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Wednesday, 25 January 2017

Get to know your app’s users: 360-player view



Get to know your app’s users: 360-player view


Every relationship coach will tell you that one of the most important things you can do is to know your audience. As game developers we are always looking to build relationships with our players, and to do that, we need to get to know them. Luckily Blazesoft’s backend as a service (BaaS) has you covered with our 360-Degree Player View feature.

Know your players as a group, segments, and individuals

360-Degree Player View gives game developers using the Blazesoft game platform the ability to understand everything about your players including aggregate-level trends, custom segment drill-downs using a wide range of filtering options, and individual player-level information including any information gained from the user’s authentication, in-game use, statistics, and purchases, and any communications that a player has had with you or your team.






Communicate easily and strategically

Let’s say you made a new super-special weapon for your game, Monster BioShooter. You want to give your most dedicated players access to this special new feature, along with a little note of gratitude, as a thank-you for their commitment. With Blazesoft’s BaaS you can easily upload the new feature, identify loyal users, make the new feature available for that group, and also send a push or email message to them to let them know the great news.


Sometimes your users contact you directly for support, suggestions, and other communications. Instead of sifting through an email inbox, Blazesoft’s game server offers end-to-end customer service management with service tickets and status, and tracking.


 
Blasesoft’s customer management platform lets you coordinate communications and support across teams so you never have to worry about anyone falling through the cracks or getting more than one response. You provide the friendly service, Blazesoft will give you the tools to provide it easier and more reliably.

Understand how your players actually play your game

When we develop our game and its features and settings, we start with a theory about how people will play our games. Once they start actually playing, sometimes we get a very different picture. With Blazesoft’s BaaS, not only can you produce retention reports and other handy statistics, but you can also filter these results based on key segments. Find out how your most loyal players play your game, then you can figure out how to attract more of them.

Like they say, knowledge is power, and with Blazesoft you can be the most powerful game development company around.

Thanks for your interest in our Blazesoft game backend, stay tuned for more feature posts! If you would like a free live demo of the Blazesoft backend as a service interface, we encourage you to contact us to book your demo

Friday, 20 January 2017

2016 – Worldwide gaming market reaches 99.6B USD. Mobile is 37%


2016 – Worldwide gaming market reaches 99.6B USD. 
Mobile is 37% 

According to mobile data tracking firm Newzoo, in 2016 the worldwide gaming market reaches $99.6B with mobile gaming accounting for 37 percent – a proportion that has been increasing year over year, and a trend that is expected to continue.

2016 Global Games Market

Wednesday, 18 January 2017

Nevada Casinos: Department Revenues and Income 1984-2016




Nevada Casinos: Department Revenues and Income 1984-2016


Fiscal-year breakdown of Nevada casino resort revenues and income generated by Gaming, Rooms, Food, Beverage, and Other departments, since 1984 by UNLV.


For more info -  http://gaming.unlv.edu/reports/NV_dept_income.pdf 






  
Contact us for more details - [email protected] | http://www.blazesoft.ca 



*** All trademarks, names, images and logos appearing on the site are the property of their respective owners. Do not copy & use without written approval from Blazesoft legal department.


Monday, 16 January 2017

How to make a game – (Part 3). ACHIEVEMENTS – great player’s retention feature


How to make a game – (Part 3). 

ACHIEVEMENTS  – great player’s retention feature


Player retention is one of the key success factors in gaming industry. It positively affects various business KPI’s and one of them is monetization. It’s obvious that by prolonging player’s session, app’s monetization probability dramatically increases either via embedded “intensified”  components (TapJoy, AdColony, IronSource and many others) or by having actual IAP (In-App Purchase).
Player’s retention is effected by dozens different elements. One of them is “Achievements” –
The idea of Game Achievements is obvious – To reward player for Extraordinary or Unique accomplishments. ex:
a.       Unique – “First goal”, “getting first win”
b.       Extraordinary    - “Knock-out it 10 seconds”




Game Achievements as many other features should be managed from the server to allow easy setup and maintenance.
Objects to manage –
Server side -
  1. Achievement ID
  2. Achievement pictures 
  3. Achievement name
  4. Achievement description
  5. Coins / Virtual goods to assign once unlocked
  6. Set of rules when each achievement triggers
  7. Sending data (1-6) to the client


Achievements list - configurable from CRM


Client side  - 
  1. Receiving data from the server and triggering relevant UI popup components

That’s it…  J

What Blazesoft has to offer - 

Using Blazesoft game server, you can add / remove / enable / disable achievements. Configuration is performed via easy to centralized CRM system. Using same CRM system, admin can monitor assignment process for specific player, group of player (filtered by levels, geography, skills or many other parameters) or full game summary




*** All trademarks, names, images and logos appearing on the site are the property of their respective owners. Do not copy & use without written approval from Blazesoft legal department.


