For almost the entire summer and well into the fall, I was developing a large-scale feature for the game I work on. Our game has featured an in-game store since it launched, allowing players to buy cosmetic items for themselves. Other games feature similar in-game stores but they also allow players to buy items for their friends as gifts. For the last several months, I assisted in developing a gifting feature for our store.
Specifically, I wrote all the back-end logic in our game so that we could communicate to the servers that handle our economy system that a player wanted to gift their friend an item or items. I’ve been a game developer for a long time and the schedule that initially was presented to me on when they wanted all of this to be done was aggressive to say the least. The desired date for this feature to be launched was today actually and I’m pleased to say, we did release this feature today. The required effort to get this done was, however, monumental, not just from me but from several teams over the last few months. There were lots of meetings, last second discoveries, many questions, and a plethora of moving parts and dependencies.
I’ve been told and I’m not sure if this is true but we are the first major title at the company to have a gifting feature in their store and that many other teams are looking to see how all this works out for us in the coming weeks and months. Being a pioneer for anything has both pros and cons but it is kinda cool to be the first ones to do something.
I’m not sure how much more money this will make for us but if it is an appreciable amount, I hope they remember that when they decide what my bonus will be next year. If you’re interested in reading more about this gifting feature, click here.