The true cost of building a game backend
Together with a leading market research agency, we surveyed 125 executives and tech leads at US mobile game development companies with a minimum staff of 50 on the cost of building their in-house tech.
Complete the form to read the full report.
Download the report
Fill in your details to access the full Build vs Buy research report.
Why make games with Metaplay?
Metaplay gives your team everything needed to build, operate, and grow a successful live service game — from monetization and retention tools to team collaboration and infrastructure stability.
In-game offers system
Create and manage purchasable offers with dynamic content, targeting, and purchase limits.
A/B testing framework
Run experiments on offers, events, and economy changes with built-in statistical analysis.
Player segmentation
Target offers and events to specific player groups based on behavior, spending, and preferences.
Economy management
Adjust prices, rewards, and drop rates over-the-air without client updates or app store delays.
LiveOps events
Schedule time-limited events and offers with calendar-based activation and expiration.
Purchase validation
Server-authoritative IAP validation prevents fraud and ensures revenue integrity.
Player segmentation
Define player groups based on behavior, progression, spending, and custom criteria for targeted experiences.
Scheduled events
Create recurring and one-time events that activate automatically based on calendar schedules.
Guild framework
Pre-built guild system with invites, roles, quests, and social features that keep players connected.
Leagues system
Season-based competitive leagues with divisions, matchmaking, and progression rewards.
In-game mail
Send targeted messages, gifts, and broadcasts to players or segments to drive re-engagement.
Push notifications
Schedule and send push notifications to re-engage players with event reminders and personalized content.
Centralized LiveOps dashboard
Single source of truth for all game operations - designers, analysts, and support teams work from the same platform.
Self-serve operations
Designers ship configs independently, analysts manage A/B tests, and LiveOps teams schedule events without engineering bottlenecks.
Cross-team workflows
Customer support can triage issues, link error reports to engineering, and manage player requests without context switching.
Role-based access control
Grant appropriate dashboard access to each team member with granular permissions that maintain security.
Over-the-air updates
Ship content, events, and economy changes instantly without app store delays or client rebuilds.
Fully extensible platform
Customize and extend everything - add custom dashboard pages, admin actions, integrations, and workflows that match your team's needs.
LiveOps dashboard
Comprehensive dashboard for viewing player state, managing operations, and troubleshooting issues.
Player state inspection
View complete player data, transaction history, and game state in real-time for rapid debugging.
Game server metrics
Built-in metrics for performance, errors, latency, and resource usage with Grafana integration.
Incident reporting
Client error reports with logs, stack traces, and environment data for actionable debugging.
Self-healing infrastructure
Kubernetes-based architecture with automatic recovery from failures and horizontal scaling.
Analytics event streams
Real-time event streams and historical analytics for understanding player behavior and issues.
What's in the Metaplay SDK?
Metaplay is a complete game-making toolkit that includes everything you need to build, operate, and scale your live service game:
Unity SDK
Unity Client Library- Advanced game development workflows
- Offline development
- Model inspector
- Remote debugger
- Client prediction
- Connection manager
- Highly-performant
Game Server
- Fully programmable C# server
- Extensible by design
- Server-authoritative
- Cheat-proof by default
- Shared client-server logic
- Low latency
- Game config pipelines
- Ready-made features included
LiveOps Dashboard
- Complete game control centre
- Advanced A/B testing tools
- In-game events management
- Player segmentation
- Tailored offers and bundles
- Player support tooling
- Fully extensible and customizable
Metaplay Cloud
- Metaplay-managed service
- Optimized for scalability
- Monitoring, logging and backups included
- Built on Terraform and Kubernetes
- Low-latency architecture
- Battle-tested to millions of DAU
- Path to self-hosting
Still exploring?
Download the latest Metaplay SDK to try our tech and tools in your game project. Head to the Metaplay Portal to get the latest release.
