Launching social gaming apps is not a trivial task. But what happens when you rapidly scale from zero to six digits of players, while the (meta)gameplay complexity and content volumes you deliver rise exponentially?
At some point, you start realizing the flexibility level of your apps is not enough, though the players always demand more, and your marketing team continuously experiments and invents something new. In these circumstances, keeping an eye on each and every aspect of your pipeline is almost impossible. Focusing on a few critical areas is more productive, but also inflicts risks in the blurred area.
A customer approached us with performance issues in their mobile apps serving approximately 800K users. The growth was disruptive, and the player base inflated really quickly.
As the complexity grew, players started experiencing noticeable lags on iOS and Android at multiple gameplay points, such as mini-game transitions, spin result displays, big win pop-ups, CTA banners initiated by in-game triggers, etc. Though the issues did not seem to have a critical impact initially, analysis showcased their greater importance, leading to a serious extra player churn of 6-8 pp.
Simultaneously, the team was looking for the root causes, but it was not that obvious, and the first guess was the apps’ architecture is not optimized enough to support growing needs and changes being continuously implemented in response to player expectations on one hand and marketing strategy demand on another.
The significant factor was that the team was burdened with daily work, managing production operations.
As the complexity grew, players started experiencing noticeable lags on iOS and Android at multiple gameplay points, such as mini-game transitions, spin result displays, big win pop-ups, CTA banners initiated by in-game triggers, etc. Though the issues did not seem to have a critical impact initially, analysis showcased their greater importance, leading to a serious extra player churn of 7-8%.
The corrective measures the customer wanted to take were radical – migrating apps and rewriting them completely during the migration process.
This promised to resolve the issues while providing more flexibility and opportunities to enhance configurability and implement features that were stuck in the backlog, restricted by the legacy realization, and burdened by pressing unsolved performance problems.
It was clear that such a move would also require global adjustments. The cascade of changes was significant, leading to an estimated 18–24 months to accomplish. At the same time, the business impact was too critical to ignore the issue.
At CGS, we were delighted to undertake this porting job to assist the customer in its business-critical development program. However, upon gaining access to the source code and examining both backends and apps, our opinion changed as we recognized that there was enough room for optimizations.
Instead of spending the client’s budget on long-term migration, we proposed a 6-month optimization program:
After four months of hard work, voilà – 90% of lags are completely gone, and the remaining ones have cooled down to acceptable, non-interruptive levels. The gaming experience has become significantly more stable with smooth transitions.
Two more months were dedicated to finalizing, polishing, and conducting acceptance testing before releasing to production via gradual “silent updates” covering various locations.
What was initially a daunting two-year program was resolved 3–4 times faster and x10 times cheaper compared to the initial intention.
Custom Games Studio is a highly specialized software development contractor dedicated to casino games design. Our customers ― game developers, casino operators, platform providers, gambling startups ― engage millions of players with fair and unbiased math, high-quality graphics, sound effects, animations, and interface. With over 150 game titles released, we always put the needs and satisfaction of customers first, investing in long term win-win partnership.