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Online Services take your games to new heights

September 27, 2012 in Games | 6 min. read
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It’s always exciting to announce a new service or product, and certainly there has been no shortage of enthusiasm with the introduction of our new Online Services program into the Unity Asset Store.  Announced this year at Unite 2012, Amsterdam, Unity’s Online Services program connects Unity developers with online service providers we feel will be of particular benefit.  From MMO hosting services, to monetization and ad-revenue generation, analytic services to avatar generation, you’ll find service providers who have committed themselves to the Unity developer community.  Meet our Online Services partners and see how they can bring your productions increased depth, scalability, revenue and breadth. Listed below in no particular order – they’re all fantastic!

Monetization & Advertising

You’ll find a number of services which can help you both generate and manage revenue. Take, for example, PlayHaven. You can easily acquire, retain, engage & monetize your players with PlayHaven's powerful marketing platform. With this extension, integrate PlayHaven Placements directly within Unity to serve promotion & monetization content. Integrate once and enjoy true flexibility as you create, schedule, manage & analyze served content in real-time through PlayHaven's web dashboard.   Online Services partner InMobi is the largest independent mobile advertising network. With over 10,000 publishing partners and 2,000 advertisers to date, InMobi's sales network is instantly capable of monetizing your mobile ad inventory in any region of the world.   You’ll also find an excellent advertising solution from our service partner, Placeplay, PlacePlay helps iOS and Android app developers increase their revenue with targeted, high-eCPM, mobile banner advertising.  PlacePlay provides world-wide inventory, high fill rates, and average eCPM's of approximately $3.00.  Increase your mobile advertising revenue today with PlacePlay.   Inneractive automates the dynamic, fragmented global mobile advertising world by offering ad networks highly segmented, responsive audiences. Beintoo offers a loyalty program for mobile and web applications. Give value to the time that your players spend using your apps: convert their achievements and skills into real world benefits.  Implement the Beintoo features to start a smart and profitable plan to engage all your users. Reward your players with Bedollars, a cross app virtual currency that users can turn into real discounts provided by advertisers through non invasive campaigns. Keep your users loyal by allowing them to redeem real monetary value from engagement in your games.

Payment Solutions Quite often, lucrative markets are cut out of the picture by barriers that make player payment collection difficult.  International trade regulations, currency complications, limited access to payment options and even age can make enabling payments tricky.  We’ve found a number of service partners who have innovative solutions to help!  If you’re looking for a way to collect global payments in a variety of international currencies, xSolla’s PayStation is a global payment platform targeted and optimized specifically for games.  Or perhaps your target demographic is under 18 and not in a position to spend money without their guardians’ oversight.  In this situation, you’ll find your solution in the form of Virtual Piggy, the first e-commerce service that enables kids to manage and spend money within a parent-controlled environment.

Analytics & Data Warehousing
If it’s analytics you’re after, you’ll find a couple of great solutions. GamesAnalytics might just be the solution you’ve been looking for. This cutting edge service uses advanced data mining and predictive modelling to identify and segment significant player behaviours to improve player satisfaction.  And don’t miss Treasure Data, whose cloud data warehouse platform is based on Apache Hadoop. You can store and analyze your data on the cloud, and focus 100% on analytics.

Network Multiplayer, Avatar & Voice Chat Solutions
Asset Store Online Services is about more than analytics, advertising and monetization– we’ve also teamed up with some of the brightest service providers who have brilliant solutions to commonly encountered problems in the industry– creating and operating sophisticated multiplayer games.   These selected Online Service partners bring you technical solutions to problems which have historically required entire teams!  From managing and creating custom avatars and virtual goods, to providing intelligent cloud-based managed MMO back-end hosting, voice chat to resource management engines and crafting systems, you’ll find the solution within Asset Store Online Services.  Historically, designing and operating a networked multiplayer game has required a multitude of skilled professionals– spanning server development, system administration, database design, and back-end support!  These extremely heavy demands have made MMO design problematic or unrealistic for smaller developers and indies.  If you are familiar with our mantra,  the democratization of game design, you’ll probably appreciate that we look for like-minded innovators with services aligned with our mission statement.

As far as providing and operating an MMO back end server, Exit Games’ Photon cloud service is unparalleled.   Exit Games provides you with an intuitive API framework ready to communicate with their high-speed, cloud based server technology to keep your characters and game worlds synchronized.  Photon Cloud is fastest and easiest-to-use network engine to build scalable MMOGs, FPS or  any other multiplayer game and application for PC, Mac, browser, mobile, console and cross-platform.  It’s not just a server– it’s a completely managed cloud-based solution, allowing you to focus on the good stuff: making a great game!

Vivox has been long regarded as the top in-game voice chat provider for nearly a decade now.  You’ll find Vivox’s tech in some of the top MMO’s on the market.  Now Vivox has made their technology available to smaller indies with the addition of their C3 Lite Integration network chat system.  They’ve provided a great integration for Unity developers that will let you add in-game voice chat with very little work.

Making a network game with substance usually requires, at the most abstract level, a structure of relationships between objects and properties representing in-game resources and  events.  Handling these relationships on your client side with any sense of persistence is often impractical, not to mention insecure.  If you plan on having server-based resource management logic, persistence and record keeping, this seemingly basic task quickly becomes quite complex... This is where Roar Engine comes in to save the day. Roar's award-winning platform lets game developers easily and quickly implement player messaging, items and gifts, crafting systems, quests, badges and leaderboards, as well as payment channels and a LUA based server-side scripting solution.

Server-side logic is just part of the equation.  A large number of multiplayer games also require persistent identities and rely on avatar customization as a means of developing player engagement.  Creating an avatar customization system requires a system capable of manipulating and tracking a constantly changing datascape of art assets and properties. This is where the highly innovative Vostopia comes in, which promises to be one of the first cross-world universal avatar and player management system.

These excellent services are a cinch to use– just download the plugins, register with the service provider and you're ready to go.  Our first wave is already live on the store, and keep your eyes and ears open for the coming arrival of Roar Engine, inMobi, Treasure Data, Virtual Piggy and xSolla's plugins.

September 27, 2012 in Games | 6 min. read

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