ways: organizing Google volunteers — who usually love games themselves — to be part of internal chats, monitoring customer requests, giving internal teams a heads-up around launches to shorten problem resolution time, training the customer about who to reach out to and how to open cases and more.
“When an hour of downtime costs $4 million you don’t want studios scrambling to file a support case, or figuring out who to reach out to on a particular product team,” Sy added. “We do a lot of work ahead of time to create very clear lines around how we’re going to handle those things.”
Resource planning
This is about making sure all the necessary resources are available and ready to be unleashed when necessary, if necessary, and to the appropriate scale. This applies not just to people, but to infrastructure as well. It’s easy to forget that a concept as ephemeral as “cloud” is powered by very real physical objects and places. As Electronic Arts notes, capacity requirements can make an engineer’s head spin, so it’s important to understand and address them well in advance.
Best practices for games of every size
Load testing
Speaking with VentureBeat, Lance, Oliveira and Sy were vocally unanimous about the most critical component of a successful launch: load testing. Having to simulate the activity of a real world launch can be expensive, but the knowledge gained can be worth it. For best results, developers should simulate enough activity to reveal the stress points in a game’s architecture. However, a simulation may not take into account how players actually behave. Therefore, stressing a game with real players — such as a pre-launch beta — can be helpful. But this does require marketing resources to drive interest in the beta.
Server reservations
Another critical strategy is reserving servers for launch day and understanding how concurrent user count will impact available resources on cloud (“quota”). A developer may have quotas to spin up 1,000 game servers, but that doesn’t mean that a cloud provider will have all the resources on its side available to actually spin up those servers at any given time.
“It’s about understanding the potential failure points and putting contingency plans in place, and establishing what risks the business is comfortable taking as well as who owns those decisions,” Sy says. “We say, here’s a potential risk that could be mitigated through XYZ. Our job is to surface and highlight the tradeoffs and let the studio know the pros and cons of those approaches so that they can make the right decision for their game.”
Don’t just wing it
“To quote other Google engineers, ‘Hope is not a strategy,’” Lance says. “You can either hope that your products will work and that the resources you need will be available the day you need them, or you can reach out to your Google team and know you’ve got a team of 30-plus people making sure all the boxes are checked for you, so you have confidence that Google Cloud will perform without incident come game time.”
Prepare to do it, again, and again
In today’s gaming landscape, “launch day” can be just the beginning. To keep players coming back, developers are adopting a continuous launch strategy, constantly refreshing content and experiences. “With games leaning harder into the live game service model, it’s just about the initial launch anymore,” says Richard Lee, head of game industry marketing at Google Cloud. “To drive players back into the game, developers are effectively launching again and again; such as through battle passes, content drops, and in-game events.
A blueprint for success
The gaming industry is in a constant state of evolution, and game launches are no exception. From the intricacies of live service models to the immense pressure of launch day expectations, the path to success is fraught with challenges. However, as the experiences of Google Cloud’s Game Launch Council show, these challenges are not insurmountable. By adopting a proactive approach, learning from both triumphs and setbacks and leveraging the expertise of those who have walked the path before, developers can approach the game launch landscape with confidence.
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