The most anticipated thing for publishers like us is the announcement of a patch – new content for an online game. Anyone can easily surmise that in this business, content is king. A game without regular AND meaningfull content will slowly decline as players become bored and begin to think of “looking for greener pastures” and try out other new games (especially those in the beta stage).

I’d like to share with you a behind-the-scenes look on the factors that makes a patch a success and how we prepare to make the most out of it.

More after the jump…

First, in order to successfuly market a patch or episode, we have to determine if it’s a major or minor one. Major patches are those with jaw-dropping content – for example, new jobs and new game features (Juno and Transcendent jobs for pRO are considered Major patches). While minor patches are those that add just some new stuff. More often these are new (sometimes boring) maps, new armors, new monsters. There’s simply no “world-rocking gameplay changes”. It’s good to have at least 2 major patches and 2 minor ones every year… at least one every quarter.

Once a patch is announced by the developer, our Product Development team will start asking for the game features and documentation about the patch. Sometimes there are no english documents since we work with Korean developers. If this is the case, we still have to transcribe that (which adds to developement days). Also, the ProdDev guys will start making the timelines for the project, noting the following things - testing, bug resolution, final client printing, cd printing, making the posters, designing the site, making marketing plans and then roll out to the cafes. All of these should be in paper and each department has to committ to the dates. If one domino falls, the rest will follow.

And in this business, “Murphy’s Law” (when something can go wrong, it will) follows us everyday. A lot of factors can cause delays – tech problems, incompatibility, a major bug or feature that’s not working (Skill? what skill???? it’s not here damnit!). Teams have to go back to the documents and update stuff, which adds to more mandays and more delays.

Some players (especially when they post in the forums) think that everything is simple child’s play and that a patch is something that we just install (put a crack) and everything goes well. Oh, how wish it were that simple. But there are a LOT of small details which all the departments have to attend to. That’s why everyone should work like a well-oiled machine. Otherwise, the entire project will suffer.

Now that you know what goes into every patch, we call on all players to bear with us and understand that we want to produce a good patch – one without errors or bugs. And that’s one of the reasons why we try to stick to the process as much as we can…

We’re not doing this for us… we’re doing this for YOU.