Beamable Helps Developers Unlock the Power of Their Games

"PubNub is a highly reliable technology and a partner always engaging with us to determine new ways to grow together. Cloud Infrastructure is a business-critical component of operations, and PubNub has been the kind of partner we can rely on over many years for stability and uptime. Not worrying about PubNub has allowed us to reclaim our time and focus on differentiators." - Ali El Rhermoul, Co-Founder & CTO at Beamable

Meet Beamable

Beamable is a live game server platform for developers looking to build live game features and workflows into their Unity or Unreal game project. With Beamable, game developers can rapidly add social, commerce, and content management to their games. 

Beamable was a game developer at first, turning popular entertainment brands like Star Trek and Game of Thrones into hugely successful games. Having built several successful games, they knew the challenges, so they launched a new business to help other developers eliminate the difficult creation of server-based game technology so creators can stay focused on a game’s differentiators.

The Challenge

Building a successful game is difficult. Not only do developers need to create an engaging story people will love, but they also have to code the software and build the infrastructure for many individual components. 

Game servers require complicated features, tooling, and performance characteristics. However, ensuring that the tools are intuitive, the technology is easy to implement, and it performs at scale is challenging.

In 2015, when they saw their platform growing quicker than their previous pub/sub solution could handle, Beamable began looking for a Unity-compatible pub/sub system to push information from server to client. But with their sights set high and developers painfully aware of the difficulties in building rich gaming experiences, they knew they needed a robust Unity SDK, infrastructure they could afford to forget about, and flexible pricing that supported their growth without worrying about financial penalties.

Having used PubNub’s chat capabilities in their previous games, the choice was clear when the time came to add more services to the Beamable offering.

"We originally adopted PubNub when we were making first-party games,” said Ali El Rhermoul, Co-Founder & CTO at Beamable, “Over time, as we built and shipped the Beamable platform, PubNub was able to adapt to our need to have potentially hundreds or thousands of games using a common backbone.”

Enabling Game Developers & Unlocking Creativity

Today, Beamable uses PubNub to provide the vital infrastructure for all server-to-client messaging, in other words, to synchronize the state between their backend and end-user clients in real time. This can include common applications like chat or more behind-the-scenes functionality like notifying a client if a new content update is available or a specific player has received a new message, item, or offer.

Now that Beamable partners with PubNub, they can provide a smooth experience, a highly reactive feeling app, and the ability to build novel experiences for players worldwide. Most importantly, they’re confident in the reliability of PubNub’s 99.999% SLA. “We load-tested PubNub to a very high load and have seen millions of players across various devices successfully use our products. PubNub rarely, if ever, was the source of issues,” said El Rhermoul.

He continues, “[We appreciate that PubNub is a] highly reliable technology and a partner always engaging with us to determine new ways to grow together. Cloud Infrastructure is a business-critical component of operations, and PubNub has been the kind of partner we can rely on over many years for stability and uptime. Not worrying about PubNub has allowed us to reclaim our time and focus on differentiators.”

While quantifying eight years of benefits is difficult for El Rhermoul and his team, they know that with PubNub, the development time saved when building and operating the technology, the features they can offer in their platform, and the success of the games of their customers are major indicators of a successful partnership that continues to provide value.

“PubNub continues to roll out new and interesting features that open new possibilities. Furthermore, as PubNub continues to travel up the value chain, it will provide turn-key solutions beyond a low-level infrastructure component. This will allow us to deliver novel features to our customers (game developers) and their players,” he concludes.

In PubNub, Beamable found a partner that allows them to provide their customers with a robust solution to build highly engaging and interactive games and the confidence to support huge audiences across various devices and operating systems. If you want to learn more about how PubNub can help you build reliable, real-time experiences, sign up for a free account.