PubNub joined what felt like the entire European gaming community for two back-to-back events in Cologne during August 2023:
Devcom is Europe’s biggest game developer event. This year, it took place from August 20-22.
Gamescom is the largest computer and video games trade exhibition and festival open to all gamers. The event followed immediately after Devcom, from the 23rd to the 27th August.
PubNub at DevCom Europe 2023
Thank you to everyone who took the time to come and visit us at our booth during the event. We were pleased to announce the release of our updated Unity SDK, overhauled to provide a more feature-rich and intuitive way for Unity developers to incorporate PubNub’s capabilities into their app.
It was also great to meet so many current and future PubNub developers - things got quite hectic at times, so if you still need to talk with us, please reach out at devrel@pubnub.com.
One of the biggest draws to the booth was our Unity multiplayer shooter, which showcases the different ways you can add real-time features to your game using PubNub. Our ‘Real-Time Leaderboards’ proved particularly popular - next time, we promise there will be prizes, but congratulations to Jaci, who managed to top the leaderboard in a close-run competition towards the end of the day.
Add Real-Time Interactive features to your Online Games
PubNub lets you quickly and easily add real-time features to your game such as:
In-Game Chat
Leaderboards
Lobbies
In-Game Events
Multiplayer Sync
Friends, Parties, Guilds, and Alliances
Friend Presence
Achievements and Battle Pass
Profile and Inventory Management
Player Trading and Gifting
But how do you implement real-time at scale? How do you track which of your players are online or offline as your player base enters the tens of thousands? How do you implement a secure but flexible chat system that scales from a small lobby to a huge stream audience?
One of our Developer Advocates, Darryn Campbell, spoke about the major considerations when adding real-time features to any multiplayer game, addressing the most common challenges we see developers face and offering advice and solutions. The slides are available here and if you have a log-in for Devcom, you can see the recording on their website. Thank you to everyone who came to listen to us on the top floor. If you have questions we didn’t get a chance to cover during the Q&A, please reach out to us.
The key takeaways? Adding real-time features to your game is essential to foster a sense of community, and adding those features with PubNub is trivial.
PubNub at Gamescom Europe 2023
Gamescom immediately followed Devcom and was as always an amazing time to meet with both game industry members and fans of video games across the globe. We spoke with a lot of passionate game professionals and learned how many are struggling with supporting real-time functionality in their games. Many experienced frustrations with their current offerings or were at an early stage of implementing multiplayer and were looking to integrate features ranging from in-game chat, live leaderboards, and even multiplayer synchronization. We explained the benefits of PubNub and how we can help solve these problems - in case we didn’t get a chance to speak with you during the hustle and bustle and you yourself are struggling with these issues, please contact devrel@pubnub.com and we’ll help get you the information you need.
Of course, as video game fans, we had to have a little bit of fun checking out Gamescom as gaming fans. We enjoyed being some of the first people to play demos of new releases from companies, celebrating indie games, participating in exhibition booths, and purchasing lots of cool swag.
What’s Next?
Join us at Gamescom Asia from the 19th to the 22nd of October, 2023. PubNub will be on hand to discuss your real-time needs; whether your game is at the early design stage or an established brand, we’ll have technical folks available to help. We look forward to seeing you there!
