How do you incorporate social features and multiplayer modes in mobile games?

1 Define your target audience

Before you start adding social features and multiplayer modes to your mobile games, you need to define your target audience and their preferences. Different types of players may have different expectations and motivations for socializing and playing with others. For example, casual players may prefer simple and asynchronous social features, such as leaderboards, achievements, and invitations, while hardcore players may seek more complex and synchronous multiplayer modes, such as co-op, PvP, and tournaments. You can use market research, surveys, and analytics to understand your target audience and their behavior.

2 Choose your social features

Social features are elements that allow your players to connect, communicate, and interact with each other within or outside your mobile games. They can help you build a loyal and active community, increase word-of-mouth marketing, and encourage in-app purchases. For example, you can add social login and profile features, so players can sign in with their existing accounts and create a personalized profile. Additionally, you can enable friends and chat features, which will allow players to add and manage their friends list, and send and receive messages with them. You can even enable voice chat or video chat for more immersive communication. Furthermore, you can offer social sharing and gifting features so that players can share screenshots or videos, as well as send and receive gifts like coins, items, or lives. Finally, you can provide social networks and groups for players to join or create networks or groups based on their interests. This will create a sense of belonging and identity among your players.

4 Use the right tools and platforms

Adding social features and multiplayer modes to your mobile games can be a complex and costly process, but there are many tools and platforms that can help simplify and streamline the development and integration. Firebase is a cloud-based platform that provides authentication, database, storage, analytics, and more. PlayFab is also a cloud-based platform that offers server hosting, matchmaking, leaderboards, achievements, and more. Photon is another cloud-based platform that provides networking, synchronization, voice chat, and more. All three of these platforms can be used to implement social login and profile, friends and chat, social sharing and gifting, asynchronous multiplayer modes, co-op and PvP multiplayer modes, social networks and groups, social events and campaigns, voice chat and video chat, as well as ghost mode games to your mobile games.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?