When Video Games Become Services: Applying ITIL to Modern Gaming

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How ITIL helps gaming studios deliver reliable services, manage change and turn player feedback into better experiences.

November 3, 2026

Yurguen Penaranda Thomas

When Video Games Become Services: Applying ITIL to Modern Gaming

Introduction

The video game industry has undergone significant evolution in recent years. In its early days, games were a digital product that came on a disc or cartridge and rarely received updates, so this physical item was generally considered the final product. With the mass adoption of the internet and the always-connected world we live in today, this has changed.

Digital titles (available on consoles, PCs, and mobile devices) have become even more popular than physical titles. In addition, games now offer other features such as online play, downloadable content (DLC), season passes, and microtransactions. This shift in the industry has caused a video game to no longer be viewed as a complete product acquired through the purchase of a disc or cartridge, but rather as an ongoing digital service that requires stability, support, and continual improvement.

A Modern Video Game Is a Service

With this paradigm shift, where games are no longer simply digital products, the concept of Games as a Service (GaaS) emerged. GaaS is a model in which a video game is not sold as a closed and finished product, but rather as a platform in constant evolution that receives periodic updates, events, and continuous content. Some examples of video games operating under the GaaS model include: Fortnite, Genshin Impact, EA Sports FC, Roblox, League of Legends, and Call of Duty. There are also services such as Xbox Game Pass, which offers a model similar to Netflix or Spotify, where the user does not acquire ownership of the title (physical or digital), but instead pays a recurring subscription to gain temporary access to a large catalog of video games.

The GaaS model introduces new benefits for both game publishers and consumers. Publishers receive continuous revenue through subscriptions, season passes, the purchase of characters, additional scenarios, upgrades, and cosmetic items within the game. For users, the value of this type of gaming model lies in continuously receiving new content and having the opportunity to participate in seasonal events, which helps maintain ongoing interest in the game, something that is more difficult to achieve in a traditional-format game.

In a traditional video game, the relationship between the publisher and the player could end at the moment of purchase. In a GaaS video game, the relationship continues for months or even years, forcing companies to operate the game as an active digital service.

The GaaS approach makes the adoption of ITIL good practices even more relevant. In the traditional approach, where video games are treated as digital products, ITIL is primarily relevant during Product Discovery, Design, Build, and Delivery activities. However, in the GaaS model, ITIL becomes relevant throughout the entire digital service lifecycle, including Operations and Support activities.

Applying ITIL Management Practices to GaaS

Below are some examples of how ITIL Management Practices can be applied to video games operating under the GaaS model.

Monitoring and Incident Management: How to Prevent the Game from “Going Down”

Like any other digital service, GaaS games depend on real-time connectivity to the publisher’s infrastructure in order to operate. Therefore, if any component of this infrastructure fails (servers, databases, communication components, etc.), issues may arise such as authentication problems, failures when making in-game purchases, difficulties accessing multiplayer matches, or problems participating in temporary events. These situations negatively impact the player experience.

Monitoring and Event Management should systematically observe the infrastructure hosting the title in order to trigger a proactive and timely response that prevents issues from affecting users. On the other hand, if these actions are not sufficient and an outage still occurs, the Incident Management practice should orchestrate the technical and administrative activities required to restore the service as quickly as possible, provide timely communication to users, record the incident, and subsequently analyze what happened.

Release Management, Deployment Management, and Change Enablement: The Danger of Rushed Updates

Video games operating under the GaaS model receive new content continuously, including changes involving missions, characters, outfits, maps, weapons, mechanics, and temporary events. However, these new versions involve the risks associated with moving code from a controlled environment into production.

The Change Enablement practice does not seek to bureaucratize software development and releases. Instead, it aims to proactively identify and address risks that could materialize during deployment. To achieve this, the practice seeks to answer key questions such as: What are we going to change? What impact could it have? How will we validate the change? How will we roll back if something goes wrong?

Video game players are generally a highly demanding audience, so an update that does not work properly and negatively affects the gaming experience can result in thousands of negative reviews, damaging the reputation of the company behind the game. Therefore, adopting these practices is a way to avoid such impacts caused by issues during the release of new content.

Security Management: Protecting the Privacy of Player Data

In GaaS environments, users are required to create an account where all of their game progress and acquired items are stored. These accounts generally contain personal data. In addition, because these games allow in-game purchases, it is very common for users to register payment information within their accounts (such as debit and credit cards).

For this reason, companies that develop these games must implement strict security controls. If security is breached and unauthorized access is obtained to user accounts, not only will access be gained to game progress, but more importantly, access may also be gained to personal information and even registered payment details.

The Relevance of Other ITIL Management Practices in the GaaS Industry

The practices described above represent only a few examples of how ITIL can contribute to the management of video games operating under the GaaS model. Other practices such as Problem Management, Capacity and Performance Management, Availability Management, and Supplier Management can also provide significant value depending on the characteristics of the service and the complexity of the infrastructure that supports it.

Listening to the Player as a Continual Improvement Practice

One of the main differences between GaaS titles and traditional video games is the delivery of content that is constantly evolving, including seasonal events (similar to television series seasons). This helps maintain a highly active user community that generates enormous amounts of information. This information comes from bug reports, social media comments, forum discussions, reviews, surveys, and usage metrics generated by the gaming platforms themselves.

Because of this, the challenge is not generating information but rather knowing how to leverage it as an input for improving the title.

One of ITIL’s guiding principles is "Progress iteratively with feedback." When applying this principle to the GaaS video game industry, it means that the game development company should analyze the feedback generated through this data and translate it into improvements implemented in future releases. In this way, future releases will incorporate improvements that provide value to players.

To facilitate the identification of these improvement opportunities, the organization can rely on the activities of the ITIL Continual Improvement Model, which provides a logical sequence of activities that help identify and implement improvements aligned with the organization’s vision.

Player Experience Is the New Service Experience

ITIL currently reflects value co-creation as the primary objective of managing digital products and services, and it also includes the concept of User Experience (UX) as one of the four dimensions of quality in this type of industry. This perspective aligns very well with GaaS.

Users of these games do not evaluate only graphics, story, and gameplay (Utility). They also evaluate server stability, response times, ease of account recovery, new features and content introduced through updates, service reliability, and the security of their data (Warranty).

When these latter dimensions fail (Warranty), the overall experience deteriorates, even if the video game is technically excellent (Utility).

Conclusion

As games increasingly become permanent digital services, ITIL practices cease to be an element used exclusively during the design, build, and testing phases and instead become a tool that can help studios throughout the entire game delivery lifecycle, enabling them to operate with greater stability, reduce risks, learn faster, and provide better experiences to their communities.

Both ITIL and GaaS video games ultimately seek the same goal: creating consistent experiences that generate value for people.

Today, players do not consume only video games; they consume digital services. Therefore, success no longer depends solely on developing a great gaming experience, but also on keeping it available, secure, stable, and continuously evolving. In this context, many of the practices promoted by ITIL become a natural ally for organizations seeking to provide sustainable, high-value experiences to their player communities.

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