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Case Study

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

Embrace is the best monitoring solution we’ve found for our mobile games. The depth of insights they provide allows us to understand which issues to address and gives us the data our teams need to solve them. We can make better decisions for our business and users because of our partnership with Embrace.
Bruno Dreux Director of Engineering Operations

Customer

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.

Challenge

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.

Results

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.

Wildlife is on a mission to liberate and elevate game creators to help the world play, learn, and interact

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.

Wildlife reduced ANR rates on one of its largest games, which led to an increase in Play Store features

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.

Through investigations into Sniper 3D and data from Embrace, we understood that during Sniper’s ANR incidents, 60% of the time the game is on OnPause, 30% in WebViews, and 10% other miscellaneous calls. Therefore, we directed the initiative to investigate what happens during OnPause, through hypothesis validation with A/B tests.
Eduardo Fantini Senior Manager of Graphics and Technical Performance

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.

After investigating every lead that Embrace gave us, we found the best way to reduce our ANR rate was to disable ads for a subset of devices and stop supporting the game for very low-end devices. This allowed us to minimize the revenue impact while boosting our Play Store visibility. Embrace helped us to test the right things and discard ideas that would not lead us anywhere.
Pablo Santos Technical Director of Sniper 3D

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.

Since implementing this solution, we have consistently been below the ANR threshold, which has considerably increased the frequency that the game is featured in the Play Store.
Lucas Klegen Manager of Engineering Operations

Wildlife quickly solved a crash that did not show up in other monitoring tools and was impacting hundreds of thousands of players

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.

When our team investigated the impact, it was affecting hundreds of thousands of users and would have continued to do so without the visibility provided by Embrace.
Vinícius Daros Technical Director of Color by Number

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.

Embrace’s Session Timelines helped us identify the true nature of an error that would have been difficult to do in other providers. The bug occurred on the home screen, so it appeared to be an initialization bug. However, since Embrace provides the full context of the user session, we found these bugs happen in very long sessions, which pointed us towards them being related to memory issues instead. This helped us work on the right solution instead of pursuing false leads
Vinícius Daros Technical Director of Color by Number

Wildlife improved retention and increased DAU (daily active users) by monitoring technical performance in a new game launch

Sky Warriors is an air combat game in which players can fly a modern fighter jet in multiplayer battles. Wildlife launched this game with Embrace and closely monitored its technical game performance to improve its chances for success. The Sky Warriors team noticed a chat implementation bug that appeared as a generic error in other crash monitoring tools, leaving them little to go on to solve the issue. However, the bug caused crashes for many players when using the chat feature.

Embrace identified the exact line of code that was causing the crash, and by solving it, we improved our crash rate from 1.2% to 0.3%. This increased the frequency our game was featured in the Play Store and improved the user experience, which may partially explain why DAU increased after the fix.
Patrick Sava Technical Director of Sky Warriors

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.

Wildlife reduced issue remediation timelines in Tennis Clash by several days

Tennis Clash is a real-time tennis game designed to be the ultimate tennis experience on mobile. The game consistently ranks among the top sports games on the App Store, and was selected as one of 2019’s top five competitive games on the Google Play Store. The Tennis Clash team uses Embrace’s Alerts to monitor the technical performance so they can be notified of abrupt increases in errors or crashes.

We sometimes remotely perform a change or improvement in the game that unfortunately results in a regression. When we receive the alert from Embrace, we can quickly revert changes to mitigate the impact and improve the user experience.
Guilherme Gibertoni Technical Director of Tennis Clash

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.

Embrace is now an essential part of how Wildlife ships successful mobile games

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.

Before Embrace, our game teams would frequently struggle to solve the toughest issues affecting our users and business. While there is never a silver bullet when it comes to improving technical game performance, Embrace is the best solution to Wildlife. They provide the data and expertise that helps us continue to deliver incredible mobile game experiences to players all over the world.
Bruno Dreux Director of Engineering Operations

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.

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