Heroic Labs CEO Chris Molozian on the Deconstructor of Fun Podcast

Earlier this week, Heroic Labs’ Co-founder and CEO Chris Molozian was a guest on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast. Chris and host Ethan Levy discussed the current state of the mobile gaming industry and how Heroic Labs can help game teams of any size succeed, whether targeting hypercasual, casual social, or grand strategy games on mobile, web, desktop, or console.

Listen to the full episode below on your podcast platform of choice. If you don’t have time to listen, we’ve summarized some of the key points below. (But we highly recommend you have a listen to the whole episode!)

Focus on the Fun (not your GameTech)

As anyone who has worked on a game team knows, building a game is one of the hardest challenges you can take on, requiring both creative and technical expertise across a multitude of wide-ranging disciplines. Building a game that is fun is even harder. And building a game that is fun and successful is harder still.

In their early years working on databases and distributed systems, with many games studios and publishers as customers, Heroic Labs’ co-founders saw first-hand how much time and effort game teams were spending on building and maintaining their own backend infrastructure. They saw how much time and effort was being spent on building and maintaining the same features over and over again, features that were not core to the gameplay experience.

These are the challenges that the Heroic Game Stack solves for game teams. Built and refined over 8+ years of working with some of the most successful studios and publishers in the industry, the Heroic Game Stack is a complete tech stack that allows game teams to focus on what they do best: building fun games.

This is done by providing a holistic suite of tools that spans the entire game lifecycle, from development to launch to LiveOps:

• Nakama, our powerful open-source game server that provides a complete set of features for building and running your game’s backend, including social, multiplayer, and competitive features. In being open-source, Nakama enables any indie developer and small studio to build a game with AAA-quality backend features.
• Hiro, our game dev toolkit that enables teams to rapidly add many common gameplay systems (energies, rewards, achievements, etc.) and dramatically reduce their prototyping and development time. We’ve seen reductions of 15 months in development time when using Hiro.
• Satori, our LiveOps platform that provides a complete set of tools for managing your game’s player base, events, and content. Satori enables teams to run their game as a service, with the ability to make changes to their game’s economy and content in real-time, run experiments, live events, and more.
• Heroic Cloud, for teams that don’t want to manage their own infrastructure we offer Heroic Cloud, our fully managed service that scales with your game.

Given the crowded marketplace, limited attention span of players, and the high cost of user acquisition, it’s more important than ever for game teams to be able to iterate quickly to find the fun in their game. And when they do find it, they need to be able to efficiently scale and not suffer from downtime, performance issues, or other “problems of success”. (Listen to the full episode for some fun anecdotes about this from both Ethan and Chris!)

Check out some of our case studies to see how Heroic Labs enabled the small teams at Lightheart Entertainment, makers of Mr Autofire, and Original Games, makers of Merge Inn, to do just that. The podcast announcement includes a wonderful quote from Original Games Co-founder Arseny Lebedev:

Contact us to learn more about how Heroic Labs can help your team succeed.