Player.IO

TapJoy, formerly known as OfferPal, is now available as a payment provider in PayVault. Integrating their Managed Offer Platform in your Player.IO game is now easier than ever and gives you one more great option for monetizing.

Just like the other offer-based payment providers, we have added support for this in the SiteBox Templates.

Are we missing any payment providers? Do you have a payment provider that you think we should add to the PayVault system? Just let us know!

We’ve just released version 2.1 with updated multiplayer features.

Our Multiplayer service was the first service we launched, and since it hasn’t received many updates since the original launch, it was about time we gave it an overhaul and added some of the often requested features.

“So, whats new?” you ask. Well I’m glad you asked:

Stability and Performance
We’ve focused a great deal on stability and performance in this release. We have quadrupled the amount of multiplayer specific unit tests, fixed quite a few edge case bugs, and we have spent quite a bit of time tuning and optimizing the core socket layer for even better performance!

Full rights in development server
One of the biggest frustrations we’ve heard from customers has been the fact that the old development server did not run with full rights against Player.IO like the production servers. Instead, it inherited it’s rights from the first client to start a room.

Developers could easily workaround this issue by using a connection with full rights in their clients, but it caused a lot of confusion and wasn’t really an optimal solution.

This was done because we didn’t have a secure way to ensure that only your development server had full rights against your games.

In version 2.1, we’ve fixed this issue with the simplest possible solution: When you start the development server, you’re asked to login to your Player.IO account which will grant the development server full rights against all your games.

You can even make it save the credentials so you don’t have to login every time you press F5 (run server). And of course there’s also a logout button so you can clear those saved credentials at a later time.

Ability to have multiple room types in one dll
Our second most requested feature has been the ability to develop a game with two or more room types (previously we called them “server types”), on one machine using one development server. This was next to impossible earlier, which lead to local-and-live development where developers would run one room type in a local development server and the rest on the live servers.

Needless to say, this was more than a bit bothersome when switching between code in different room types and made it impossible to setup breakpoints and other debugging information across all room types at once.

In version 2.1 we’ve fixed this issue by allowing you to have multiple room types in each dll. You have to mark each main game code class (The one that inherits from Game) with the RoomType attribute like this:

And just like that, you can have multiple room types in one dll.

Ability to upload debug symbols (.pdb)
Another often requested feature has been the ability to get file and line number information in the error log for exceptions throw in the production servers.

With 2.1 we’ve added the ability to upload debug symbols (The .pdb files generated by visual studio) along with game code dlls. These files are loaded by the production servers and ensure that accurate file and line number information is submitted to the error log for every exception in your game.

Since running code with debug information uses more resources we’ve decided to make this feature only accessible for costumers on the Plus plan or better.

Updated Multiplayer Admin Panel
The multiplayer section of the admin panel has been given a major overhaul. It now has a Statistics tab where you can see how your game is performing over time, a tab where you can list running rooms and their room data, and a tab where you can manage your clusters. Uploading game code now has its own tab, and it should be easier to upload and update that code now.

Cluster Management

Multiplayer rooms run on groups of game servers we call clusters. Previously you didn’t have any choice regarding which cluster or servers your game would run on, but with this release we’ve laid the ground work for allowing you to manage and control just that.

In the multiplayer admin panel you’ll now find a new “Game Servers” tab where you can select which clusters are used to run your live game rooms, and prioritize them.

To begin with most users will only have access to these two clusters:

• Player.IO Main Cluster: The main server cluster running most games.
• Your own development cluster: A special cluster created for you that contains all your currently active development servers.

In the long run we want to expose multiple higher-capacity clusters around the world so you can choose to run your game close to the geographical location of your players, so they will get an get an optimal experience.

And finally we’re also considering letting costumers run their own clusters of game servers on their own servers. This would give you the ability to control server settings such as room capacity, max run time, disable the codescan/class-whitelist and more. We’re not quite sure how to approach it, so we’d love to hear from you if you are interested in such a feature and would like to be one of the first users.

Run live rooms on your development server
You can even use the cluster management features to run live room on a development server on your local machine, giving you the ability to set breakpoints and view live debugging data directly inside your live rooms!

