Designers design inside of contexts: the business model, the distribution channel, the platform, the intended audience. Sometimes, these change, and the change profoundly affects how we create games that players like to play and pay for. Few changes have been as profound as the move from games as fire-and-forget products to services played for months if not years. Raph Koster, VP of Creative Design at Playdom, has been working exclusively in games-as-services for over fifteen years, and in this talk he'll present to you the top ten lessons you need to learn for this environment: What does "service" really mean? What mechanics always work? Why and how do you measure things differently? And what, in the end, makes the games fundamentally different?
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