When developing a live service game, is there a standard for how far into the future your team plans in terms of content like say a preseason and first season worth of content outlined. If there’s a story/plot attached to your game, is there a planned “ending” that you deviate from based on how successful the game is?

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Most in-development live service games plan ahead for one year's worth of post-launch content from the jump. Typically this is planned to follow a quarterly schedule, so that we have sufficient development time to build a sizable amount of new content for players. The development focus is not evenly distributed either - the closest update is always much more concrete than three updates in the future because the closest update is launching much sooner.

For those established franchises that have a regular refresh cycle (Annual sports games, Call of Duty, Just Dance, Lego titles, Assassin's Creed, etc.), we plan out quarterly content updates until the launch of the next game in the franchise. Because of the strength of the franchise, we can expect there to be a community of players that will continue to play until the cycle refreshes.

When it comes to things like narrative, things are also generally planned out over the next year. The usual plan is gradual tension building over each update, with clearly defined major story beats, culminating in some kind of climax that should launch at the end of the year's planned content. Then the specific details of the characters and the story beats get fleshed out as we build them.

We usually have a pretty good idea of how well the game was received within the first few weeks of launch, while we're still executing the one-year-plan. If things are proceeding to plan (or better), we keep on keeping on by sticking to the plan. If they aren't, we quickly assess. How far away from target are we? Can we get back on target? If we can't get back on target, chances are good we'll push out the finished first update and maybe the second update will be the last. If this happens, the announcement for end of updates will likely go out after the second update and the end of service will be announced a few months later. If things are really bad, the plug probably gets pulled immediately to cut losses.

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