Friday, 13 January 2017

ATLANTIC CITY - Annual statistics for Total, Slot, Table, & Internet Win,1978-2016. Note the "Internet" line...


ATLANTIC CITY - 

Annual statistics for Total, Slot, Table, & Internet Win,1978-2016. Note the "Internet" line... 
by University of Nevada 


I have a feeling that the Internet trend will continue growing while all the rest continue to decline




Full article can be found here 

Thursday, 12 January 2017

"Rate us" internally mechanism before triggering external Store's Review/Rate screen


"Rate us" internally mechanism before triggering external Store's Review/Rate screen


Google's and Apple's reviews and rating system is a wonderful tool for for app makers to prove that their app is great. That's why, player receives those popups that ask him to rate the app. 

But what if player's gaming experience is not that good as you hope and instead of getting 5 or 4 stars,  you will receive 2 or 1 ? 



Direct impact is actually pretty serious. You will require to get dozens 4-5 star just to fix the ranking "damage" of 1 bad (1-2 star) review. 

So what is the best practice for that ? 

Instead of sending the player directly to the AppStore, consider having a preliminary, internal popup with similar 5 star graphics and a "Rate Us" button. 


Assuming player provided good rank (4/5) in our internal Rate Us system, we can assume that he will do the same in the Store and only then Store Review screen will trigger. 

In case the player provides bad internal feedback, he will not be forwarded. Optionally, 2nd Rate Us window can ask to leave a textual feedback. 


Result - 
1. High reviews on Apple stores & Google Play  
2. Gathering feedback from unsatisfied players, analyze and get things better

About Blazesoft's internal Rating mechanism - 
All functionality described above can be easily achieved easily using Blazesoft's gaming backend platform. 
  1. Definition of "Good" / "Bad" reviews 
  2. Review screen - yes / no 
  3. Gathering reviews in main players database 
  4. Rates analysis reports 
  5. Various easy to define triggers that can be defined by admin without development. Sample scenarios:
    1. When bad internal review received (Start 1 or 2), to send email to product manager with player's details 
    2. When bad internal review received (Start 1 or 2), send to player push notification or email with specific message

Contact Blazesoft for more details - [email protected] 


What Blazesoft has to offer - 

Blazesoft  developed A-Z slot backend. Internal App Rating is one of it's features. All functionality described above can be easily achieved using Blazesoft's gaming backend platform
  1. Definition of "Good" / "Bad" reviews 
  2. Review screen - yes / no 
  3. Gathering reviews in main players database 
  4. Rates analysis reports 
  5. Various easy to define triggers that can be defined by admin without development. Sample scenarios:
    1. When bad internal review received (Start 1 or 2), to send email to product manager with player's details 
    2. When bad internal review received (Start 1 or 2), send to player push notification or email with specific message





Contact us for more details - [email protected]



*** All trademarks, names, images and logos appearing on the site are the property of their respective owners. Do not copy & use without written approval from Blazesoft legal department.









Wednesday, 11 January 2017

Jobs @BLAZESOFT


We are constantly Looking for passionate professionals to work on our backend platform and mobile solutions.

UNITY, Microsoft Full-stack, Angular, HTML 5 pro's - drop us your CV.

http://blazesoft.ca/jobs.php




Tuesday, 10 January 2017

Parse.com is out. Blazesoft is great alternative


The Parse hosted service will be retired on January 28, 2017

Parse.com, is shutting down on January 28, 2017. 

Top reasons why to migrate to Blazesoft game backend as a service  - 

A recent entrant of the BaaS scene, BlazeSoft has come out of the gates with a solid, offering. While offering all of the features you would expect from a quality BaaS provider, such as -  
  • Game hosting
  • App store integration
  • User authentication
  • Level management
  • Achievements management 
  • Leaderboards
  • Social perks - invite friends, send money, share
  • various login mechanisms - Facebook, tweeter, Google+, Email, Guest 
  • Rate us mechanism - internal and integrated with stores 
  • Billing 
  • 360 view on player
  • Reports - Retention, monetization, lead management and more 
  • Built-in integration to marketing tools - MailChimp / OneSignal and others 
  • Built-in integration with Analytics tools 
  • Slot Engine, including slot machines configuration, %RTP calculation, PAR sheets
  • Sports Betting Engine, including pre-match, in-game, stats, markets, odds 
  • and many other exciting features :)
BlazeSoft stands out for their powerful analytics and engines for casino, slot and sports games and scalable infrastructure hosted on AZURE cloud.

