It won’t be news to many out there that freemium titles live and die on the support the developer affords the game post launch.

But what is the ideal way of deciding areas to improve and how do you keep the schedule efficient?

For GREE’s Development Manager Hiroyuki Haga, the most important thing in social games is “having a lot of iterations as fast as possible”, and to ensure these iterations and updates are successful you’ll need to both apply scientific method and ensure all staff can contribute.

Haga described GREE’s operation as working on a pattern of ‘Check. Plan. Do’.

Check what’s working and what isn’t, Plan a way of improving the area, and the implement the update.

Where it works

This is performed simultaneously with other improvement ideas in a system Haga describes as ‘parallelised planning’ in order to speed up the delivery of iterations.

To avoid potentially damaging overlaps, the company creates internal Wikis for their engineers and other staff for each game, updated and maintained by the staff.

These both store any suggestions and results of updates, as well as act as a central point for any staff to contribute ideas to iterate from.

Haga pointed to the 2004 title Fishing Star as a good example of how sharing out information on the development and results of the project.

The wealth of 8 years worth information on how well different ideas and updates fared in the game means that newcomers to the company can brought up to date quicker and easier.