Hamburg Impressions – what international Goodgamers think of the city

HamburgNot all German cities can be deemed “multicultural” or even “cosmopolitan” – but Hamburg is definitely one of them. In 2014, more than 30 percent of the people living in the harbor city had an international background, and another 15 percent carried a nationality other than German. Goodgame Studios is headquartered in the city and its numbers are also nothing to sneeze at: as in Hamburg, more than 30 percent of our colleagues come from outside Germany, and from over 60 different nations. Some even moved here for the job from places as far away as India, China, or Australia. We’ve asked them about their impressions of Hamburg and the Germans:
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United we learn – 2nd Hamburg Unity Meetup

If you’ve ever been involved in developing a mobile game, you’re surely familiar with Unity. Many current mobile games for smartphones, tablets, and more have been developed using the game engine, and we also use it to develop our games. This week, we partnered with Innogames to host Hamburg’s second Unity Meetup – even the sunny weather couldn’t keep around 100 people from enjoying an evening socializing in our café.

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Agile Coaching: How teams deliver a top performance

Companies that develop free-to-play games like we do constantly have to navigate an extremely competitive global market. To be successful in this field, you can’t be afraid to react, learn, and adapt to new situations very quickly. This is exactly what working in agile teams enables us to do. Companies that work with agile methods are always keeping an eye on what a product’s most valuable development path is, meaning that existing plans can always be reworked as needed. Most successful companies work this way, especially in the IT industry, instead of creating a plan at the beginning of the year and then realizing by the end that it should have been changed after the first month. Agile workflows are therefore put in place to make the company faster and better than the competition.

At Goodgame Studios, we are committed to promoting agility throughout the entire company. Since we have achieved tremendous growth in a very short time, and teams and processes constantly change and develop, sticking to this plan isn’t always easy. We have therefore brought in specialized agile coaches to integrate these unique working methods into the teams even more efficiently. Their goal is to create extremely powerful and highly motivated teams that stand out because of their excellent teamwork and that continue to drive forward the company’s success.

Team Agile
The agile coaches of Goodgame Studios
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No connection to the game – what’s the cause?

In our last blog, we explained how a server works. Of course, we’re sure you’re also interested what happens if it doesn’t work. If you play Goodgame Empire, for example, you’d quickly be able to see that a server isn’t available if you can’t connect to the game for a certain time. Game servers are therefore essential for online MMOs such as ours to guarantee ongoing fun for our large international community of players.

We sat down with two Goodgame experts to discuss how a server could become unavailable and how to minimize instances like these. Robert (left) manages our IT department and is in charge of server hardware. Jens (right) is the head of our game technology department, which shares the responsibility for the server software with our game developers.

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How game servers connect millions of players

Those of you who have played one of our games knows that a big part of the experience is interacting with others – whether by cooperating in alliances or by facing off in battles. Our games currently have a total of 300 million registered players, with Goodgame Empire alone boasting 80 million users at the moment.

All these people are able to interact with each other thanks to our game servers. It doesn’t matter where a player is located – as long as their computer is online, they can open Goodgame Empire in their browser. Keep reading to find out how exactly this works.

A game server is comprised of two components: one software component and one hardware component. If you compare that to a normal PC, the hardware server is the computer. The software server is the application written by the developers – for a PC, this would be the program running on it.

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5 Questions for Francis: Mission Collaboration

If you’ve ever played one of our games, perhaps you’ve noticed that they aren’t found only on our website. Goodgame Empire, Legends of Honor, and our other hits have been integrated into various online platforms around the world in order to reach a wider audience. To do this, we collaborate with thousands of partners worldwide. Our key account management department takes charge of these important partnerships for us. The department is split into two essential teams. The key account managers maintain constant communication with our partners, while their colleagues in the key account process & strategy team provide strategic support.

As a junior strategic account manager, Francis one of the team members responsible contributing to the strategy in this area. She’s been at Goodgame Studios for almost two years now. For today’s blog post, we sat down with her to ask her our beloved “5 questions”.

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