Beamable is an open-source game server platform that allows users to build online games and virtual worlds in minutes. The server also allows users to add player authentication, analytics, social, commerce, inventory, content management, meta-game features, GenAI, Web3 capabilities, and more to any game project. Beamable’s goal with decentralized physical infrastructure networks is to change the creation and operation of the game’s backend infrastructure.

What is Beamable?

Beamable is an open, extensible game server platform that allows you to build online games and virtual worlds in minutes. Beamable will enable users to add player authentication, analytics, social, commerce, inventory, content management, meta-game features, GenAI, Web3 capabilities, and more to any game project. Beambale allows you to prototype in minutes with engine-integrated processes and scale to millions of players. It is available as a fully managed SaaS service or a private cloud alternative powered by AWS. Beamable set out to solve a collection of interconnected problems. It entails providing game developers with the live services required to enable modern games, such as social games, games with communities, and games with economies. Beamable is the most effective way to create, manage, and scale a Unity-powered live game.

• Build: Takes a low-code approach to Unity projects, with drag-and-drop functionality and UI that can be shipped as-is or fully skinnable.
• Manage: Provides tools via Unity Editor and web browser for launching live events, altering player data, creating content, and more.
• Scale is supported by the scalable Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing service, which has served over 30 million players with a high-quality and cost-effective user experience.

Background of Beamable

John S. Kline and David J. Hill developed Beamable in 2018 to create a single platform that allows game creators to incorporate backend services and live game operations. In 2019, Beamable began forming connections in the gaming industry and integrating with Unity, a popular game production engine. During this time, Beamable worked on essential features like real-time multiplayer, in-game commerce, and analytics. Beamable fully released its platform in 2020, allowing it to be used by a larger spectrum of game creators. It included facilities for handling player data, multiplayer support, and live game operations.

Beamable’s platform continued to improve and expand in 2021 with the addition of live operations (LiveOps), A/B testing, and cross-platform player compatibility. It also enhanced the capabilities of player involvement and analytics. Beamable remains a key participant in the backend service area for game producers, catering to a wide range of genres and allowing developers to scale live game operations effortlessly. Beamable raised an undisclosed sum in their seed investment round in 2018. This initial round of funding was utilized to jumpstart the platform’s development, focusing on establishing its core products around multiplayer features, in-game commerce, and live game management. Beamable raised $10 million in Series A fundraising in 2021. Northwest Venture Partners and Volition Capital led the Series A round, which included participation from other investors.

Features of Beamable

Beamable is a game creation platform that provides developers with backend services and live game features.

Beamable Private Cloud-Based Backend Services

Beamable provides a cloud-based backend architecture, allowing developers to create scalable, multiplayer, and live service games without operating their servers. The platform manages major parts of game administration, including serverless architecture, which is automatically scalable to support millions of gamers, and cloud storage provides secure and dependable data storage for player data and game materials.

The key component of this feature is Unity and Unreal SDK directed at the developer’s private cloud API endpoint, which they can personalize and modify; beamable backend services, infrastructure, and CI tools deployed to the developer’s AWS account, which includes full source code; a Web Dashboard app deployed to the developer’s AWS account with deployment scripts and complete source code for customizability and branding; and co-development support for key features and customizations.

Web 3 Integration

Developers may create a Web3 game with Beamable. Developers may now focus on their game content while adding on-chain assets with drag-and-drop chain connectors. This integration allows developers to construct an interoperability layer between on-chain and off-chain player-owned assets, making it simple to identify a subset of Beamable products or currencies as federated to a particular blockchain. This makes it simple to ask Beamable inventory for a game item or cash, and the inventory system provides a consistent interface for both on-chain and off-chain objects. The Web3 connection enables Beamable users to log in using their cryptocurrency wallet. The wallets are paired with a Beamable account, allowing server-side cryptographic validation of wallet ownership.

Unity and Unreal Live Services SDK

Beamable provides a variety of APIs to tackle problems from diverse perspectives, each with extraordinary layers of intelligence for distinct modes of operation, including player-centric APIs, C# APIs, and REST APIs. With these tools, creators may vertically integrate their games into the Unity IDE, allowing faster implementation, content development, testing, and release. This integration reduces the need to glue technology and services together, allowing everything to be connected and operate seamlessly. The services are entirely managed, integrated, and driven by prefabs, allowing developers to start experimenting as soon as feasible. The SDK is reactive and changes automatically based on data from the platform. All of the Pub-Sub plumbing is installed.