BlazeSoft’s 360 degree player view lets you track individual players or key segments including biographical, social, and in-game data, and to pinpoint communications based on player behavior or attributes. If you’re developing a casino or slot game, definitely check out BlazeSoft’s BaaS as they allow full control of factors such as volatility, RTP percent, PAR sheets, and more using an intuitive CRM with real time update.


BlazeSoft’s pricing is based on need, and right now they’re offering a free live demo and  trial, along with some other perks. 

Contact us for more details - [email protected] 
http://www.blazesoft.ca 


Saturday, 7 January 2017

Making amazing slot machine game in less than 3 months - study case 1


There are dozens social slot games out there. Most of them have fantastic UI. Great symbols, animations and sound effects. 

But when you review store ratings and read the comments, you notice that most of the slot machines have severe %RTP (Return to Player) and Hit Frequency issues and unplanned Volatility ratio. 

The reason is that most of the games you play out there can't make scientific calculations of Slot machine RTP, Hit Frequency and other important parameters. 


To build your own "Slotomania" like game, to provide great experience and to be able to control your game economy, the following components should be configured properly and if needed you should be able to make quick adjustments. 

Pay Line - The line on the slot window. 


Number of Pay Lines - Slot machines may have several pay lines. Can be 3 lines, 5 lines or even 100 or more on video slots  games. 

Pay Table Area in the Slot Machine that shows the payouts for each winning scenario. 
The pay table will also tell you if there are other types of payouts.



Bonus Symbol - Combination of bonus symbols (as defined in Pay table) triggers  a "mini-game"  in a slot machine game that allows the player to win additional goods. 




Scatter Symbol - Combination of X Scatter symbols initiates "Free Spins". Spins that generate additional profit to the player without paying for those spins. 



Wild Symbol - Acts as a joker symbol to make up a winning combination on the pay line. Can be also used for other purposes, based on the "game play" of specific machine. 



Reels - Rotating barrels (or any other graphical elements) on which the symbols appear. 
In modern slot machines, you can find different number of reels - two, three, four, five.
Reels can have different number of rows. Usually it's from one to 5. Most popular is three. 
The most common are three and five. Statistically, more reels, it's harder to get jackpot. 
Besides the visible symbols, you should be able to configure total amount of symbols for each reel.
For example, in reel 1 you can have 30 symbols in total, while only 3 are visible. and in reel 2 and 3, you will have 50 symbols  



Based on the terms described above, you should be able to calculate your - 

RTP -  Return to Player (RTP) is the term casinos / social casino games use to describe the percentage of what slot machine will pay back to players over time. For example, if you make a hundred $1 bets on a machine on which the RTP is 90%, statistically, you might expect to get back about $90 in wins.

Hit Frequency -  How often a machine will stop on a winning combination. For example, if a machine has a hit frequency of 10%, it means that statistically, the machine will stop on a winning combination about 10% of the time. It’s worth noting that many slots allow players to bet on multiple lines on each spin. The result is that, on a single spin, a player could get one or more winning combinations, along with numerous losing combinations. To the player, it may feel as though he is winning more often, but as always, over time the losing combinations will far outnumber the winning ones.

Volatility - The ratio of size versus frequency of major wins in a slot game.


So, what's your options as a social slots game developer - 

1. Client side Slots logic development - You can plan and code all mentioned above in your app as client-side development. 

Cons - 
1.  Client side development requires to "re-publish" the app every time you make changes. On some stores it's a matter of several days until your change is public 
2. Client side development is dangerous - you are always in risk that your dev guys will harm existing functionality during change process 
3. Not having these values as server side parameters - makes that process super inefficient. sometimes, you need to make frequent changes (same day or week) and it's just impossible. 
4. Security / Security / Security - having all your logic as "client-side", makes your app vulnerable to hackers, "copycats". For example - any app that resides on Android store, can be easily downloaded as APK. 

Pro's - 
I can't really think of any, besides some tactical advantage of making something quicker (and very inefficient) and having "fun" of managing crazy excel files with formulas and machine details. 


OR...


2. Server side Slots logic development - having your slot related logic securely managed on server side 

I can't really think about Con's in this scenario. Client (mobile / web / Facebook or any other platform) do not control the outcome of the spin. it comes as a value for each spin based on all the parameters mentioned above (paytable , RTP, .....) 

Security aspects are fully covered because the app is useless without having connection with company's backend.  And there are various methods to make sure that only "legit"  app will make the connection  - SSL tunnel, SSL Pinning, handshake mechanisms and more..







What Blazesoft has to offer - 

Blazesoft  developed A-Z slot backend. You can easily manage all parameters mentioned above from your admin screen and with 1 click calculation expected %RTP.
And it takes one more click to publish your changes to your players. 

Blazesoft develops API that allows new or existing gaming companies to create new machines via provided SDK and to receive the output values to your Slot Machine based on predefined configuration. 
All the day to day management is done via advanced CRM system. 



