Trapper, Ali and I had lived through building and operating live games like Star Trek Timelines, investing millions to build up the infrastructure to enable it. We didn’t think anyone should have to do all of that again. Our team has a unique background that includes not only making games—but making enterprise technology and cloud-based infrastructure—so we felt like solving this problem was a unique calling.
When we look out into the world, we see many trends. Games are becoming more social. Development teams are changing their composition from technologists to artists. Games are shifting from “products” to “economies.” Everything you need to create a successful game is only getting more complex. Although 3D engines have brought enormous simplicity to game development, the whole server/cloud side is still a patchwork of bespoke systems. We’ve created a company to help.
Our mantra is: “We Fight for the Game Maker.” The game industry is so hard to succeed in, and we feel that someone needs to be on their side. This is the core of our culture.
One of the things we’ve discovered is that most teams building live games today tend to get caught up in a lot of artificial bottlenecks around workflow; engineers frequently need to get involved in the most basic processes. Debugging, deployment, updating is a pain (if not impossible). And at the same time, most game developers want to work within the visual design environment (e.g., Unity) or perform live operations tasks from within a web-based interface.
One of our sources of inspiration is Roblox. Like Roblox, we believe there is a great deal of power in top-down frameworks geared towards the creator—as well as a no-code/low-code backend that eliminates the need for DevOps, specialized programming, etc. The approach we are taking with Beamable is to make building a live game as easy as it is in Roblox, but with the freedom to do whatever you want: no living inside a walled garden with big take rates, no creative constraints, and the ability to use a great 3D engine like Unity. The goal is to enable everyone from a small indie studio to a large publisher to scale up to get as big as they need, while bringing joy and simplicity to their day-to-day work.
The product we’ve invented—the Beamable Live Games platform—has three main areas of functionality:
Fully-managed, cloud-based infrastructure: game developers can build a live, online game without needing to master DevOps, maintain an IT team, or build brittle server code. This enables features to manage content, economy and social systems. It scales automatically, and has a track record of delivering 99.9% uptime to millions of users. Dashboards are built-in so that the people responsible for managing and updating the game can see what’s going on with all of their performance metrics—and more importantly—take actions to operate the game, whether that’s adding a new item, helping out a player, or scheduling a live event.
No-code workflow: game developers work within their native development environment along with a web-based interface for managing things like item inventories, rules or statistics. Everything is fully integrated, so you can test changes to live game components locally, and then debug, stage and deploy changes as you need.
Extensibility: It’s impossible to create every feature that every game developer might need now and into the future, so we created a platform built around a common game programming language (C#) and made it possible for developers to add their own custom modules and microservices.
As we continue to fight for the game maker, we’ll help everyone navigate the challenges of the solo-to-social trend, the games-as-economies trend and the shift towards more and more artists on teams. And we’ll keep fighting as the industry continues to evolve.
