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

Part 1 discussed the decision-making process and benefits of moving to brainCloud.

In Part 2 we discuss the process of migrating their apps to brainCloud.

How did you approach migrating to brainCloud?

We started with an initial pilot of our Scattergories Blitz game.  

It took 2 to 3 months to integrate brainCloud into the game fully. Overall, the transition went smoothly, thanks to brainCloud’s well-documented APIs and responsive support team. 

One of the most essential services we leveraged was the Turn-by-Turn Async Multiplayer system, which was a perfect fit for our game. This feature enabled players to take their turns at their convenience, keeping the gameplay engaging and interactive. Additionally, brainCloud’s flexible backend architecture made it easy to integrate leaderboards, player data management, and matchmaking, ensuring a seamless experience for both new and existing players.

And after the pilot?

After the initial pilot, we began migrating our key titles to brainCloud, including Phase 10, Spite & Malice, Passport Rummy, and Idle Pet Paradise.

The migration process for our key titles proceeded relatively smoothly, with Phase 10 and Passport Rummy taking approximately 1 to 2 months to integrate with brainCloud fully.

For Spite & Malice, we leveraged brainCloud’s Replay Service (i.e. PlaybackStream API) to develop a robust multiplayer function, ensuring a seamless and engaging player experience. This enabled us to implement an asynchronous turn-based system, allowing players to replay past moves and strategize effectively.

In Idle Pet Paradise, we leveraged brainCloud’s Cloud Code to integrate a Web3 platform, enabling blockchain-based interactions such as NFT ownership and in-game asset management.

Did you encounter any hurdles during the migration, and how were they resolved?

During the integration process, one of the challenges we faced was querying large datasets in our game. Handling big data efficiently was initially difficult, as performance and response times became a concern. However, the brainCloud support team was incredibly helpful — they provided us with key insights, including best practices for using Custom Entities and how to optimize queries by adding indexes. With their guidance, we were able to implement a more efficient data structure, which allowed us to develop features related to big data without performance bottlenecks. Their support made a huge difference in overcoming this challenge and ensuring our game runs smoothly at scale.

Was there a specific capability that delivered above and beyond your expectations?

One capability of brainCloud that truly exceeded our expectations is its Real-Time Technology (RTT). It enables us to develop real-time games and instantly send messages to online players, resulting in a smooth and engaging experience. We successfully leveraged RTT in Spite and Malice and Scattergories Blitz to build turn-based gameplay with seamless player interactions.

Was the transition disruptive for your players?

Transitioning to brainCloud has been seamless for our players. When we migrated our backend, we ensured that player accounts, game progress, and in-game purchases remained intact, ensuring no disruption to their experience. brainCloud’s robust authentication and data management tools made the migration smooth, and players were able to continue playing without even noticing the backend change. The reliability of brainCloud also improved server stability, reducing downtime and ensuring a smoother gaming experience overall.

Has brainCloud enabled product improvements that benefit your players?

Absolutely! Moving to brainCloud has allowed us to introduce several new features that enhance the player experience. For example, we leveraged brainCloud’s Real-Time Technology (RTT) to enable faster matchmaking and instant in-game notifications. Additionally, its cloud-based leaderboard and analytics tools helped us fine-tune game balancing and personalize rewards for players. We also improved scalability, ensuring that the game runs smoothly even during peak hours or special events, without lag or connection issues. These improvements have led to increased engagement and a better overall experience for our players.

Has the usage-based pricing of brainCloud been good or bad for you?

Usage-based pricing resulted in significant overall cost savings. Magmic has a library of games in various stages in their life cycle, and usage-based pricing ensures that a game’s costs are proportional to the size of its active player community. 

Usage-based pricing also had an interesting side effect for Magmic: More optimized coding. 

Usage based pricing created an incentive for us to more intelligently make calls in batches so as to reduce the cost. It drove us also to write better server code, to optimize what code resided on the server vs. on the client. By optimizing our code in these areas, we have achieved even greater savings in usage. And the user experience improved too - it’s win:win!

[For more information on cost savings, see Part 1 of this case study.]

Has brainCloud affected your approach to building games?

Before integrating brainCloud, our development team was split into two separate groups — backend and frontend. This separation often led to communication challenges and slowed down feature development, as frontend developers had to wait for back-end engineers to build the necessary infrastructure before implementing new gameplay elements.

After adopting brainCloud, our workflow became much more efficient. Now, each Magmic developer can work seamlessly across both brainCloud and Unity, allowing us to implement new features without bottlenecks or dependencies on a dedicated backend team. This has significantly reduced development time and enabled faster iteration on ideas.

How has brainCloud impacted your team's overall efficiency?

brainCloud has significantly boosted our team’s productivity by streamlining backend development, allowing us to focus on what matters most: building great gameplay experiences. With its powerful backend-as-a-service capabilities, we can quickly implement new features without having to allocate extra resources to backend infrastructure. This has enabled our team to iterate more quickly, experiment with new ideas, and bring features to market faster. 

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.”

Continue with Part 2 of this case study here.

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