Development realities of 'games as a service' revealed at GDC

The notion of operating "games as a service" is gaining traction in the industry, but the nitty-gritty details of pulling it off from a mobile game maker's perspective can often seem frustratingly vague. If you're attending the 2015 Game Developers Conference in March, you probably already know how to make a great game. But how do you develop and deliver weekly content to your players, and how do you then take the analytics data your players give you and use it effectively to iterate on your core design? What if you're a small studio, or an indie team working out of your apartments? MunkyFun (League of War, pictured) LiveOps specialist Bethany Frank will show you how at GDC 2015, where -- in a Production talk titled "LiveOps: A Process in the Making" -- she'll draw on her experiences building MunkyFun's LiveOps team from scratch to provide practical advice on how you can become a Live Ops-first studio capable of processing analytics and player behavior data to produce the best game for your audience. It's a talk worth attending for anyone with a mind to optimize their studio's production pipeline, and conference organizers look forward to announcing more GDC 2015 sessions covering a diverse array of game industry issues in the months ahead. All of the announced talks are now available in the online GDC 2015 Session Scheduler, where you can begin to build your conference week and later export it to the up-to-the-minute GDC Mobile App, coming soon. In the meantime, don't miss your chance to save money by registering early -- the deadline to register for passes at a discounted rate is January 21, 2015. GDC 2015 itself will take place March 2-6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information on GDC 2015, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS. Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech.