Presentation: Tweet"Zero to ten million daily users in four weeks: sustainable speed is king"

A successful social game can achieve very rapid growth to large scale during a short period of time, with extreme cases (CityVille, The Sims Social, Gardens of Time) achieving millions of daily active users and tens of millions of monthly active users within a few weeks of launch. In this presentation I will argue that achieving the fastest possible sustainable speed of development is the most important technical factor in launching and operating a successful social game, or indeed any large-scale web business -- whether at startup phase, during rapid growth, or established and mature. I will propose some techniques, both technical and non-technical, to optimize rapid development at large scale. Finally, I will describe some of the typical architecture, processes, and tools used in the development of both the transactional and analytical systems of social games.