Blacklight Studio Works: Enhancing Mobile Gaming Experience with Google Cloud

Blacklight Studio Works is a mobile gaming company founded in 2012. Its flagship game, Ludo SuperStar, is one of the most popular mobile board game apps in India with over 100 million downloads since its launch in 2017. The company attracts more than 2 million players daily with its library of popular games including CallBreak, Carrom, and Solitaire. The company creates social games played by millions of users daily and leverages Google Cloud to deliver a reliable experience and build a thriving game economy by analyzing real-time game events.

Blacklight Studio Works, a mobile gaming company, faced the challenge of managing and analyzing vast amounts of data from millions of daily users to improve player engagement and in-app revenue. The company needed to understand user behavior and app performance to create a viable game economy. The challenge was to find the right balance between complexity and rewards to keep users engaged and willing to make in-app purchases. The company also needed to accelerate app development, ensure user data safety, and support remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The situation was further complicated by a 300% increase in downloads and daily active users due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Blacklight Studio Works leveraged Google Cloud to gain valuable user insights and build better games. The company started its Google Cloud journey in 2017 with Firebase for game development and now uses Firebase Realtime Database, Cloud Functions, Cloud SQL, and BigQuery for real-time gaming analytics. The studio uses BigQuery to process and analyze half a gigabyte of event data from Firebase and half a gigabyte of non-real-time streaming data such as historical archives in Cloud SQL. Based on the insights, the studio can automatically trigger events based on user behavior to improve the game economy. The studio also uses Firebase Remote Config to push the application to a small percent of users and set performance perimeters to see what works well. To keep user data safe, the studio uses Firebase Authentication and Cloud Functions. The company also worked with Google Cloud Premier Partner Searce for regular training and updates.

• The use of Google Cloud has allowed Blacklight Studio Works to improve player engagement and in-app revenue by creating a viable game economy. The company has been able to process and analyze vast amounts of data in real-time, enabling it to understand user behavior and app performance. This has allowed the company to automatically trigger events based on user behavior to improve the game economy. The use of Firebase has also enabled the company to accelerate app development and ensure user data safety. The company has also been able to support remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, with Google Cloud enabling a 100% work-from-home policy. The company is now looking at using Cloud Tasks for scheduling specific tasks to further improve the game experience.

• Zero downtime despite a 300% increase in load after the COVID-19 lockdown began

• Reduced game development time by more than 30%

• Processes terabytes of data in seconds to better understand users and their interests