Ever since a JPEG created by the digital artist Beeple sold for more than $69 million in 2021, the worldwide obsession with NFTs (non-fungible tokens) that represent digital collectibles, art, and media has been growing. A company at the forefront of the NFT world is the blockchain gaming studio Dapper Labs, which leverages blockchain to build addictive games (such as CryptoKitties), verify authentic digital collectibles, and run fan tokens for sports personalities and music artists.

There is huge scope required when building video games. They are not just computer programs; they’re audio-visual artistic works. It’s a collaborative effort between software engineers, animators, scriptwriters, graphic designers, photographers and sound engineers. Working with these collaborators and assets leads to a different software pipeline than the average software project.

The moment of launching something new at a game studio (titles, experiences, features, subscriptions) is a blockbuster moment that hangs in the balance. The architecture—distributed and complex, designed by a multitude of teams, to be played across a variety of devices in every corner of the world—is about to meet a frenzy of audience anticipation, along with the sky-high expectations of players, executives, and investors.

Given the millions of registered Unity developers worldwide, Unity is arguably the most popular engine used to develop games. But, whether you’re building the latest FPS or a turn-based classic, you need visibility in how your game is performing on a gamer’s device. More than 800 game development and platform companies rely on Sentry, from OutFit7 to Riot, Epic Games, and Unity.

In 2020, the gaming market generated over 177 billion dollars, marking an astounding 23% growth from 2019. While it may be incredible how much revenue the industry develops, what’s more impressive is the massive amount of data generated by today’s games. There are more than 2 billion gamers globally, generating over 50 terabytes of data each day.

Gamers are not shy about reaching into their wallets for premium content and features. They also won’t hesitate to tap the uninstall button at the first sign of trouble. It’s not uncommon for a gamer to boot up a hotly anticipated new game or revisit an old favorite only to put it down days or weeks later. The culprit is often gaming monetization issues that get in the way of what would otherwise be a long-term rewarding gaming experience.

Anomalies don’t have to be a fear factor; they could even present an opportunity to make money. Imagine detecting positive spikes in in-app purchases, conversions, or gaming activity in real-time and then having your business monitoring system identify what caused them 10x faster than you can now – autonomously. With 95% accuracy in the root cause analysis you could replicate and capitalize on the deviation immediately.

When you grow your peak concurrent users by 5x nearly overnight, ensuring that your operations can successfully support that growth can be a make or break for your success. Rocket League is a popular online multiplayer game created by Psyonix described as arcade-style soccer and vehicular mayhem. In the summer of 2020, the game maker decided to switch the business model of the game from an upfront purchase to a free to play model.

Game development is an entirely different beast to other industries. Marketing, development, and release are more tightly interwoven than in other sectors, with a lot of pressure to meet community-anticipated milestones and launch. As such, it’s important to have game engine logging and monitoring pipelines set up for your projects. In other platforms, version upgrades and roll-outs tend to be sudden, with no definitive date set.