The soft­ware infra­struc­ture devel­op­er for cross-plat­form gam­ing, Play­er­Scale, has just announced that its users now num­ber over 100 million.

The Bel­mont, Cal­i­for­nia start­up was only found­ed in 2011 but is now health­ily cash-flow pos­i­tive, which isn’t bad for a self-fund­ed out­fit that most gamesters will be unaware that they’re using. Its focus on build­ing archi­tec­ture places it as a back­end ser­vice for game devel­op­ers, so it’s unlike­ly that many amongst those 100 mil­lion con­sid­er them­selves as Play­er­Scale users, even though that’s exact­ly what they are.

Why game devel­op­ers like PlayerScale

As any astute busi­ness devel­op­ment asso­ciate, chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer or prod­uct man­ag­er can tell you, when you’ve got 100 mil­lion play­ers using your tools, you’re reach­ing an impres­sive­ly broad audi­ence. The like­li­hood is that this fig­ure rep­re­sents unique users, not sim­ply repeats: PlayerScale’s CEO, Jes­per Jensen, explains that users log-in through Face­book after cre­at­ing in-game pro­files. That means there may be a few repeats but most of those 100 mil­lion are unique users.

The start­up offers a solu­tion to gam­ing com­pa­nies, many of which find that back­end infra­struc­ture devel­op­ment eats up more than half of their game pro­duc­tion time. With Play­er­Scale, these com­pa­nies are spared such tedious time lags: the plat­form not only offers in-game chat, mul­ti­play­er sup­port, play­er match­mak­ing, data man­age­ment and inte­gra­tion with pay­ments sys­tems, it also works on con­sole, PC/Mac, brows­er-based and mobile games.

Jensen says:

“The rapid pro­lif­er­a­tion of mul­ti­ple plat­forms com­bined with users want­i­ng to access their games any­where and on any device has cre­at­ed a chal­lenge for devel­op­ers over the last year.  Play­er­Scale was designed from the ground up to give users con­tin­u­ous con­tent across all devices mak­ing the gam­ing expe­ri­ence rich­er while giv­ing devel­op­ers the abil­i­ty to build user loy­al­ty and increase rev­enues across their gam­ing portfolio.”

Onwards and upwards

The firm’s chief rev­enue offi­cer is like­ly to be very pleased with its growth: it’s cur­rent­ly being imple­ment­ed on 4,000 games devised by more than 2,600 game devel­op­ers, includ­ing big names like Con Artist Games, 505 games and SGN (Social Gam­ing Network).

A major goal of the com­pa­ny, accord­ing to Jensen, is to free game devel­op­ers to con­cen­trate on the cre­ative aspects of game con­struc­tion by tak­ing care of the back­end soft­ware infra­struc­ture. And it seems that more and more game devel­op­ers are catch­ing on to that message.