GameSparks' Griffin Parry talks backend services

okay so proper gaming dot biz we're at the apps world conference we've got our big indie pitch going on and we're talking to game sparks now you guys are new do you want to tell us who you are and what gamesbox is about so gamesparks is a server-side uh integration platform and an ongoing game management engine it sounds complicated well the idea is to make things much more simple for the developer particularly the entity developer so what we all recognize is life has got much more complicated for mobile games developer as dependence on server side components increases and at the moment people are left to get on with it themselves create the core server side capability and then hook lots of great component solutions from third-party suppliers around it but creating that core server-side platform is incredibly hard work and beyond the where with all of most indies in particular so we take that away from you we're essentially our

promises you can say goodbye to servers you can be up and running with us in a matter of hours and you control a broad range of server side functionality with a web-based portal so what does that actually if i'm an indie developer and i've been probably i understand a bit about services but what is a bit less abstract okay so uh i'll give you some typical uh pain points that we hear off and then i'll talk in a slightly more complicated way about the components of our solution so you're you're an indie and you're having headaches because you are distributing your game across multiple different device types and it's very difficult to keep them all updated and all updated in the same way you need to start putting intelligence back into the cloud and have a server-side solution um you're a developer and you are beginning to take your first tiptoe steps into free-to-play you can see the potential there but you feel like you're driving blind and you want to be able to launch a game see what's going on within the game and adapt and iterate around it where you need what's essentially an e-commerce

platform and that is cloud-based we provide that you want to do multi-platform multi-player uh again that's difficult you need that server side we do that uh you want to do simple leaderboards again we do that so uh a bunch of uh pain points out there i could probably name about five or six others that we hear all the time uh in terms of what our platform does it's essentially got three layers it's a merchandising and player management platform which is essentially an e-commerce platform the second layer is a series of social mechanics uh basically first class features that allow you as a games maker to do core things like i need virtual currency um i want to sell coins i want to have leaderboards or integrations with facebook et cetera take that away and the final thing is we provide a much better integration environment for all those great third-party services you'll continue to want to use like analytics we make that much easier and across all of those

are the key design principles of interoperability across platform operating system um dynamic management from the cloud and core business intelligence which is throwing off the platform so how much is going to cost it sounds good expensive these kind of displays and it's very important that our pricing is simple and transparent and fair so you pay nothing to get going uh you start paying us once you start getting users above a certain level ten thousand monthly visas and then you pay us per user and how did you this stuff's pretty complicated to come up with while you're operating as a service so how did you guys come up with this in the first place so it's not complicated for us because of our backgrounds not because we're clever because we've got accumulated experience of more than a decade uh in the online tv world so tv went through a similar it doesn't it's not obvious but in fact it's true tv went through a similar migration so with the online with the birth of online

television the ability to deliver on the internet that all of a sudden that required tv companies to understand the server-side platforms well and they're difficult because they they bridge advertising subscription management ad insertion et cetera so uh i worked at sky and i built and run the online tv portfolio there which is now sky go and now tv and my partners were the uh the high margin services business that integrated that platform for us and went on to sell similar services to itv channel 4 disney 18t the best brands in broadcaster brands and television so so for us it's quite easy to get to a point which is impressive um we've got ambitions to take things much further than that and we look in particular towards the e-commerce sectors and the betting sector for the level of sophistication and complexity you'll need to support particularly if you're operating free-to-play games but that's for the future for now we're trying to solve people's biggest headaches as quickly as painlessly as

possible you