Three Reasons Why Cloud-centric Companies Should be Watching Game Developers

In less than 24 hours, my team of fearless log management afficionados and Hoover our Beaver mascot will be roaming the halls of Moscone Center for the Game Developers Conference. If you work for another type of cloud-centric business, you may think that GDC isn’t for you. But we can all learn a lot from game developers, and here are three reasons why you should care about GDC:

1. Game companies live and die by player (customer) experience
   Online games have been at the forefront of data-driven optimization for some time because competition is ruthless and survival is directly tied to player experience. Give your players a boring experience; they won’t come back. Lose their purchased goods; they won’t come back.

2. Slow play = no play
   Deliver sluggish app performance, even for a minute, and you lose. Players won’t come back and LTV takes a big hit. While the users of most cloud-based apps are a bit more forgiving than game players, a bad experience can put your subscription revenue at risk and torpedo future editions and sequels. So a great user experience should be a foundational approach for all customer-centric companies.

3. DevOps is closer to the customer than Marketing
   While Marketing focuses on acquiring customers for future revenue, their activities have a fractional percentage of impact on current customers. The efforts that DevOps makes to deliver a quality customer experience has a virtually 100% impact on both current and future revenue. Pound-for-pound, a dollar invested into protecting your player experience will generate more revenue than a dollar invested in acquiring a new customer.

Loggly has hundreds of customers in gaming for a reason, they focus on improving player experience and outsource non core competencies and ‘undifferentiated heavy lifting’. At GDC, you can attend an amazing session with Albert Ho of Rumble Entertainment that showcases how his company maximizes revenue using insight provided from their log files, and see why you should be doing the same.

I hope that I’ll see some non-gamers too, as the innovations of game developers are too valuable to not be integrated across any cloud-centric company that is focused on improving customer experience.

Until GDC!

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