WHY MULTIPLE PLATFORMS?

• Gaming is becoming more diversified
• Picture of average gamer is changing and platform coverage is changing from year to year
• With the growth of gaming, there is an increase of the marketing expences
• Covering multiple platforms allows you to reach wider audience and get better value from your marketing
• For players it provides more immersive experience and allows them to play more, for longer

CHALLENGES OF MULTI-PLATFORM PRODUCTION

• Workload vs resources – you might require different skillsets and tools to make the same game work on different platforms
• You need to make sure that you choose the optimal engine and tools, that can easily be adapted for multi-platform production
• Providing the same quality experience for different user interfaces and different technologies
• Handling multiple platforms technological requirements
• Effective QA? How and when?
• You will need to address cross-platform syncing. Can player play on one platform and continue their gameplay on the other one?

SOME SUCCESSFUL EXAMPLES

Even if Angry Birds is primarily known as one of the most popular games ever made for mobile, it also had an incredibly successful console version "Angry Birds Trilogy".

X-COM

X-com is legendary game for PC, but it also did amazingly well with their console and mobile version.

DIABLO

Diablo 3 had an exceptionally well-adapted version for consoles.

MULTI-PLATFORM TEAMS

• Usually, the same team does iOS and Android versions, but if the game is published on mobile and PC, for example, development is rarely done by the same team
• Development for one platform (sometimes also called “porting”) is often completely outsourced or done by a separate team in the studio.
• Game producer has an important role in syncing between the teams, making sure that all teams are on the right track
• Useful to have a “Platform champion” within the team – someone who will know the intricacies of working on a particular platform and can help the rest of the team

WHAT TO PAY ATTENTION TO

• Platform specifics: every platform has some specific rules and those must be correctly addressed
• Platforms often change rules and preferences; make sure that you follow up and always know what are the most recent requirements
• Testing is increasingly important because failing platform requirements can have severe consequences for the product
• Multiplayer functions: chat, tournaments, invites, guilds…how will they work on multiple platforms? Implement the best, most relevant practices
• Can you play simultaneously, having the same experience on different platforms? Or those are separate play session with different experiences?
• Some game ports are completely different from the other platform versions. For example, for Angry Birds Trilogy, we developed console versions from scratch, as console players expected very different gaming experience