Archer: Danger Phone powered by Beamable

We are proud to work with East Side Games on the support and release of Archer: Danger Phone! The game leverages many key capabilities of Beamable.

About Archer: Danger Phone

ARCHER: DANGER PHONE takes place inside the world of the hit animated series from FX: Archer. Across 11 television seasons, the show follows the misadventures of a dysfunctional intelligence agency and the crazy employees that work there. The game picks up during the collapse of the world economy, and the only way to survive will be to lead this crazy team in a cryptocurrency operation that’s just crazy enough to save the world.

ARCHER: DANGER PHONE is a narrative-driven idle game where you’ll build generator rooms, collect your favorite characters, level them up, and send them on lucrative missions to fund your operations, and take advantage of their get-rich-quick schemes to stay afloat.

Archer on Beamable

ARCHER: DANGER PHONE is a collaboration between Beamable and East Side Games who have worked for the last year to bring the game to life. ESG has focused on the game design, idle systems, and content that they’ve pioneered with their other hits TRAILER PARK BOYS: GREASY MONEY, IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY: THE GANG GOES MOBILE, and THE GOLDBERGS: BACK TO THE 80S.

Beamable provides critical live game features and support in the areas of:

1. Identity
2. Commerce
3. Events
4. Content
5. Managed hosting

Identity with Beamable

ARCHER: DANGER PHONE leverages Beamable’s login, authentication, and player analytics. Beamable is set up to offer a standard email and password option, along with Facebook ID or Apple ID.

For the player analytics, all instrumentation runs into an Athena data store where a Tableau connection allows for the creation of dashboards and reporting.

ESG uses Beamable identity and authentication APIs to construct a player web portal so that players can log in with their game account on the website and receive player support.

Commerce with Beamable

ARCHER: DANGER PHONE’s key revenue comes from in-app purchases (IAPs) and ad views.

ESG leverages Beamable’s Limited Time Offer (LTO) system to provide a collection of segmented merchandising.

The game uses Loot Rolls in a unique way, leveraging a special Beamable feature where ESG’s game servers can talk to the Beamable Commerce API and insert proprietary game logic on what players receive.

The game also leverages Beamable’s system for purchase limits and pricing schedules so player purchases can scale based on timers and frequency.

Finally, ARCHER: DANGER PHONE makes heavy use of the Beamable Real Money Transaction (RMT) and virtual currency purchase systems to integrate efficiently with the iOS and Android app stores leveraging SKU Mapping to accommodate flexible offer pricing.

Events with Beamable

A big part of East Side Games’ Idle system design is using multiple Limited Time Events (LTEs) each week to drive player engagement. These events use the Beamable Events system so that they can be scheduled, replayed, include multiple phase changes, and accommodate different reward schemes.

Rewards can be provided at different event phases, at defined thresholds or milestones of progression, and by rank at the end of an event or phase.

Finally, the game’s LTEs also leverage sharded/partitioned leaderboards so players participate in smaller groups of 200 which allows for more fierce competition and a shot for more players to achieve the highly coveted rank rewards.

Content with Beamable

One of the most powerful features of Beamable is content management, ensuring that the game teams can create and publish large amounts of changes to the game content without requiring a client update (and laborious app store approval process).

Almost everything in the game is defined as content: Announcements, emails to players, stores, store listings, SKUs, events, rewards, characters, etc.

The Beamable Content flow allows ESG to author the content, and have it be tested and validated in lower environments, and then seamlessly promoted to the production environment.

Fully managed hosting with Beamable

Everything we do runs on Amazon Web Services in a fully containerized environment. All the services mentioned above scale independently and automatically on EC2. When ARCHER: DANGER PHONE runs an event, we can see a 6X increase in player traffic. Beamable has to be able to handle that ramp up in scale, provisioning the correct resources, and scaling them back when the event load and concurrent players drop.

Example of an ARCHER: DANGER PHONE event start in soft launch

Hear from the Beamable Devs!

Go behind the scenes with some of the engineers that helped bring Archer to life on top of Beamable. Join the discuss over on our YouTube channel.

Conclusion

This is a very exciting project for Beamable. ARCHER: DANGER PHONE is a huge FX IP with fans all over the world. It is exciting to see such a large game trusting Beamable to deliver advanced live game features at this scale. A special congratulations to the East Side Games team and everything that we’ve accomplished together!

If you think Beamable can help your game project, please contact us to discuss opportunities!