Finland’s Metaplay releases new game development backend to make it easier for ambitious developers to make mobile games at scale
The SDK, developed for four years by working with top-tier game studios in Helsinki like Metacore, Dodreams, and Nitro, enables games to achieve real scale and keep growing with custom features and live services.
Finnish scaleup Metaplay, the company behind the fully customizable backend for game development, has announced the global release of its new Unity-based gaming software development kit (SDK) to enable ambitious developers and studios to make top-tier online mobile games that can scale as they grow.
The Metaplay SDK brings customizable and fully extensible workflows, libraries, and tooling to professional game developers, which were previously only available to high-end studios who had the time, money, and expertise to build it themselves. It can be used to develop anything from simple single-player games with state persisted on the server, all the way to full real-time games with complex social interactions.
According to Zippia, the global mobile gaming industry had a market size of $172.10 billion in 2023 and is projected to nearly double by 2040, worth up to $338 billion. Due to the growing saturation of mobile gaming, it’s become far more difficult and expensive for developers to prove and test concepts for new game titles. To get the game to market as fast as possible, developers are often forced to rely on cheap and flaky backend tech to build and ship the minimum viable product. If the game becomes popular, developers need to later upgrade their back-end tech to handle the scaling of users and add more custom features, which becomes very problematic once a game is already live.
Metaplay solves this by giving developers a robust and pre-made upgrade path that allows developers to easily scale their backend as they grow their game. The Metaplay SDK comes with four component parts that cover every element of game development, from the first line of code right through to LiveOps and player support.
Additionally, Metaplay’s C# game server comes pre-built with all the necessary features of top-tier games today but is fully customizable and extensible, making it easy to add new features and modify existing ones whenever needed. Metaplay ships as source code and can even be deployed into a developer's own cloud, giving them full control over their game and their data.
"We got tired of black-box backends holding us back when making games. So we made Metaplay, a full-stack platform with everything developers need to make a top-grossing game," says Metaplay CEO and co-founder Petri Kero. "Our goal has always been to take Metaplay global and help developers far and wide achieve true scale without being limited in their creative vision, and now, the time has come to make that happen," he continues.
Metaplay’s SDK is considerably lowering the barrier to entry for game developers. Starting at just €995 a month, ambitious developers get access to the full suite of backend tech and tooling that's taken decades of person-years for the Metaplay team to build. This allows studios to focus on marketability, more creative game ideas, and ultimately, giving their game its best chance of success.
"Since 2019, we've mostly been working with a few hand-picked game studios in Helsinki to build a game-making platform that, once they've started using, they can't imagine their life without it. We (and they) can confidently say the result is better than anything else out there. Now, we couldn't be more excited to introduce Metaplay to the world, and we can't wait for everyone to experience the incredible things you can do with it,” says Teemu Haila, co-founder & CPO at Metaplay.
Games like Merge Mansion by Metacore, Drive Ahead! by Dodreams, and Friends & Dragons by Playsome were made with Metaplay’s technology, while a number of promising venture-backed game startups in Helsinki are also benefiting from early access.
Metaplay will attend Pocket Gamer Connects London 2024 from January 22nd - 23rd, delivering a talk on stage about how to make games with scale in mind, and demonstrating its SDK to attendees. To get access to the SDK, interested parties can sign up via portal.metaplay.dev, evaluate Metaplay's tech and tools at no cost, and start shipping games commercially in just a few steps.
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For additional information:
Media kit with pictures
Chris Wilson, Head of Marketing
Metaplay
chris.wilson@metaplay.io
About Metaplay
Founded in 2019 in Helsinki, Finland, Metaplay provides a fully customizable backend for game development that enables ambitious developers and studios to make top-tier online mobile games that can scale as they grow. Metaplay is the only backend solution specifically designed to handle every stage of a top-tier mobile game’s production, from the very first line of code to live operations and player support.
Games like Merge Mansion by Metacore, Drive Ahead by Dodreams, and Friends & Dragons by Playsome were made with Metaplay’s technology,
The company is self-funded and wholly employee-owned, with a team consisting of 22 experienced developers and professionals who share a deep passion for creating high-quality games. For more information, visit www.metaplay.io.
