In 2013 out of the top 400 revenue generating apps on Apple Appstore and Google Play Store, 52% and 48% respectively were games according to a report by Distimo. The revenue share of these apps out of the total 400 was 79% and 92 % in Apple and Android platforms respectively. In addition, games contribute towards 63% and 37% of all the revenue generated on Appstore and Playstore respectively. Note that here we are not missing out on those heavy money generating enterprise apps as well.
So if we say that in the world of Mobile Gaming there has been an ‘explosion’ of sorts in innovations both on the smartphones and tablets, it’s an understatement. This explosion is not limited to games only but also towards game support platforms and game development environment.
Going through rigorous phases of technological advancements and testing updates the world was gifted with a rock solid, richly featured and affordable server platform for massive multiplayer games development called SmartFoxServer. This product has come with fully scalable and exhaustive documentation with dozens of examples of source code and robust administration tools.
Conclusively, we can infer that as a fast and reliable gaming server, SmartFoxServer today supports all popular clients which includes iPhone, Android, Flash, Unity 3D, MS Silverlight. Fully extendable with custom code written in Java, JavaScript or Python, SmartFoxServer has come up with world class projects like Disney’s Club Penguin, Zynga’s Yoville and Build-a-Bear’s Build-a-Bearville which have gained interesting players and audiences.
I will be publishing my next blog on Scalability and Performance of SFS around same time next week Scalability and Performance of SFS.
SFS and Its Impact On The Gaming Industry:
Gaming industry has gained explosive growth since the last decade. The creative ninjas, talented workforce and technically equipped developers together have continued accelerating the advancement happening all over the globe. They helped in making the gaming industry a pioneer thereby unlocking the potential of entertainment experiences. The innovations happening in the gaming industry in the past decade have fuelled the demand of gaming products and encouraged the progression of expanding the diversified consumer base while also accelerating the player connectivity.
And that’s when SmartFoxServer came up with answers. There were days when MMOs(Massive Multiplayer Online) used to cost hundreds or thousands of bucks just for maintenance and hardware which the company had to bear. SmartFoxServer offering custom high-performance and scalable architecture provides integration in the cloud via Rightscale. This offers a very economical way of scaling your application. SmartFoxServer, or SFS, very smartly provides all relevant tools for getting you started with multiplayer ideas. You get to create virtual world with zones, room groups, rooms, create various games challenges, manage buddy listing, creates custom profiles and lot more using client-server API. Therefore, SFS is a prodigious rich featured multiplayer platform which has impacted in the many ways we just discussed. SFS supports a variety of clients’ platforms. I would like to use acronym for SmartFoxServer- MMP or Massive Multiplayer Platform. 🙂
SmartFoxServer Efficiencies, Capabilities and Highlights :
What almost seems to be an ideal solution for quickly creating advanced multiplayer applications, I would like to summarize the relevance of SmartFoxServer:
- Offers all necessary tools, documentations and instances explaining creation of multi-user applications.
- Create wide range of gaming applications with multiplayer experiences from simple text chat to advanced level of chat to all kinds of massive games.
- SFS helps in creating for us ‘a glorified chat room’. You enjoy full-featured and authenticated chat rooms. You enjoy authentication, private message sharing, multiple rooms, friends lists, ignore lists, your name, foul words filtration. SFS gets relatively fast, elegant, scalable and smart at what it does.
- SmartFoxServer provides free UI components which comprises of chat windows, room list, user list, login box which help developers in creating interfaces with minimal coding.
SmartFoxServer Pricing:
We know that MMO like Club Penguin handles millions of players every day. For a well-designed server architecture there is virtually no limit to scaling. A highly economical and scalable server which brings an enterprise level clustering contributes positively in the gaming world by opening the window of opportunity for small enterprises as well.
SmartFoxServer which comes in main Three editions
1. Basic
2. PRO
3. SmartFoxServer 2X
The Basic version is known for chatting applications, turn-based games, whiteboards etc while the PRO’s fully-featured edition is used by MMOs and large scale projects. Where basic version supports only flash games and pro version only supports Flash, Unity/Mono/.Net, iOS and Android games, SFS 2X supports all of these along with Windows phone and Windows 8 platform and HTML5 technology. As far as pricing is concerned for upto 100 users SmartFoxServer 2X Server is free, for more you would have to purchase licences as per your requirement.
SmartFoxServer: Next In-Store?
I am delightful to furnish you with such detailed information which should have given you a little insight to SmartFoxServer. You must therefore, be interested in knowing what SmartFoxServer have more in store?
The guys who created SFS also created Open Space a robust Flash based isometric engine and framework that you can use to fast track creation of your MMO worlds. If you need to speed up your game development some more then you can use their Flash UI kit as well.
In addition to these, for game administrators and managers, SFS also provides an awesome feature rich Analytics module that you can use to keep track of everything important in your game from the perspective of server. The analytics module is available for all three versions.
So keeping all these offerings in mind, if you are now thinking about using SmartFoxServer in your next game development project, you are thinking in the right direction. You can read my next blog which will soon be published around next week on Scalability and Performance of SFS. This will give you better insights on SmartFoxServer.
We at Algoworks are experts in game app development and SFS integration. So if you are thinking about starting a new project or want to enhance you already built game, feel free to contact us for a free quote.
Rachit Agarwal
