An outline for GameDevOps

Let’s coin a term

This post is the first in an ongoing series of blog posts on what I’m calling GameDevOps. A combination of GameDev and DevOps, it’s really clever I know /s. The idea is simple. DevOps is at this point old news in the software development world. The adoption of DevOps is now widespread and it has led to different offshoot flavors like GitOps and DevSecOps. There are even newer buzzwords like Platform Engineering following in its footsteps. Despite this fact, the games industry seems to be lagging behind. Holding on to older ways of working with the mantra of “You just can’t compare GameDev to regular software development.” While, I agree with the sentiment I do not agree with the conclusion. Instead of holding on to “what has worked in the past” we should be looking to steal as much as we can from outside of our industry and make it our own. So that is what I want to do here in this series of blog posts.

The call is coming from inside the house!

If you search online for “game development DevOps” you’ll find several links and pages talking on the subject. Most of which will talk about how to use DevOps in backend teams or to help with game builds. It only serves to highlight the ironic reality that many game studios already use DevOps. They just do not use it to facilitate actual game development. Instead, it is relegated to supporting teams and functions. Which I can understand on one hand but it is also just an absolute waste.

It’s not like I’m the first to think of this

There are some resources out there by game developers describing how they use DevOps throughout their entire studio. My favorite of which is the GDC talk by Butterscotch Shenanigans’ Seth Coster. This a great start and it is a source of inspiration for the blog. I remember the feeling of relief after watching it the first time. I was starting to feel like I was losing my mind trying to talk to other game developers about using DevOps. I want to go one step further and really zoom in on those idiosyncrasies that makes game development so unique. That and, it usually helps to have a name for the thing you’re championing.

What’s next?

I have plenty of ideas for how to proceed with fleshing out the concept of GameDevOps. The next post will most likely be a breakdown of some high-level concepts and several places it diverges for vanilla DevOps. I don’t have a comment section on this blog just yet; I’m not expecting many people to read this anytime soon. But if you have any ideas or input, feel free to use the contact section of the website. I would love to hear from you.