Contact Blazesoft for more details: [email protected] 




*** All trademarks, names, images and logos appearing on the site are the property of their respective owners. Do not copy & use without written approval from Blazesoft legal department.




Thursday, 5 January 2017

Blazesoft completed full integration with BetRadar and SportRadar – leading supplier of sports betting data and digital content









BetRadar and SportRadar provide full coverage for worldwide sports events. Including pre-match information – statistics, players, odds, results in last X games and LIVE data – score, live odds, commentaries and much more (Betradar coverage list).

Blazesoft fully integrated sports data to its backend, so creating sports betting website ore mobile app is not a complex project anymore.  Companies that used to spend many month on integration, performance tuning, security aspects and testing can launch their sports app in less than a month.

Example of social betting games (BETA's) currently developed on Blazesoft's backend -

and various other projects in development stages under NDA.

Dimitry Behak, Blazesoft CTO - Using Blazesoft game backend, you can enable / disable sports types, leagues, markets and odds and transmit pre-match and live data using various open socket protocols. All configurations and performance reports available via the most advanced CRM system available on the market today – Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Launching of your sports app becomes a matter of weeks and not months. 













*** All trademarks, names, images and logos appearing on the site are the property of their respective owners. Do not copy & use without written approval from Blazesoft legal department.

In search of user authentication: Social and email login in mobile games

As mobile game developers, of course we love all of our players. But we know that we save a little bit extra love for those players who are also authenticated users.

Almost all games ask users to sign in before they play the game, and most allow the options to sign in using a social media connection (Facebook Connect, Google+, Twitter), Email login, or as a guest. You want as many to sign up as anything other than “guest” so that you can communicate with them and better understand their behavior.

The Blazesoft backend as a service solution gives game development companies the ability to offer a wide range of authentication methods, built in to your overall backend infrastructure. This means that not only can you offer these authentication methods without worrying about coding them in manually, but you can also tie authentication to in-game actions, like bonuses and awards.


Once you have the data from your authenticated user, using Blazesoft’s game server, their information is automatically stored in your backend CRM.


There you have it. Blazesoft’s back end as a service helps you offer any method of authentication, helps you promote user authentication, and stores the information you collect so you can learn more about your users, all built in to an intuitive CRM.

Thanks for your interest in our Blazesoft game hosting solution, stay tuned for more feature posts! If you would like a free live demo of the Blazesoft backend as a service interface, we encourage you to contact us to book your demo.



Wednesday, 4 January 2017

How do mobile games get made?

You do mobile app development. You have an idea for a game – a shooter where you’re a monster, shooting other monsters, but all of your weapons are made out of plants. You call it Monster BioShooter and you’re ready for it to be the best game on the market.

There are a few things that you, just like every game developer, need to figure out. How do players progress through the game? What is the Level / XP configuration? Will you have Achievements, Tournaments, and Rate Us mechanisms? What about multiplayer? Where will you host your game, and how will you submit it to the major game stores (Google Play / Apple Store)?

Then there’s the question of your game’s virtual economy. What kinds of “points” or “money” are in the game, how do players earn them, and what are they good for (game economy)? How many of these do your players start with, and how many do they need to move onto another level of your game? These aspects need to be considered and implemented. And then, importantly, they need to be tested, monitored, and adjusted.

Every game needs to solve these aspects, and the ones that do it best are the most fun for players and the most successful for game development companies. That’s where Blazesoft comes in.

Blazesoft’s gaming backend as a service represents the unity of your mobile games with a powerful CRM that makes it easy to not only implement, but also iteratively improve, all of these aspects of your game – without making your players download an update every time you tweak a setting. And no dipping back into the code.



The challenge for any game developer is to make your game hard enough, but not too hard, to grab and keep the attention of your players. You need to reward your players with incentives they want (like more coins, or a bigger plant gun) for actions you want to encourage (like becoming an authenticated user through email or social media login – more on that in tomorrow’s blog post). Our backend as a service lets you create and manage features that your players can unlock and offer bonus points to keep encouraging them. And it all updates in real time. No recoding or republishing means hours saved.

As a smart game inventor, you know that your game needs to get a little harder as your players progress through your game. Maybe they need to kill ten monsters to get passed the first level, twenty monsters for third, forty for third, and so on. But the sweet-spot settings are just a guess until you have data – and Blazesoft provides plenty of data. We’ll talk more about our 360-degree player view and retention reports on the blog next week, but for now, here is a look at how easy is to tinker with your level settings once you have some data to drive your decision-making:



Thanks for your interest in our Blazesoft game server, stay tuned for more feature posts! If you would like a free live demo of the Blazesoft game hosting, we encourage you to contact us to book your demo.