Unity Gaming Services

How to create player-centric game economies

Having a firm grasp on the resources, currencies, sources, and sinks in your game is a great start to building a healthy economy, but understanding what behaviors exist within your player base will allow you to tailor your reward and progression design choices.  In this guide, we’ll dive into how you can design your economy around different types of players through the following topics: Payer vs. non-payers Different levels of engagement Player motivations Planning your player journey Using A/B testing to improve your in-game economy Learn about our suggestions for each player type and the variables you should test in Designing a balanced in-game economy. By developing a strong understanding of sources and sinks, currency and resource management, as well as the various types of players of your game, you’ll be fully equipped to create a healthy in-game economy that can drive player engagement.  Start learning today in the first of our introduction to economy series: What is an in-game economy, or skip to Building an in-game economy and Designing a balanced in-game economy. If you want to get started building your own game economy, Economy from Unity Gaming Services has everything you need to design and manage it. If you feel you’re ready for A/B testing, Remote Config lets you run different tests that target specific player segments without code changes or app updates.

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How to A/B test game difficulty with UGS Use Cases

Perfecting your game’s design can be difficult when you can’t see how your players interact with it. By doing A/B testing, you can make design decisions based on how your players really play the game. The Unity Gaming Services (UGS) Use Cases are a collection of samples that implement typical backend game use cases and game design elements, show how to resolve specific development tasks, and highlight the efficiency you can achieve in your game backend by integrating different UGS packages in your project. One of these samples is about A/B Testing.This lets you segment players into multiple test groups in order to determine which version of a specific game element is the most engaging or intuitive to your players. The example we show is testing the amount of XP required for leveling up. This particular example is suited for something like alpha playtesting of a single-player game. But this is just one example, and there are many potential uses for A/B testing with UGS, even in published or multiplayer games.

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Growth and Monetization Report: Five insights to help you achieve scale for your mobile game

Data backed insights to help grow your user base and effectively monetize your game. It’s no simple task to attract a steady flow of new users to your game and monetize so you can keep funding your creations, but it is vital.  While there are no guarantees or magic tricks, the formula to success is understanding what combination of development, user acquisition, and monetization strategies will work best for your game. Starting early and taking a data backed approach to understanding what strategies work best can save you from the inevitable trial and error when trying to achieve scale. In our first mobile insights report, we dive into growth and monetization trends to offer guidance on how to approach topics like subgenre choices, soft launches, ad creative, monetization mixes, ad implementation, and even peer benchmarks.  Read on to learn about five insights from our report, backed by unique Unity data, that will help support the future of your creation.  Plan early to improve chances of success Perfect your soft launch strategy for UA Sharpen your ad creatives Balance your IAA and IAP efforts Create placements that perform

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What’s new in Cloud Content Delivery: Spring 2022 update

For example, you can use Game Overrides to set up time-based changes to your game by enabling and disabling game modes with Remote Config keys. You can then enable new content using CCD, and adjust rewards and IAPs using Economy (beta). To integrate Game Overrides with CCD, install the Remote Config package, link your Project ID, create an Override to target content by using your CCD badges and content bucket, integrate Remote Config into your game code, and retrieve the appropriate assets from CCD. This integration gives you greater control over your asset delivery, allowing you to make more changes directly from the dashboard while keeping positive player experiences at the forefront. To learn more about Game Overrides, click here. Also, visit this documentation page to learn more about integrating Game Overrides with CCD.

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Try out our battle pass sample using Unity Gaming Services Use Cases

For live games, especially multiplayer ones, the server should be the source of truth for most of the players’ data.  This prevents cheating tactics which may allow a player to have an advantage over another, or grant a player items or currencies that would otherwise need to be purchased or earned.  Similarly, in order for seasonal rewards or battle passes to be fair for all players, all data and decisions need to be managed server-side.  In the design of this battle pass sample, Cloud Code (beta) service does most of the heavy lifting in terms of handling the backend infrastructure. Cloud Code allows you to write and run your game logic away from the client. Other tools used in this sample include Cloud Save (beta), which allows you to store player data to the cloud. In this case, it allows the player’s season progress to be stored in a flat key-value system. A battle pass ownership flag for the current season is also stored with Cloud Save. Game Overrides (powered by Remote Config), which lets you create personalized in-game player experiences to determine the content of the current season and battle pass tiers. All of the tier rewards in the battle pass are either currencies or inventory items, which are all managed through Economy (beta). There is also one Purchase set up in Economy for exchanging gems for a battle pass. As with any game where player data is managed by an online back-end, each player will need to sign in to the game. For this, we’re using Authentication (beta). Once the user is signed in, all Unity Gaming Services SDKs will automatically know to send the player’s unique ID with every server request. Here’s how the sample works:  Seasonal reward configuration data is sent from Game Overrides to the client, and is also available in Cloud Code (read only). The game client will use this data to determine the UI. Cloud Code will use this data to determine which rewards to grant a player that claims a valid reward tier. Cloud Save is used to track the player’s progress through the reward tiers. The player will have an array of mutually exclusive tier states with three possible values: Locked, Unlocked, or Claimed. Cloud Save also stores a value indicating whether the player has purchased the battle pass for the current season.

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