Social Features in Gaming

Seasoned game developers know that live games are some of the most difficult to develop. Live games depend on complex, extensive infrastructure to power them and require a lot of time and hard work to develop.

Your live game infrastructure generally needs to support four things:

• Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS)
• Item economy
• Content management
• Social gameplay features

Your game’s backend allows players to play together, communicate with one another, compare items, exchange items, interact with one another and with items, cooperate, and coordinate their actions. An item economy allows players to acquire new objects as well as buy, sell, shop, gift, and possibly trade using both game items and currencies. These actions, called content, are critical for game playability, but live games add an additional layer of complexity because all of these actions need to be managed in real-time.

In video-game design, developing each element individually is both time-consuming and resource-burning. Leveraging pre-existing elements and a fully managed infrastructure can save you both time and money by ensuring you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. By utilizing a BaaS option, it can be possible to save as much as 20% of the costs of developing your game.

One option is Beamable. With it, you can dramatically decrease the amount of time it takes to go live and reduce the amount of money, people-power, and other resources it takes to get you there.

Why Social Features Are Important

Integrating social features into your game is important because:

• Activity feeds allow the players to feel connected to their peers in real-time.
• In-game chats allow players to express themselves while keeping up to date on what other players are currently doing.
• They help create a sense of community, with competitive play encouraging players to return frequently, increasing retention, the number of daily active users, and the amount of revenue they generate for you over time.
• Social features streamline the viral marketability of your game, which improves its recovery rate.
• The interactive community social features foster help develop a compelling human element, which works in tandem with beautiful graphics and a frictionless gaming experience to create a solid and enjoyable game.

How Beamable Helps You Make Live Games Faster

Beamable can help reduce the amount of time and money your team needs to invest in developing the infrastructure for your live game and integrates tightly with the workflow you are already familiar with as a Unity developer.

Instead of spending countless hours coding the apparatuses necessary for gamers to communicate with each other from scratch, Beamable’s toolbox enables developers to add this key functionality through drag and drop prefabs. This reduces the amount of time and effort required to add social features, freeing developers up for other tasks while reducing overall development time.

Through Beamable’s Unity SDK, developers can simplify live game server programming with Beamable’s C# microservices. Since both the client and server backend are displayed using one language, you and your team don’t need to spend time learning other languages.

Beamable also offers a user-friendly portal that allows you to manage your game’s content easily. This portal comes with a Google Sheets plug-in that allows you to render all of your content via spreadsheets, allowing you to easily deploy your content in your server environment.

Beamable Is Simplifying The Mobile Game Development Experience

The social elements involved with a game’s architecture and item economy, as well as the content management, are critical for designing a good, revenue-generating game. However, developing these elements from scratch is both extremely difficult and needlessly time-consuming.

Beamable helps you to develop games faster while reducing costs by allowing you to simplify your infrastructure by allowing you to build on existing elements. By combining these revolutionary features, you can build or expand upon your loyal fanbase, achieve your development goals, and increase your revenue. For more information, or to get started adding social features to your game, please visit our website.