The Beamable Core Unreal package includes mechanisms for authentication, content management, player accounts, statistics, and type-safe REST access to a full range of Beamable APIs using Blueprints/C++. The Unreal Engine Live Services SDK will fully utilize blueprints to enable low-code creation and iteration of strong live features to increase player engagement. Developers may create a working account in Beamable with zero lines of code. Beamable allows many local users to log in at the same time. This enables developers to support both remote and local cooperative implementations. This feature includes an integrated editing toolset that takes advantage of the standard UI/UX Unreal Engine developer process, so developers do not need to learn Beamable-specific stuff to get started and be productive.

Beamable’s Solution

Identity

Beamable offers a robust identity solution that integrates with third-party applications. This set of capabilities allows you complete control over how to authenticate users in your game. Beamable understands that authentication methods vary from game to game, so we offer a variety of authentication tools to meet your specific demands.

Authentication is typically tricky and includes more edge situations than expected; you must consider what occurs when errors occur and how to handle those problems. The graphic below depicts the authentication flow and demonstrates how you might handle certain instances.

Login Function

The RecoverAccount functions, also known as Login functions, are important to Beamable’s identity system. These are utilized with all of the other sign-in techniques. RecoverAccountWithEmail() is used for email and password verification, while RecoverAccountWithThirdParty() is used for third-party authentication services. Both of these methods yield a player recovery operation. The PlayerRecoveryOperation structure can inspect the account the user is attempting to recover if the necessary credentials are provided. If invalid credentials are provided, the PlayerRecoveryOperation will return an error, and the isSuccess field will be false.

Features of Identity

• Frictionless Authentication: Frictionless authentication is the most straightforward to integrate in your game. However, it is device-specific and should not be utilized as the sole mechanism if cross-platform support is desired.
• Username/Password: Authenticate with a Beamable username and password. This solution enables users to build cross-platform authentication without incorporating social features from other platforms.
• Facebook Authentication: This solution enables Facebook integration to provide cross-platform compatibility for your game. Here, you can discover all of the information you need to integrate Beamable with Facebook for authentication.
• Google Sign-In: The Google sign-in solution manages the OAuth 2.0 flow and token lifetime, making it easier to integrate with Google APIs. Users can always revoke access to an application at any time.
• Apple Sign-In: Apple Sign-In allows users to easily sign in to apps and websites with their Apple ID. Instead of filling out forms, validating email addresses, and selecting new passwords, users can use Sign in with Apple to create an account and use the app immediately. For further protection, all accounts employ two-factor verification, and Apple does not trace user behavior in the app or website.
• Steam Integration: Valve’s Steamworks is a collection of tools and services that assist game creators and publishers in building their games and maximizing their Steam distribution potential. This connection enables developers to integrate Steam Authentication with Beamable smoothly.

Profile and Storage

Beamable provides robust and adaptable solutions for in-game storage and content management. Beamable cloud saving allows players to save their progress. The cloud data is fetched online and stored locally, with game- and player-specific scope. This solution detects all changes and automatically keeps data in sync. Beamable also includes a content feature that allows game creators to store project-specific data. This approach allows developers to create, deploy, and update game content without having to release new apps to the app stores. Beamable also offers a stat feature that allows game developers to save player-specific statistics. With this feature, developers can track various built-in and custom player (and guild) stat variables with adjustable visibility levels.

Live Ops

Beamable’s Live Ops provides strong and adaptable solutions for interacting with gamers and allowing them to interact with your games. Beamable Live Ops includes the Events functionality, enabling game creators to create one-time competitions. This social/competitive feature allows participants to participate in many phases over a set period, with their in-game actions contributing a score to an event leaderboard and earning rewards. The announcements function enables players to manage announcements. With this feature messaging, game players can majorly impact engagement and income. The announcements offer a one-to-many communications channel for speaking directly to gamers. The other features of Beamable Live Ops include;

• Notifications: Enable games to send and receive messages via subscription. Messaging systems enable the game to deliver real-time updates based on server data. This is intended to broadcast communications (e.g., one-to-many).
• Mail: Allows players to manage their in-game mail. Messaging game players may significantly increase engagement and profitability. This feature is intended to limit communication between players to one-on-one interactions.

