TL;DR
Regions that were previously inaccessible to game developers are now opening up. Expanding your game’s player pool leads to stronger communities, better matchmaking, and increased in-game revenue. But those improvements are only possible when gamers from around the world can achieve low-latency gaming experiences. Subspace’s platform addresses this need by providing enjoyable, low-latency experiences for players around the world.
Estimated read time: 9 minutes
Game publishers invest a lot of time and money producing groundbreaking games, fighting increasing player acquisition costs, working to engage their communities, and using analytics to improve their ROI. They pay attention to every detail of the revenue model, making it all seem perfectly optimized.
Even with those optimizations, there are more significant opportunities to be seized, such as expanding its playable regions. When games aren’t running on Subspace’s platform, they’re leaving money on the table.
Remember that market game publishers thought they couldn't reach? It's finally opened.
For too long, players in many areas of the globe have been left out due to unplayable ping times. Decreasing ping times in those regions prevents negative press and customer support which frees up developers to focus on game improvement.
Reaching more players leads to positive ROI growth. As more players successfully get online and have an enjoyable experience with playable ping times, game revenue will grow past what was previously possible. With more satisfied players comes an increase in in-game purchases, superior matchmaking times and pools, and a happier game community.
With the rise of free-to-play games, it is hard to imagine the game industry reaching more than $300 billion by 2025 without in-game purchases. By 2023, in-game purchases are projected to account for 77% of game revenue. The future of game revenue lies in-game purchases, and the best way to capitalize on this trend is by increasing player count and satisfaction levels.
Subspace’s platform isn’t just nailing incredible improvements in latency. It’s also opening up entirely new markets and areas (like MENA) through ISP partnerships, creating a fast lane for game publishers and their expanding playable markets.
Expanding Reach and Reducing Churn for Greater ROI
Expanding markets goes beyond creating access for unreached regions; it requires an accompanying expansion of playable connections. Game publishers will increase potential ROI simply by expanding reach as more players participate. But, without optimizing network quality to provide a playable link, players will churn rapidly.
As researchers reported in Predicting Player Churn In the Wild, a “substantial part of the work on retention and by extension churn in games stems from network science, where the goal has been to understand the impact of network conditions on quality of service and player satisfaction.”
Network quality plays a significant role in player churn. Accessing previously unavailable regions is only valuable when game publishers can provide a playable experience, which requires a quality network connection.
When latency is improved, games become more enjoyable, leading to an increase in engagement. In regions previously plagued by 100+ ms ping times, a reduction in latency means games become playable.
Better gameplay leads to exponential growth in engagement. Increased time spent in-game leads to improved matchmaking and larger communities, fueling the revenue-generation cycle.
This engagement increases with every millisecond of improvement.
The Subspace advantage provides a fast lane for game traffic that reduces player churn, leading to an increase in both players and player retention.
Churn Reduction is Paramount for Mobile Game Success
Mobile games experience the highest risk of churn.
94% of mobile gamers churn within 28 days of downloading an app. According to a mobile gaming industry analysis report by GameAnalytics, less than 15% of mobile games retain 35% of players after day one.
In fact, mobile games have the steepest retention curve of any type of app—but the good news is that if a user hasn’t churned by day 28, the graph stabilizes. Top-performing mobile games typically have a 6.5% retention rate by day 28. One of the most considerable challenges with free-to-play mobile games is that once they are trialled, they can be deleted in favor of the hundreds of other free-to-play games available.
Churn reduction is paramount for mobile games due to the heightened competition for players on the platform. If mobile game publishers can provide a game experience that is enjoyable and free from lag interference, players will stick around.
Better Game Play Reduces Customer Support Needs
Players are quick to complain and vocalize dissatisfaction with games whenever there is a problem, be it a glitch or unplayable lag.
Game developers at Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds, recognized that customer support needs to be a part of the game experience. They have built-in customer support service into the game platform that is designed to match Angry Birds’ overall feel. Although this is great for keeping angry players connected to the game and providing a direct and private line for complaints, players will remain vocal online across social media and forums when dissatisfied with a game experience.
The quick reaction from players puts game publishers on the defensive and into damage control mode, which gets expensive fast!
In December 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 was released after much anticipation from players of the franchise. Sadly, after the game was released on console devices, players complained that it was full of bugs and glitches and was prone to crashing.
Even after releasing a statement that players who purchased digital copies of the game would be refunded as CD PROJEKT RED worked on fixes and updates, players were still unhappy and vocalized their dissatisfaction.
Due to game development’s technical nature, problems can stem from the hardware, software, or network conditions that exist outside of game publishers’ control. By leveraging Subspace’s platform and reducing the focus on how network conditions can impact or limit a game’s success, additional, invaluable focus can be allocated to the optimization of software and hardware functionality.
Decrease In Complaint Tickets For Greater ROI
Once on Subspace, developers will have a better sense of how to remedy a problem. They can confidently rule out network conditions and focus on hardware and software bug identification and remediation.
