Wildlife uses Embrace to maintain high technical performance, better player experience, and higher potential for organic distribution

Wildlife is one of the largest mobile gaming companies in the world. With offices located in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Israel, and Ireland, their portfolio of over 60 games engages billions of players around the world.

Maintaining high technical performance for games is crucial to provide players a better experience (which leads to higher retention) and to increase the potential for organic distribution. After all, games with bad crash and ANR rates will have lower rankings in the Google Play Store and App Store. Wildlife needed a solution that helped them maintain a high level of technical performance so they could improve their organic distribution, user experience, and developer productivity.

Embrace’s unified mobile monitoring and observability platform has helped Wildlife reach the following:

• Wildlife keeps games consistently below the Google Play Console bad behavior thresholds.
• Wildlife has increased the frequency in which some of its games are being featured across the Google Play Store and App Store.
• Wildlife has deeper insights than with any other tool they have tried.
• Wildlife has more reliable insights so they can focus on actual issues and not false alarms.
• Wildlife can now anticipate issues before having to hear about them from players.

Founded in Brazil in 2011, Wildlife Studios is on a quest to create games that stand the test of time. While they are always working on new games, they are actively investing in new content for 5-6 live games while supporting their extensive portfolio of over 60 games.

Wildlife strives to maximize game quality and organic discoverability by meeting the strict technical requirements of the Google Play Store and App Store. In order to maintain a successful catalog of mobile games and deliver cutting-edge experiences to a worldwide audience on vastly different devices, Wildlife closely monitors the technical performance of their games.

In order to continually delight users for years to come, Wildlife chose Embrace to help them efficiently identify and solve issues that were resulting in poor user experiences and negative business outcomes.

Sniper 3D is an online PvP shooting game that is one of Wildlife’s longest-running and most-played games. It is also one of the most challenging games in terms of managing ANR rates. This is due to the complexity of the game, the scale of users and devices that play the game, and the fact that Wildlife actively builds new content into the game to this day.

To keep Sniper 3D below the Google Play Store ANR threshold, Wildlife leveraged Embrace’s ANR Monitoring. With this tool, they were given the data to investigate several different hypotheses and decide on the best course of action to bring the ANR rate down.

The flame graph insights were contrasted with data collected from performance simulations, such as forced out-of-memory, which helped Wildlife rule out several hypotheses of causality. Wildlife then delved deeper into the analysis of OnPause which showed rendering violations.

Since OnPause is when ads are shown, one major hypothesis was to disable specific ad providers that use Wildlife’s renderer. Embrace highlighting where Wildlife could focus their investigation helped save the team time and converge on a drastic solution.

In Sniper 3D’s case, low-end devices account for low revenue levels, and ads were disabled for the less profitable providers. In addition, the negative impact in downloads due to poor technical performance was evident.

Color by Number is a fun game that allows users to create beautiful artwork through painting, coloring, and drawing. The Color by Number team discovered a crash on Android that was related to an ad network bug. This crash only appeared in Embrace’s Crash Reporting, not in other crash reporting tools.

Not only does Embrace help Wildlife identify issues that appear nowhere else, but it also helps Wildlife identify “false positives”. Another crash monitoring tool pointed to a bug in Color by Number; however, Embrace’s Error Monitoring did not show this issue. The team found out that this was actually a library error from the crash reporting tool itself and not something that belonged to the game code. This helped the team avoid spending time investigating a problem that didn’t actually exist.

Finally, the thoroughness of Embrace’s analytics provides game teams enough context within the full user experience to understand the true nature of issues that show up.

With Embrace, Wildlife can mitigate some of the risk when launching new games. While there are many factors that go into a successful game, solid technical game performance is a requirement, and Embrace’s best-in-class monitoring and observability provides the visibility needed to quickly shore up gaps.

Before Embrace, the Tennis Clash team would sometimes depend on the player community to manually report problems. Since Embrace collects game data and sends alerts in near real-time, the team is now empowered to proactively address issues the instant they appear.

In the ultra-competitive mobile games market, companies like Wildlife know the importance of delighting users with superior technical game performance. A constant challenge with games is the difficulty in delivering incredible experiences to users all over the world across a myriad of devices. With so many variables to contend with, success comes down to having the best data to quickly take action and make the best decisions.

Learn how you can identify your blind spots and make the best business decisions for your mobile games, like Wildlife, by starting a free trial today.