Practical Game Design

Managing content treadmill

Teams working on live games often have to resort to adding new content in order to maintain their current audience engaged. We sometimes call such situations as being stuck on a content treadmill—if you stop putting out new content, then you run the risk of losing your players.

There are many ways of addressing such situations and it's often up to the whole team to come up with solutions of the streamlining production process or lowering the reliance on new content. Still, this is a practical book and we aim to provide some practical ideas, such as:

1. Remixing: Content does not need to be entirely new to still feel fresh. Mirrored tracks in racing games are a great example. Another one would be using old bosses as ...