Simply drag your development server cluster to the top of the active clusters list, and if there are any development servers with publicly accessible ports (8184) in your cluster, then it will be used to create the next room.

Development servers are limited to 10 rooms, which should be enough to get you some live traffic to work with, but the majority of players will still be on the main cluster.

Those are the major new features. Give it a go and don’t forget to let us know what you think!
- Team Player.IO

We have now made it ridiculously easy to integrate PayVault into Facebook apps that are hosted through our SiteBox feature! If you are using SuperRewards or Gambit for your game, there is now a new Sitebox tag called payvault that displays the offer IFrame from either of these two providers.

This means that if you want a Flash game on Facebook that makes money through offers, the only thing you need now is a kick-ass game that uses up your virtual currency, everything else is taken care of by our services.

We updated our Seedlings example so you can see it in action, and we have also updated the example game you get when you create a new Facebook App in SiteBox so you can learn from our example.

Many of you have asked us for more and better statistics on the resources your games use, and we have now released the resource usage view for all games. You can find the link to it under each game in the Admin Panel. You can view as far back as three months, and you’ll get the numbers grouped by each separate service:

With this data it should be much easier for you to see how your games are performing, how much resources they use, and this in turn should help you optimize your game. When developing you can use this to figure out the impact of a single user, and as your game takes off you can follow it in a better way.

These are also the numbers that form the basis of the usage invoice for those of you on paid plans, and we hope that by releasing this information you can get a better understanding of the monthly totals.

If you have any other cool ideas for data we should show on this page, if you have any questions regarding your usage, or if you just want help optimizing your game, just take it to the forum.

We just released support for UltimatePay in PayVault, so there are now six different payment providers in total for you to use.

Integrating the UltimatePay in-game lightbox gives you access to over 85 payment methods that are then localized and optimized to increase your conversion rate, including support for the UltimateGameCard that can be purchased in over 70000 locations worldwide.

Are we missing any payment providers? Do you have a payment provider that you think we should add to the PayVault system? Just let us know!

We’ve just pushed two major updates to the website live.

We’re blogging now.
First of all, we’re launching a blog (you’re on it right now). Our plan is to use it as our official news channel for features and updates, and as an informal outlet where we can post relevant stories and comments on online gaming. You know, the kind of stuff blogs were invented for.

Updated frontpage
We’ve also completely revamped our frontpage and the features section. It’s got a big blue header, but more importantly, we wanted to take a lot of the learnings and feedback we’ve received from our customers about our old layout and apply it to a new version.

Once the decision to update the frontpage was made, we thought we might as well go the whole mile and get some professorial help with the messaging and copy text. So we got in contact with Joanna Wiebe from www.page99test.com, and we were lucky that she had time to lend us a helping hand. Joanna is currently writing an e-book on web copy writing and we’re already convinced it’s going to be a must have for anybody writing web copy.

Here are some of the shortcomings of the old version that we wanted to address:

• Unclear value proposition
  This is the big one. You had to browse around the site for a while in order to understand what Player.IO is and the value it provides, so a major goal was simply to better communicate our value proposition on the frontpage above the fold.
• Focused on existing customers rather than new visitors
  Obviously this is bad if you want to convert new visitors to customers.

• Our scrolling top section was moving too fast
  The old scrolling section would change every 5th section in a hopeless effort to show as much as possible. It had the almost the opposite effect; you didn’t have enough time to read one section before it would change to the next so you didn’t get to take anything in.
• No clear overview of our features and benefits
  The list of features was contained inside the scrolling section so you couldn’t get a quick understanding of what was available.
• Not enough focus on happy customers
  We’ve got some great costumers on Player.IO already (M&M’s, TWBA, BBDO, IMVU… just to name a few), which wasn’t getting enough attention on the old frontpage
• No call to action
  When you reached the end of the frontpage, we expected users interested in trying out the service to scroll to the top and click the small ‘sign up’-link in the top right corner. Instead, we wanted to add call to action links and buttons (“Try it now, it’s free”) at those key places where users are most interested in trying us out.

For comparison, here is the old and new version (click to view large).

The new frontpage and features section is live now, so give it a whirl, and give us your feedback in the comments below.