July 2026 Newsletter: LiveOps Analytics Reimagined, Score-Based Leaderboards, and more

It’s a hot summer to be a gamer: the Steam Summer Sale is in full swing and GTA VI pre-orders just opened.

The games that players can’t put down all run on infrastructure nobody ever sees, and it’s the reason why we exist. So we’ve been extra busy lately: Satori’s new Analytics Dashboards and Funnels, score-based Event Leaderboards in Hiro, and a slew of other improvements you asked for. Let’s dive in.

🔮 LiveOps Analytics, Reimagined

Satori got another major glow-up: new Analytics Dashboards now bring your entire live operations into one view.

Some key features:

• Built-in dashboards: See who’s playing and what’s live; measure retention, RoAS, and revenue from day one.
• Custom dashboards: Build widgets for your own goals: Metrics, Funnels, Experiments, Retention, and more.
• Slice your data: Filter any chart by geography, platform, version, or experiment variant.
• Validation built in: Catch bad telemetry against your taxonomy during QA.

Read about the Analytics Dashboards

Funnels

Funnels can now be built inside reports to show exactly where players drop off across key game flows like tutorials, purchases, and feature adoption.

Learn how Funnels work

In addition to these major releases, you’ll be pleased to read about these quality-of-life updates:

• Easier identity management: Search and filter identities by event or session ID.
• Trustworthy player state: New read-only Taxonomy properties stay server-controlled, so sensitive flags can’t be tampered with by clients.
• Better event validation and debugging: Schema validation failures are clearly highlighted and synthetic events include their own metadata.
• Greater visibility into integrations: Last error, failure time, and error count now show in the Console.

Catch up on the Satori release notes

🏁 Score-based Leaderboards: Race to the Finish

You asked for the fast competitive loops seen in today’s top live games, so we extended Event Leaderboards to deliver just that.

Score-based events see players racing to a target score, pitting them against tougher opponents each time they reach the top. It’s the formula behind the highly addictive tournaments found in Monopoly Go, Royal Match, and Homescapes.

Read about what’s new

More updates to Hiro:

• Richer player economies: Auctions can be created for direct bids (player-to-player trades), and granted items can be set with their own properties.
• Broader engine support: Simplified Steam auth on Unreal, plus Unity IAP v5 support.
• Stronger content moderation: Profanity filtering now covers display names, chat, team descriptions, and challenge fields.
• Flexible starter grants: Top up existing players with new starter currencies and items when you expand a launch bundle.

Read all Hiro release notes

⭐ Community Highlights

How to Show Up for a Studio: Gray Zone Warfare and the Supporter Preview

Gray Zone Warfare’s Spearhead expansion moved every KPI: CCU, DAU, MAU, sales, retention, and playtime. Its Supporter Preview promised players that early-access progress would carry over to the live game, which meant migrating full player state from a preview Nakama instance into production at the moment of launch. Most studios “would have said no,” according to Johanny Clerc-Renaud, MADFINGER’s Technical Director. We said yes, and every supporter kept their progress.

Read the MADFINGER case study

Playing the Long Game: Lessons from Building Clans of London

Well Played Games spent years learning what a custom backend really costs to maintain. “We built it because we could,” says co-founder Adam Wells. “But the biggest thing we underestimated is maintaining it.” For Clans of London, their Vampire: The Masquerade card game, they chose to build on Nakama and Satori instead and got more than just software: they got a partner whose engineers hopped on calls to debug alongside them, in their codebase and under load.

Read the Well Played Games case study

Find Us on the Road

If you’re attending any of these events, we’d love to meet up:

• Gamescom – Cologne (August)
• DICE Europe – Athens (September)
• GamesBeat Next – San Francisco (November)

Reach out and let’s set up time to chat.

Looking Ahead

The best updates start with something you told us about. Analytics dashboards, funnels, score-based event leaderboards: all of it traces back to your feedback. If you’re working on something exciting, we’d love to hear about it.

Stay cool and see you in the next one!