Social and Networking

Social and networking capabilities enable gamers to collaborate or compete with one another. In today’s gaming world, it is more crucial than ever that games provide players with an interface via which they may connect. Most major consoles support groups (also known as “Party” or “Clan”), competitive online games support matchmaking and networked multiplayer, and esports-focused titles frequently offer in-game tournaments. Beamable answers many of them with minimal effort from the developer, allowing game owners to have their games up and running as fast as feasible. The features include;

• Chat: The chat feature enables participants to communicate in-game. Chat allows users to interact and discuss strategy while cooperating, and trade messages while competing.
• Connectivity: This indicates the availability of a network connection. The system checks internet connectivity and immediately updates if anything changes, such as remote server outages or a loss of local Ethernet or WiFi internet.
• Groups: This feature enables players to form and engage in real-time. Groups can be either short-term “parties” that form and disband around a specific gaming event or longer-term “guilds” or “clans” that exist between game sessions.
• Leaderboards: Allow players to administer the leaderboard. Track player performance in social rankings that are either “global” (with hundreds of millions of players) or “segmented” (with smaller groupings).
• Matchmaking: The feature enables game developers to bring remote players together for shared experiences. Players are matched together depending on various criteria, including experience (Elo) and competitive rating.
• Multiplayer: Enable game developers to create multi-user experiences. Support turn-based gameplay with seamless integration of prizes, matchmaking, and leaderboards, eliminating the need to construct, run, and scale a game server.
• Tournaments: Allow the game producer to create a recurrent competition. This social/competitive feature includes a meta game, periodic cycling of rankings/stages/tiers, and progression.

Game Content Designer

The Game Content Designer is a Google Sheets add-on that enables game developers to manage all of their game’s live data with the ease of a Google Sheet. This functionality allows game developers to construct and manage data structures without writing code. Game Content Designer enables game developers to work wherever they are most comfortable and export the results. They may publish immediately to their game with no further work, as GCD handles all of the translation from flat spreadsheets to Beamable content, which Unity eventually uses in the form of ScriptableObjects. Beamable already provides many popular content types, allowing game developers to create and publish content without touching code.

Even though GCD is designed to operate with Beamable, game developers are not required to use the Beamable backend. GCD turns flat spreadsheets into JSON objects with sophisticated structures (arrays, object references, multidimensional objects), validation, constraints (min/max), and crosstab IDs, which can then be loaded directly into a game using unity. Schema headers are defined in the first row of a GCD sheet. The headers will span numerous rows for complicated data structures with layered data to indicate the data hierarchy. The schema headers contain mapping information for exporting data from spreadsheets.

Beamable Use Cases

Beamable is a low-code option for quickly integrating social, commercial, and content management capabilities into your live game. Learn how to do it using Beamable’s online product documentation. Game developers understand that developing, launching, and expanding a live game (one in which players interact) necessitates a diverse set of engineering, DevOps, and LiveOps technologies that most game companies lack the resources to develop. The immediate benefits of Beamable differ depending on the game maker’s job and the game project type. Beamable’s documentation includes features, code, prefabs, script references, tool windows, and more to assist all game developers in finding the resources they require.

Artist

The low-code approach of Beamable’s feature prefabs, as well as the versatility of Beamable’s UI skinning system, will assist game artists. Beamable enables artists to create consistent and polished images across the player’s gameplay experience, as well as the ability to share graphical themes across numerous titles. Skinning allows game developers to modify the appearance of their user interfaces. This provides complete control over colors, fonts, and sound. The theme manager is the primary entry point for reskinning the user interface. This Tool Window aims to allow the game designer to change the appearance of Beamable UI.

Customer Support

Customer support game developers will provide all users with quick, accurate, and professional assistance via high-quality tech discussions. The Beamable Portal allows for the inspection and resolution of player support issues. Customer support will contact gamers using the Beamable mail tool. Beamable gives Customer Support an excellent level of visibility into the players’ behavior and gameplay history and the ability to communicate with them quickly via in-game mail and chat.

Game Designer

Game designers create concepts and levels for video games, balancing the player experience to be enjoyable and challenging. The Beamable Feature Prefabs provide a low-code solution to prototype new features. At the same time, the Portal and Game Content Designer allow users to balance gameplay without downloading a new update. Beamable enables the game designer to provide more user-facing features while relying less on a programmer.

Producer

Game producers plan and oversee a game’s entire production cycle, ensuring each department completes its work on schedule and delivers a high-quality output. Beamable’s broad feature set includes a variety of low-code and no-code functionalities that are out of the box. Beamable enables developers to deploy and update a more robust game quickly.

Conclusion

Beamable is a prominent platform for simplifying backend operations for multiplayer games and live game services. It assists developers in creating and operating games with advanced features such as real-time multiplayer, in-game economies, and dynamic content updates. Beamable’s journey has focused on reducing the technological burden on developers, allowing them to concentrate on innovation and gameplay. At the same time, Beamable manages the complexities of backend services.