Instead of dealing with backlash online stemming from issues that exist outside of their control, game developers can trust Subspace to secure a playable network connection. Fewer support tickets and complaints mean fewer support costs and more time to focus on other improvement areas.
Even incremental decreases in that support liability lead to dramatically increased revenue potential.
In addition to dealing with fewer complaint tickets and less time troubleshooting, players will stop blasting your game on social media, start to stream gameplay, and engage with their followers online. All of these features will increase your game’s popularity and attract more players.
Among Us was released in June 2018, exclusive to mobile games with local multiplayer ability. The publisher’s decision to run with local multiplayer capability was their first mistake. In the age of Steam and Discord, players are seldom playing next to each other, opting instead to remain at home and engage online. In its first two years post-release, Among Us only achieved 30-50 concurrent users.
But the game’s development team, Inner Sloth, continued to push forward, continually releasing updates and joining Steam with a PC version in November 2018. But it wasn’t until 2020 when Among Us blew up, thanks to the 27th most popular Twitch streamer, Chance “Sodapoppin” Morris. Shortly after, steamers like Shroud, Ninja, Tfue, J9, Skadoodle joined the bandwagon, and their audiences loved it.
Due to the popularity Among Us gained through Twitch and the growing community of streamers joining in, audience members began to get in on the action. Today, Among Us has achieved 1.5 million peak concurrent players! At just $5 to download on Stream, Inner Sloth has the Twitch community to thank for their ROI increase.
Subspace Provides Secure Round Trip Low Latency Connections
When you control the network, you can build better games and create premium experiences for players. Subspace’s platform is determined to lock down every millisecond of game traffic. With built-in, no-latency DDoS protection, capacity reservation, last-mile repair, and mobile network correction paired with its weather-mapping ability and a network exclusive to game traffic, Subspace ensures a smooth and highly secure player experience.
Subspace doesn’t just move the traffic faster and more reliably than current networks, it provides increased visibility and insight into the system’s failure points. It’s a holistic platform built especially for real-time needs and solving players’ and publishers’ pains.
On a faster, more reliable network with the lowest latency, game publishers gain the advantage of larger playable pools, a better community experience, a diverse ecosystem, and an overall better gameplay experience. All of this, in turn, increases customer satisfaction.
Happy customers play longer and buy more.
Making Jordan a Playable Region
Talk is cheap unless backed by experience and external sources. Subspace’s platform has succeeded in Jordan by partnering with Orange to improve gamers’ regional network connection. The latency problems previously experienced in the country negatively impacted game success in the region and game publishers’ perception.
Players perceived the publishers as the problem, unaware that the network connection was at fault for high-latency experiences. Blaming publishers negatively reflects on the game itself and turns away players from the game. When complaints occur on social media, other players take it as a warning and choose not to waste their time playing the game.
Solving the network connection problem protects game publishers from backlash and prevents their games from being blacklisted —resulting in more players and higher ROI.
Multiple companies in Jordan were struggling to see improvements and a decrease in latency. Before Subspace, Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) servers were not optimized for latency. Gamers had avoided playing these games beforehand.
Increased Access To Players
Most players in Jordan were struggling to get good connectivity. They were occasionally able to play with European players, but never with other players in Jordan.
Across MENA, multiple players and companies are still struggling to see that improvement. Subspace claims a 70-75% improvement on network conditions—and those results were proven in Jordan with latency improvements between 72-75%. Orange named Subspace as the world’s best internet for players after seeing notable improvements in quality of experience (QoE) and quality of service (QoS).
With such a dramatic decrease in latency times, Jordanian players had significantly higher quality gaming experiences. This encouraged them to game longer as they beat levels and connected with other players from around the region, building a solid community.
Subspace was created to meet exactly these challenges, serving as an off-the-shelf gaming network solution (it’s like a gaming Autobahn for everyone). The Subspace gaming network solution is deployed in scores of data centers across six continents, letting you improve your multiplayer game server performance with an optimized network. Subspace PacketAccelerator reduces latency and accelerates packets for all your real-time applications. Subspace GlobalTURN allows you to run TURN globally, without deploying or managing servers of your own.
Expanding Playable Regions Increases Game ROI
The most profitable games maximize their revenue with better gameplay, better matchmaking, and larger communities—but best-in-class games invest in technology that accelerates all of these. These highly profitable games know that happier customers pay dividends.
Riot recognized that to improve League of Legends’ multiplayer game, get more people playing, and increase in-game spending, it needed a private network.
The graph above displays the overnight spike in players who achieved latency times under 80ms once this connection was put in place, allowing about 50% to 80% of players to achieve latency under 80ms. Riot recognized the importance of customer service and the minor improvements that lead to significant improvements on their bottom line.
Massive companies like Riot can afford to spend time and money on network research and development, but many smaller developer companies can’t take on the financial strain.
Improving Multiplayer Experience Relies on Network Quality
Subspace has laid the groundwork and navigated the complex relationships of ISPs to create ease of access to quality networks so game developers don’t have to do it alone.
With the highest priority on QoE and QoS, Subspace answers the problem of money left on the table. Gain access to previously unplayable regions by contacting Subspace today.
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