Agenda
Choosing Our Battles: A History of Retreat Decisions
Atsushi Ueno (Division Manager, Creative Division, Lasengle Inc.)
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Track:
Production & Team Leadership, Programming
Audience Level:
Advanced
Format:
Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: Advanced
This session walks through the decisions often required of the operation team of a live service game title. Drawing from the experience of the decade-long operation of Fate/Grand Order, the presentation details what the team abandoned and what it gained across three instances: engine and infrastructure updates, device support, and anti-datamining measures for shipped assets. These three retreat decisions reveal the exact same underlying question: "how much do we make the player pay?" The session highlights how retreating breeds new judgment calls, and shares the design principles for the guardrails the team placed to manage new judgment calls.
Takeaway
Attendees learn to categorize changes into forced and discretionary, and gain decision-making criteria to decide on the allocation of their discretionary budget. Attendees discover that guardrails for new judgment calls belong on silent failures, such as which assets ship in which release, where a wrong call surfaces only after the fact.
Intended Audience
This session is designed for lead engineers and technical directors responsible for technical decisions in active titles, and producers who allocate technical investments. Experience in taking responsibility for decisions in a shipped and active product is preferred.