As technology advances, the business model for building online games is exploding.
Statitsa writes that in September 2021, Valve Corp.’s Steam Platform, home to popular games such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, peaked at over 7.6 million concurrent users per game, the highest since November 2020.
While these platforms are popular with PC gamers, millions of other users are playing on console-based platforms. Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStation Network are among the top examples in this platform category.
Simultaneously, South Korean game developer Smilegate launched the STOVE online gaming platform earlier this year. But this is not just a fight for users; it must also involve game developers and publisher partners who will provide games.
Online gaming platform: how to attract developers?
Other gaming platforms are taking similar steps, according to platform consultants and industry analysts.
The analytics and tooling model is one of the most common ways to engage developers with gaming platforms, including DevOps solutions.
Gaming Platform Specialists specialize in working with and serving leading developers to generate interest in the platform from a wider audience of developers.
The best examples of engaging developers or publishers are involving large developers by giving them preferential treatment, using that game to attract users, and then using that attraction to attract a wider group of game publishers.
Some specialists pointed to Google’s developer program, which offers developers user analytics and allows them to create events and quests for both real-time multiplayer games and turn-based multiplayer games. For example, developers making games for Android devices can use the Google Event Service to collect player data that Google says is stored on Google servers for game analytics. Event data can shed light on how often players reach a certain level in a game. This understanding can help the developer determine whether to change the difficulty of the game.
Managed services versus custom development
Forbes writes that the latest developments in open source offerings are in the area of managed services. These new services provide customers with even more opportunities to benefit from the open-source community.
Microsoft has two world-class Game Stack solutions that support the back end of your game – Azure PlayFab and Microsoft Azure. Azure PlayFab is an abstraction of general gaming solutions with online functionality, including managed multiplayer, LiveOps, analytics services, and more.
On the other hand, Azure is a broader set of tools containing over a hundred different services that make it easy to build complex systems by outsourcing complexity and operational responsibilities to the platform. It supports various operating systems, languages, tools, and services that you may already be using, allowing you to run any workload. Azure helps address the challenges of cloud-native development and scalability.
Many analysts point out that Steam has established a community-driven developer program, Steamworks. It allows developers to integrate Steam multiplayer and achievement aspects into their game. Developers can leverage Steam’s multiplayer technology for matchmaking – a grouping of players with similar abilities – and take advantage of the platform’s statistics programming interface and achievements to maintain player statistics.
What you need to do is to divide the spheres of influence
When you need to meet the market’s needs, it is necessary to add new features constantly. For example, Smilegate manages the development and operations of the platform separately but has a CTO for mobile operations who oversees both.
The development of the platform and the management of work are carried out separately but are closely related and work for the platform’s success as a whole.
Some companies developing UX / UI design services, such as https://mlsdev.com/services/ui-ux-design, also build their work according to this scheme.
