zGames has been founded with the idea to offer one-stop shop capabilities to video game companies and publishers. If you require from-scratch game development services — from target audience analysis, to concept design, game prototyping, multiplayer game server architecture design, development, soft-launching, as well as regular feature updates and KPI-based gameplay tune-up; or existing title enhancement, we can help.

Game Design
Game Design
Games on Unity
Games on Unity
Game Art
Game Art

Games with a Future:
Extended Lifetime, Steady ROI

We help game producers and publishers shift from a less effective ‘one-time title’ tactics to a more productive game development approach — Game as a Service (GaaS). One-time titles are usually single player games, which due to their level-based architecture and uncomplicated gameplay have more limited opportunities for continuous extension and monetization. The GaaS model based games are multiplayer titles with a complex game design architecture, which enables easy content scale-up and continuous ROI.

ONE-TIME TITLES
  • Heightened community attention (e.g. a cartoon release followed by an immediate co-titled game support)
  • Level-based content, which is difficult to scale up
  • Short-term audience involvement
  • Investment often exceeds payback
  • Suits puzzle, trivia, word, music, board games, etc.
GAAS TITLES
  • Strong community engagement through multiplayer capabilities and regular content updates (e.g. new features, upgrades, event-based enhancements, etc.)
  • Activity-based architecture, which enables content scalability
  • Longer lifespan, focused on user retention and return
  • Long-term financial economies
  • Suits slot, RPG, strategy, simulation, card games, etc.
 

Audience Analysis

Sample audience analysis report

Sample audience analysis report for developing a Mahjong game

We understand the key driver behind a new game development effort — getting the best bang for the buck invested. Our first step would be starting with a thorough target audience analysis. We look closely at the audience’s demographics, core interests, geographic distribution, among others. It helps ensure the game addresses the finest fads and pastime activities of the target gaming community — games, books, movies, music bands, and more. Figuring out what makes your target audience tick secures game scalability and vitality.

Value of Analytics

Let’s suppose you plan to release a game with a plot developing around a medieval theme. You target Canada. The audience analysis shows that the players who are likely to get hooked by this game are fond of the Game of Thrones series. That means you may want to consider introducing dragon characters into the game or design your characters or settings so that they evoke associations with the series.

The target audience is your testing benchmark for validating everything you may want to check with relation to the game. This way you’ll minimize the extent of irrelevant results and keep focus on your key game theme.

App Store Submission

An app submission may seem quite a trivial matter. However, it takes time and effort to prepare the submission pack so that the app has the chance to land in the “editor’s pick” category. At zGames, we’ve been employing the following roadmap for submitting an app to the store:

  • Select a relevant category
  • Come up with the right name for the game. If it’s a compound name, it’ll affect the search results. That’s why it should perform two tasks: appeal to the target audience, evoking the associations we aim for, and be search-friendly
  • Prepare a compelling short promo text, extended description, and gameplay images. They’ll help entice the users into downloading the game
  • Put together a short gameplay video to give the potential users a feel of the game With iOS 11 now out, when submitting to iTunes, you may upload up to three videos for your game
  • Generate a list of most relevant keywords for the Keyword field in the submission form
  • Map in-app purchases and their descriptions to secure an uninterrupted acquisition process during the playtime
  • Employ A/B service (e.g. Splitmetrics) to identify a submission pack with a higher conversion prospects — game icon, screenshots, description, etc.

We understand that creating a new video game is just the beginning of a major game launching process. Our mobile game developers will take care of this critical step to make sure your game grabs the community’s attention already at the app store level.

Community

At zGames we start building a community around the game-to-be already at the development stage. We’ll tease the audience with art, game design process, gameplay twists, and visual story previews. This way we ensure the newbie will get a warm welcome and a good chance for a word spread. Our favorite platforms are Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. We know how to grow the audience by targeting our promo stack across multiple social media networks. We’ll use the feedback to fine-tune the game’s graphics and gameplay, among others.

Audience Target

According to Facebook, the potential target audience for your Game of Thrones themed title are young people aged 25 – 34 years

Assassin’s Creed game

Your target audience currently likes the Assassin’s Creed game. That means you may want to introduce a blood-chilling twist to your game app

Future-proof Architecture

Based on how your game performs live over the next three weeks since the launch, you’ll be able to screen your core audience. Out of the initial daily user numbers, about 10% of the game fans are likely to demonstrate their purchasing loyalty. To make sure a game has a stronger staying power for your core audience, we see regular content updates as a viable long-term strategy for stirring up players’ interest. Depending on the game genre, these could be new powers and skills, competitions, additional game characters, clans, etc. We approach the game design so that the app’s architecture allows scaling up the content.

GaaS-based strategy game architecture

Schematic view of GaaS-based strategy game architecture. The gameplay core remains intact, whereas the content changes as long as new activities are added

Architecture-wise, GaaS-based games are designed to withstand the lows in the players’ interest thanks to regular content enhancements. This helps the game last for years and generate a steady ROI.

Game Server Design:
Continuous Multiplayer Game Flow

It’s critical for multiplayer games to support continuous game flow so that nothing distracts the players from immersing into the gaming process. When putting together a game with real-time interaction capabilities, we take special care of developing a sustainable server side:

  • To achieve minimal latency in client-server communication, it’s important to transmit data within shortest time possible. To do this, our game server development specialists employ proven data serialization techniques to compress and transmit data faster (e.g. protobuf, JSON).
  • To keep such player data as user profile, events history, trophies and achievements protected, we use special communication protocols (e.g. HTTPS, wss), special authorization tokens, and encryption. To address security, we build the client-server game architecture so that the logic is executed entirely on the server. With the major functionality shifted to the backend, the user doesn’t stand a chance to cheat anywhere in the game as the client operates data sent directly by the server.
  • We create the server side so that it supports scalability — possibility to increase or decrease the capacity of virtual machines on the server based on the dynamic load (the number of simultaneous user sessions). Our go-to service for the task is AWS’s ELB. Devising a well-thought game server architecture makes your title fast-performing, secure, and accessible. This enables continuous game flow. Together with an engaging game plot and elaborated art, it fosters player engagement and retention.

Post-release Server Support

Once the game has seen the light of the day, we look after its performance by monitoring the client-server operation. At the client side, we track the app’s crash rate and errors occurred to address the weak spots along with the data transmission latency, which should be kept low. We also make sure the server remains accessible 24x7, the machine load is well-balanced, and the request processing speed is high.

Game Tune-up

Since the launch and onwards, we keep track of how the audience responds to the game in real time and whether any game elements require fine-tuning or fixing. For this, we employ dedicated analytics tools. They harbor information on crash occurrences, most frequent interactions, app launches, daily user fluctuations, user retention rate, and more. For zGames, analytics provides valuable insight into the game’s ‘health state’ and an opportunity to tune-up the game on a finer level. This could affect the game flow, character set, in-game activities, incentives, as well as app’s technical performance.

Full-Cycle Game Development

At zGames, we know how to deliver games that boast strong staying power, stir up buzz in the gaming community, and generate profit. Our mobile game development team is ready to extend support at every stage of a full cycle GaaS game development:

 

Featured Games

Get Your Game On!

Should you have a new game idea or a need to help your in-house mobile game developers to speed up the release of the next big thing in the gaming industry, zGames is the solution. Feel free to contact us to start discussing your ideas and make them go live!

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