What are requirements of a game development studio?
We believe the gaming industry is currently in a state of transition. This transition is from Single Player to Multiplayer Games, while Social Mechanics are a key indicator of how important it is to have games where players can collaborate as well as compete. Farmville like games were the earliest collaborative game play experiences, and a Zynga Poker or Clash of Clans (both huge grossers in terms of ARPDAU).
However, Social and multiplayer games require fairly extensive data design, database storage and efficient run-time session data management from a central game data server that is usually custom-designed for each game. Such games are also quite complex and expensive to design. Additionally, the compression of product shelf-life today, means that the game design and development time and costs need to be compressed too. A number of tools (Unity3D, GameSalad, Corona) have been built to reduce the front-end design time and cost by creating a “Write-Once and Translate to native code” capability for multiple platforms. However these tools provide no support for building a common game data server model.
The potential scale of success of the game also tends to be unpredictable and unexpected, making budgeting for game development quite difficult, and the provisioning of scalable infrastructure for social and multiplayer games even more difficult.
