Mobile games have become an integral part of the industry landscape over the last few years. With devices becoming more and more powerful and internet connectivity becoming ubiquitous, there is potential for a lot of innovation and these are exciting times for mobile developers. However, with increasing competition, the challenge is to make games that keep their users constantly engaged and compel them to keep coming back.

Daily and All-time leader board

Adding leader boards to your game is a natural way of engaging users. Hard core gamers like to brag and are always interested in beating the best and it is not uncommon to see them posting screenshots with their highest scores on their Facebook walls. However, most of the users of a game are not going to be hard-core gamers and would not be interested in seeing the leader boards and posting scores on their Facebook wall if their ranking is say 21,053! It will also not interest them in seeing who is at the top of the tree and with how many points, if they are not even close. How can we engage such casual gamers through leader boards? The idea is to develop leader boards, which are more relevant to the user by making them social. We make them social by showing a user where they stand amongst their friends. So while it may not interest a casual gamer to see how they are doing compared to random strangers across the world – they would want to see how they are doing compared to their colleagues, classmates, siblings etc.

Friends and Global leader board

A prerequisite for mobile developers to build such relevant and engaging experiences, is the data storage on the cloud and its efficient retrieval in the desired form. Its time consuming to deploy your own DB on the cloud, cluster it, secure it and then expose it as a web-service in the form desired by your game running inside a user’s device. App42 leader board APIs make this task easy by providing SDKs to access and save your game scores on our readymade backend. App developers can determine the relevant user list according to their App’s user management such as Facebook friends, Twitter followers, Instagram followers or their own in-App buddy lists. Through simple API calls from the SDK, App42 backend will fetch the data requested from the backend. Of course, App42 leader board APIs also provide global leader boards and leader boards based on time such as daily, weekly top scorers etc. Another great thing is that you are not tied to a particular platform since App42 leader board SDKs are available for all devices like iOS, Android, J2ME, Windows Phone, Blackberry etc.This is great if you are a mobile developer as you need not hire a backend expert or learn these technologies yourself, reducing your time to market. Go ahead and try right now!