Behind the scenes of Subway Surfers: A Q&A with SYBO
What have been the biggest challenges with scaling up so fast? Mathias: For a smaller studio to be supporting a game with 100 million players is an extreme task. It’s incomprehensible that there was a young team operating such a massive game. We, along with Unity, grew as the industry grew, so everything, including the parameters, were changing quickly. Our goal from the beginning was to give gamers the best possible feeling when playing Subway Surfers, and we keep this in mind with every step and decision we make. We took over publishing for the mobile platforms in mid-2020. For the last 18 months, we’ve been speed learning how to self-publish. We’ve improved the game, but there’s always the potential to continue to grow and optimize. When we took over self-publishing, initially we were deactivated on the ad platform, because although we only started with 10% of our player base, it amounted to 10 million players, and they thought we were hackers. How about the technical challenges? Murari Vasudevan: On the technical side, for iOS and Android, the scale of the number of devices is enormous. For Android, there are more than 20,000 unique devices. When we took over publishing, we needed to ensure that the game ran smoothly on all devices that we targeted. We had issues with performance exceptions and crashes, and with the application not responding. We dealt with the scale of each of these issues happening live, as well as the need to diagnose it in real-time. In order to not put off our player base, we needed to look at the Unity Profiler, optimize, and work with the loading time. We needed to ensure that the loading time matched or improved upon the original. To ensure good gameplay on even the least-powerful smartphones, we devised a number of techniques, including batching level geometry to reduce draw calls, rotating coins using C# scripts running on the CPU rather than shaders running on the GPU to further minimize draw calls, minimizing UI redraws and ensuring optimal timing in level generation, and not generating more content than a user can see. The Unity Profiler and Frame Debugger make it much simpler to monitor exactly how all these techniques are working. We also use Unity’s different quality settings to optimize fps and refresh rates on low-end devices. We spent a lot of time tweaking our bootstrapping funnel and optimizing our code to ensure that we were really efficient in our process. We had to have a lot of analytics in place to see what players were doing, how they were going through the various stages, and where they were dropping off. This was the flow that came with taking over so many devices and players, and it was an ongoing challenge we had to confront right from the start.
