We sat down with CEO Mohammad Agha and Lead Developer Tri Truong to gain insights into Magmic’s decision to adopt brainCloud as the primary backend for their games.

About Magmic

Established in 2002, Magmic has developed and published over 100 mobile games, many of which have reached #1 in the Card and Board game categories on the App Stores. Some works include Mattel’s Phase 10, Blokus, and Hasbro’s Scattergories. With 250 million game downloads over 18 years, Magmic has a player base of millions of monthly active users. Across Magmic’s game library, the player base has accumulated billions of hours of play. Currently, Magmic is focused on developing AAA quality Free-to-Play casual games aimed at the mid-core market. Magmic games employ a proprietary event management system, full Live Operations capabilities, and a sophisticated Cross-Promotion SDK.

What were the primary challenges you faced before migrating to brainCloud?

We had a highly fragmented backend infrastructure:

• We had different versions of backends that we had to maintain as we were not necessarily updating older games but we had to keep them active. So we had lots of duplication.
• With all the duplicate backends our AWS bill was pushing $30K+ USD per month and that’s not including salaries of a four person backend team.
• When we were developing Texas Hold’Em King Live for the iPhone, we ran into many sync and latency issues with our legacy tech.
• We had different generations of our legacy backend built on different technologies - which required different developer skillsets to maintain. There was just a lot of inefficiency and lack-of-standardization in our backend code.

What tipped you over to deciding to migrate everything to a new BaaS?

We were spending well north of $400K USD per year on hosting fees, and the system wasn’t 100% reliable.  Add to that the management of servers crashing / going down in the middle of the night and we just always seemed to have an issue to deal with.

During the assessment process, were there any features of brainCloud that stood out as especially valuable for your business?

One of the standout features of brainCloud for our business is the Cloud Code functionality: It gives us the flexibility to develop our products in a way that fully meets our specific requirements. With Cloud Code, we can implement custom logic on the server side, streamline workflows, and optimize performance without needing to manage our own backend infrastructure. This has been invaluable for ensuring scalability, maintaining security, and integrating seamlessly with other cloud services and blockchain solutions. Overall, it allows us to stay agile and focus on delivering the best experience to our users.

What was the key feature or aspect of brainCloud that won the bid?

The real-time multiplayer aspects were what we were looking for initially but then we found a host of other features in there that we also found extremely useful, including Leaderboards, Data Downloads, In-App Purchase configuration and management, and User Login and management.

Is there a ballpark estimate that you would feel comfortable saying is a standard “time savings” that you get from having a standardized backend?

Yes, we no longer need to rebuild backend foundation features like authentication, leaderboards, multiplayer, and cloud storage from scratch, which saves us a significant amount of time—easily 2 to 3 months per project. Instead of allocating resources to backend infrastructure, we can focus more on developing innovative features. For example, in MLB Diamond Inc., our developers were able to shift their focus to building new online functions such as PvP gameplay, Marketplace, and Auction systems.

Can you summarize some of the qualitative outcomes of migrating to brainCloud?

We have seen the following benefits:

• Lower Costs: We estimate we are saving approximately $400K USD/year for AWS bill + $300K USD/year in dev salary for a total of $700K USD/year savings across all our titles.
• Higher Revenues: We started doing a lot more sales and player in-app time went up because our system was more reliable, we estimate 15% increase in IAP revenues.
• Server Reliability → DAU Increase: What we see is DAU [Daily Active Users] increasing more smoothly over time since we are experiencing no downtime. Previously it was common to have servers crash at 2AM – and every time the server goes down, the game loses users due to that. That does not happen anymore.
• Development Time: We estimate over 60%+ decrease in time spent on server development, and no more headaches due to server issues or downtime.

What was your top reservation or concern before the migration, and how did brainCloud meet that concern?

Our top concern was, “Will brainCloud do what we need it to do reliably, cheaply, and consistently? The answer was “yes” on all counts. Moving to brainCloud was clearly the right decision.”

Ready to try brainCloud for yourself?  Create a free account on our Public BaaS - or jump on a call with our Sales Team for more info!