Real-time app trading for live games that players trust
Keep inventories, trades, and markets in sync across every client with a managed real-time layer that sits beside your existing game backend, not inside it.
Key Benefits
Design around live economy signals
See how players interact with trades.
Benefit
Leverage real-time streams and analytics to understand trading behavior, session patterns, and LiveOps impact, informing pricing, sinks, faucets, and marketplace tuning.
Integrates with your existing backend
Keep authoritative logic where it is.
Benefit
PubNub sits alongside your game backend or BaaS, handling fan-out of item events while your existing services remain the source of truth for transactions and balances.
Predictable cost as trading scales
Align pricing to usage drivers.
Benefit
Model spend around active users and event volume, with controls, monitoring, and support to avoid surprise bills during peak seasons or major in-game events.
When inventory lag becomes an economy problem
Players notice when trades hang, items disappear, or shops feel unreliable. Trust erodes quickly, and so does willingness to spend.
Meanwhile, your senior engineers are busy firefighting socket clusters, regional outages, and desync bugs instead of improving the game and economy.
A managed real-time layer for app trading keeps inventories aligned, reduces incident noise, and frees your teams to focus on features that move retention and revenue.
PubNub vs. building your own trading infrastructure
See how a managed real-time layer compares to custom WebSockets and generic messaging when app trading becomes core to your game economy.
PubNub vs. custom WebSocket stack
Avoid owning global sockets, scaling, and failover. PubNub delivers real-time trading updates without the long-term SRE and infrastructure burden.
PubNub vs. generic messaging queues
Queues handle back-office jobs; PubNub is built for interactive, low-latency player experiences with presence, history, and access control.
CASE STUDY
How PubNub supports real-time gaming experiences at scale
Leading studios use PubNub to keep time-critical interactions—like combat moves, team coordination, and live chat—ordered and responsive under heavy load. The same proven real-time layer can underpin your app trading and inventory systems, so you ship faster, protect player trust, and reduce operational risk without rebuilding your networking stack.
Get an ROI + architecture review for app trading
Frequently Asked Questions
How does PubNub support app trading and game inventories?
PubNub provides a managed real-time layer that pushes inventory and trading events—grants, revokes, offers, fills, and LiveOps changes—to the right players and markets. Your existing game backend or economy service stays authoritative for balances and transactions; PubNub handles global fan-out, presence, and optional history so clients always see current item state.
Will PubNub replace my game backend or economy service?
No. PubNub is designed to complement, not replace, your backend. You keep item catalogs, pricing, and transactional integrity on your chosen stack. PubNub distributes real-time updates, manages connections, and enforces channel-level access control to keep UIs responsive and consistent across platforms.
How does PubNub reduce operational and incident risk for live trading features?
By offloading global WebSocket infrastructure, scaling, and regional failover to PubNub, your SRE and platform teams avoid running their own real-time edge network. You gain a platform proven under very large concurrent loads, documented reliability targets, and support focused on real-time operations so your engineers can prioritize gameplay, anti-abuse, and economy tuning.
Can PubNub help prevent trading exploits and inventory desync?
Authoritative validation still lives in your backend, but PubNub helps reduce exploit impact. Access Manager scopes read/write permissions per channel, presence helps detect unusual patterns, and Functions can enforce rate limits, filter malformed messages, or trigger logging and alerts. Persistence and timetokens help clients recover cleanly from network issues, reducing desync risk.
What does implementation look like for an existing live game?
Most teams start by wiring a single trading or inventory surface—such as a marketplace or gifting flow—into PubNub. Clients subscribe to per-player or per-market channels; your backend publishes state changes. Once the pattern is proven, you can extend to additional features like guild banks, auctions, or cross-game inventories under the same platform.
How do security and compliance reviews work with PubNub?
PubNub provides documented security practices, encryption options, and access control capabilities to support your InfoSec and Legal teams. We offer materials to accelerate security review and procurement, and our team can engage with your stakeholders on architecture, data handling, and configuration choices. You maintain control over what data is sent and how it is scoped.
