Kicking off the evening session of the Live Ops Landscape track at Pocket Gamer Connects Digital #1, Amazon Web Services Game Tech's technical evangelist Chris Finch and developer enablement manager Tabitha Graves on how AWS can be used for live ops.

They started by pointing out that even though live ops can make a huge impact in big games like Fortnite, it can also be important for smaller developers and games as it keeps players coming back for new content.

"For this to work, you really need to have live ops built into your game from day one," noted Finch, adding that you should be collecting data and informing your design decisions from the earliest players that you have in your game.

Building communities

The pair then outlined how AWS is able to help with community building, with live events powered by Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, economy monitoring from Amazon Neptune, and social campaigns with Amazon Comprehend.

As for measuring and responding to player behaviour, using tools like Amazon Personalize for activity analysis, Amazon SageMaker for responding to threats, and Amazon Kinesis for Live Procedural Engagements.

PG Connects Digital #1 is the best of our Pocket Gamer Connects conference in an online form, with an entire week of talks, meetings, and pitch events taking place from April 6th to the 10th. You can read up on all the tracks taking place through the week here.