October 2025 Newsletter: All-new Nakama Console, Unity Sample Projects, and Viral Success Stories
Hello Heroes,
We recently celebrated our 10 Year Anniversary at Gamescom, shipped a completely rebuilt Nakama Console, and watched studios like Spektra Games and Wooster Games hit viral breakout success while staying lean and focused.
This newsletter is packed with product updates, new sample projects to get you shipping faster, and community wins. Let’s dive in.
🔮 What We Learned at Gamescom
Fresh off celebrating our 10-year anniversary in Cologne, co-founder Mo Firouz reflects on three major takeaways: tighter budgets are pushing studios toward proven infrastructure over custom builds, LiveOps has become essential for player retention, and AI is already delivering practical efficiency gains for lean teams.
🪄 Five Ready-to-Go Unity Projects
What if you could skip weeks of backend work and instead pour all your blood, sweat, and tears into your actual game? Well, now you can.
We’ve packaged our most commonly used Nakama systems into five complete Unity sample projects: Leaderboards, Friends, Groups, Tournaments, and Cloud Save. Each is open sourced with code annotations, quick start guides, and clean UI that you can customize and ship.
Get started with sample projects
✨ All-New Nakama Console
We’ve completely rebuilt the Nakama Console from the ground up. The new UI makes navigation more intuitive, centralizes settings management, and introduces new tools like bulk data import and an ergonomic API explorer. These updates are a direct response to years of community feedback, and we’re thrilled to finally deliver the experience you’ve been asking for.
🏰 Teams 2.0: Your Guild Got a Massive Upgrade
Hiro’s Teams system got a massive upgrade. Everything that was available to individual playersAchievements, Inventory, Economy, Stats, and moreis now available at the team level. Teams can earn shared currencies, manage collective inventories, compete on team leaderboards, and reward members based on their contributions.
Discover what’s new in Teams 2.0
Other recent Hiro highlights:
- Send rewards on your schedule with the new Reward Mailbox: Deliver rewards asynchronously to players and teams, giving you more options in how you run LiveOps campaigns and events.
- Expanded OSSv1 support in Unreal Engine: Hiro now supports Unreal’s Online Subsystem for Identity, Achievements, and Leaderboards.
- Enhanced offline support in Unity: Players can progress through Achievements, Energy systems, and Event Leaderboards without connectivity.
📀 Still Rolling: Satori 2.1.4’s Greatest Hits
Satori’s been on a roll. Now at version 2.1.4, recent updates include a complete redesign of the Hiro Feature Flags experience, new messaging capabilities, and precision tools for running cleaner experiments. More highlights:
- Configure Hiro systems visually with the new Feature Flags UI: No more digging through JSON. Manage Inventory, Economy, Energy, and Achievements through an intuitive wizard with tabbed views, quick editing, and at-a-glance status checks.
- Test the future with QA Mode: Switch individual identities into a “future date” mode to preview how live events, experiments, and feature flags will behave at upcoming times. Validate scheduled content before it goes live.
- Run multi-channel campaigns with OneSignal: Send email campaigns directly through OneSignal from within Satori for richer player engagement strategies across in-game and out-of-game touchpoints.
- Send events without players: The new Server Event API lets you track system-level, team, or background process events that aren’t tied to specific identities. Great for game-wide analytics.
🤝 We are SOC 2 Type II Certified!
We’re pleased to announce that Heroic Labs has achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance certification, as validated by independent auditors at Johanson Group LLP.
Learn more about our certification
⭐ Community Highlights
Racing to the Top: Spektra Games’ Viral Breakthrough
Turkey’s Spektra Games proved that focus and viral momentum can beat traditional marketing tactics. Highway Racer Pro hit #1 in US racing charts across 45 countries with 350,000 pre-registrations, all from organic TikTok growth.
When launch day brought an unexpected surge that nearly crashed their systems, Heroic Labs’ engineers worked side-by-side with the team to diagnose and fix the issue within hours. What could have been a catastrophic failure became a success story about resilience and partnership.
Read the Spektra Games case study
Animal Company: From Prototype to VR Breakout with Half-a-Million Daily Players
Wooster Games, a subsidiary of Spatial, launched Animal Company from prototype to VR breakout in just five weeks. By embracing rapid iteration, organic virality, and community feedback, they’ve scaled to 500,000 daily active users while shipping weekly updates.
Built on Nakama, Animal Company demonstrates what’s possible when you focus on features that matter to players instead of fighting backend limitations, especially critical in VR where multiplayer-first is the expectation.
Read the Animal Company case study
Join Us at Brackeys Game Jam 2026.1
Brackeys Game Jam 2026.1 is coming up in February, and we’re excited to be supporting one of the largest community game jams around. It’s a great way to try out new ideas, connect with other developers, and finish a complete game you can share with friends, family, and fellow jammers.
If you want to add multiplayer, leaderboards, or social features to your entry, Nakama’s open-source backend is free to use and built for exactly this kind of rapid prototyping.
Looking Ahead
You asked for it, we built it: the new Nakama Console, sample projects, and Teams 2.0 all started as community requests. We’re constantly listening and building what you need, whether you’re shipping your first game or scaling to millions of players.
If you’re working on something exciting, we’d love to hear about it and if we can help you get there faster, even better.
See you in the next one!
Speak to the Heroic Labs team
