A robust backend infrastructure is the engine that powers all top-grossing mobile games. It enables engaging gameplay experiences and handles essential functions such as user authentication, multiplayer capabilities, LiveOps, leaderboards, cloud storage, and much more. However, there are numerous mobile game backend providers (also called backend-as-a-service) in the market. By the end of this article, you’ll have an understanding of who they are, and how they differ from each other. Should you build or buy your backend tech? Most of the companies you see in the top-grossing gaming charts use bespoke backend technology that they’ve built in-house. This allows for customization and total control of the backend tech stack, but it requires hiring a team of engineers – a time-intensive and costly process. The vast majority of game developers, however, do not have the time, human resources, or money to...

You need to wear a lot of different hats when you’re making a game – especially if you’re doing it solo. One day, you’re a foley artist. Next, you’re a marketer. Even as a programmer or designer, it’s useful to understand how these elements come together, so you can make sure everything ties into your theme. To help you along the way, we gathered all the free resources you can use to learn about the different areas of game development. Before you use the resources, we encourage you to make sure the assets are royalty-free. Game design resources Game design is all about the choices you make. The rules and mechanics that bring your idea to life. From small decisions, like whether to use coyote time in your platformer, to big decisions, like the main theme of the game. Game...

When it comes to game and mobile app analytics, there are hundreds of metrics numbers to track. There are metrics like downloads, sessions, or DAUs on one end of the spectrum. These numbers are relatively straightforward and measure concrete actions. More complicated metrics include user churn or Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU). These are less intuitive to interpret and might raise more questions than answers. While there’s no one-size-fits-all policy for game analytics, some useful metrics can help shed light on how you can improve your mobile game. To better understand how these metrics relate to each other and provide comprehensive insights into your game’s performance, we divide them into three main categories: engagement metrics, monetization metrics, and advertising metrics. Each category focuses on different aspects of player behavior, revenue generation, and marketing effectiveness, allowing you to optimize various...

Protecting yourself isn’t necessarily hard. Not if you’re aware of the techniques hackers use. So, with data breaches becoming increasingly common in the news, we thought we’d give a little advice about how to protect yourself.

Data is the key to success in the ever-evolving landscape of game development. Explore this guide to transform your data into insights using our turn-key data solutions. What’s inside? Our comprehensive guide explores cost-saving strategies and real-world applications for advanced use cases. Learn how to seamlessly integrate data sources, unlock detailed player insights with Player Warehouse, access real-time data with Raw Export, and ensure data privacy compliance.

Building a community for your games is crucial to getting new players and keeping them loyal. And Discord is now the number one place to go. But how can you get the most out of this social media platform? Here’s our guide.

Learn how to create an adaptable tracking plan, enabling you to unlock richer insights and maximize the value of your data within GameAnalytics.

Learn how successful publishers evaluate hundreds of games per month, to find the next hit game.

The goal of marketing your mobile game? Drive awareness and increase installs. It sounds simple when you narrow it down to that. But there’s a world of tools and techniques you’ll need to research to get it done right. The mobile games industry is a vast one, filled with thousands of games. And making yours stand out is just half the battle. So to give you a fighting chance, we’re rounded up the best articles and resources for you to get started. Let’s dig in. First off, understand your audience Before you even consider sorting your marketing strategy, you need to know who you’re selling to. Sure, you made the game – so you should have an idea of who your audience is. But you’ll need to understand exactly what your players’ motivations are and why they’ll want to play...

We’ve been getting our research on, and looking into the metrics behind successful hyper-casual games. You can read our full findings here. But just in case you’re too busy for that, we’ve put together this post to give you the need-to-knows. What’s the research about? Using data from our network of games, we’ve broken down the top KPIs (key performance indicators – basically measurements of performance) that developers of hyper-casual games should be aiming for, by sub-genre. You can use these to benchmark your own games against some of the best games, and learn just whereabouts you sit within the industry. But before we do, here’s an idea of how much data we’re handling in GameIntel. Our network stats for Benchmarks+ All-time integrated games: 140k+ Games tagged with sub-genres: 150K+ Cross-title monthly players: 2b+ Average monthly sessions: 20b+ Network stats...

Making a game is one thing. An impressive, creative and wonderful thing. But a game really comes to life when it is released to players. Being played is a game’s reason to be – and the vital step in starting to generate revenues that let your studio grow, or allow you to begin work on your next title. As such, getting the release of a game right is about as important as it gets. And in today’s connected era where titles so commonly exist as live, maintained entities, releasing is now about a lot more than making it available for sale. With all that in mind, we’ve built up a checklist of all the things you need to consider before releasing your games. It’s a list that considers quality, performance, marketing, monetisation and more. Bear in mind that many of...

This article was originally written by OneSignal. You can it out on their blog here.  Before OneSignal, our company was a mobile game studio called Hiptic Games. Our experiences at Hiptic helped us see the need for a simpler, more reliable, and more powerful messaging platform to improve user engagement. In many ways, we built OneSignal with game developers in mind. The top 25% of mobile games have an average Day 28 retention of just 4% and the cost of acquiring a user that eventually makes a purchase is over $40 USD. Yet, the vast majority of mobile games still don’t implement basic best practices for improving user engagement and retention through messaging. In this guide, we’ll walk through the four main user-engagement channels that every mobile game studio may want to leverage — Push Notifications, In-App Messaging, Email, and SMS — and...