The Art of LiveOps

The Art of LiveOps podcast provides an in-depth perspective on modern game development and shares stories behind some of the most successful LiveOps strategies. Join our hosts, Crystin Cox and James Gwertzman, as they interview a variety of game development professionals in the industry about their personal experiences creating and operating LiveOps games.

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The Art of LiveOps

Welcome to Season 3 of the Art of LiveOps!

April 22, 2022 • Season 3 • Episode 0

0:00 | 2:28

Crystin Cox and James Gwertzman are back again for Season 3 of the Art of LiveOps podcast. Listen in to see what’s in store for this season. New episodes will be posted every Tuesday starting April 26th, 2022.

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0:03

I can't believe it's been another year, Crystin. I know. I'm excited to be back. I'm ready to talk to some more people about LiveOps. It's been a little while. It has been a while. And we're face to face, like in a studio which has been crazy. I know. It's been even longer for that. We're actually able to be together now, which is great. I think we're going to have some really fun conversations going for this season. I'm Crystin Cox. I'm the Director of Live Operations for Xbox Game Studios Publishing. I've got 18 years of experience in the industry, pretty much spent my whole time as a game developer working on large scale LiveOps games, things like MMOs like "Maple Story" and "Guild Wars 2". Hi, I'm James Gwertzman. I'm currently a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, focusing on the game industry. Previously, I was a co-founder and CEO of PlayFab, which focused on building game services for game studios. I also ran the gaming vertical for Microsoft, which is how I met Crystin. And I'm really excited for this third season of the podcast, as we continue expanding the group of people we talk to from the industry. If you haven't heard all of the rest of the episodes, season one and two are out there. Some of them are probably worth a relisten to. I mean things have... A lot has happened. Do we have a theme this season? It sounds like we're starting to expand a little bit. You know, we're going outside of strict, narrow LiveOps to looking a little bit broader into sort of game design and the broader context of gaming. Yeah, I think that that follows along with the theme of what's been happening in the industry, which is LiveOps is kind of everywhere now. Yeah. And we're starting to see it expand out and a lot of experimentation happening: non-gaming applications; really interesting things inside game economies with things like NFTs; or potentially what play-to-earn might look like for the future. So there's a lot of really interesting things happening that very much touch on the history of LiveOps and the kind of experiences that LiveOps practitioners have been having for years. But we're starting to see that really bleed out into a lot of other industries. I also feel like we're starting to get to sort of almost like Gen 2 LiveOps games because when we started this podcast, LiveOps is still a niche topic. I really think nowadays every designer I talked to knows they need to be operating their game. Absolutely. So I think we'll explore all of that this season. We have some really interesting guests lined up. You know, I think we'll talk to a wide range of people. Some of them will be classic LiveOps practitioners who are, you know, running live games for years, and some of them will be people who are doing some things that are a little different. Yeah.