Fred Gill
Antidote Gamers
Fred has worked in the video games industry for over 40 years. His journey began at the age of 17 when he sold his first game. After graduating from Birmingham University, Fred founded video game developer Attention To Detail (ATD) with four fellow graduates. In 2004, Fred joined Electronic Arts' North West Studio in Warrington in 2004 as a Technical Director, helping to ship “Battlefield: Modern Combat” in just 11 months. Fred moved to Swordfish Studios in 2006, returning to EA to join a small division called EA Partners in 2008. At EAP, he worked with independent studios to bring their game to market with EA as the publisher. Titles include: Crysis 2, Syndicate, Crysis 3, A Way Out, Unravel, Unravel 2, Titanfall and Titanfall 2. EA acquired Titanfall developers, Respawn Entertainment in 2017, and Fred joined as Studio Technical Director in 2018, becoming Head of Technology in 2020, and VP in 2022. Fred helped to ship "Jedi: Fallen Order" and "Jedi: Survivor", and was Franchise TD for "Apex Legends" through to Season #18. Fred semi-retired in August 2023 to create games for himself by himself, and with no expectation that they will be commercially successful.
Fred Gill is speaking at the following session/s
Tech Learnings from Five Years of Apex Legends
Apex Legends was a closely guarded secret within EA and launched unannounced on Feb 4th 2019. Within a week over 25M players had played, and over 2M concurrently; within a month over 50M players had played Apex Legends. This talk covers just over 5 years of Apex Legends development from April 2018 to August 2023 (10 months before launch to Season #18). How did the team apply all the learnings from Titanfall and Titanfall2 to ensure a smooth launch of a free game with no 'technical test' or closed beta or open beta? How and why did we make choices around which tech, gameplay and backend systems were critical versus nice-to-have for launch, i.e. anti-cheat, player reporting, crash reporting, esports support, etc? How did we decide build-vs-buy? From the euphoria and "launch phew" to "we have to ship four large season updates reliably each year" - how tech priorities changed over the first 18 seasons and why, and how the engine, build and test infrastructure, backend and engineering team evolved to support those priorities, and the difficulties the team overcame.
Session Takeaway
The challenges and learnings the Apex tech team faced are very relevant to games planning a live service:
- Stability - how to add reliability and make your game stable while scaling to high volumes (with high volatility)
- Build vs Buy - understand how to evaluate dispassionately and find the right solution for now and tomorrow (and 5 years from now)
- Longevity - what team structure and shape are needed to support a long-term live service game - and how this differs from a "typical" team
- Team Health – what works and what to avoid to maximise team efficacy, performance, and well-being
- Resilience - things go wrong post-launch for every game - we'll cover how to minimise & overcome them
Session speakers
