Rovio’s Beacon platform simplifies game development with industry leading tech, and allows game teams to focus on making the best games for their players.
Beacon is a powerful platform developed by Rovio that simplifies development, publishing, updates, and live operations for a game of any genre.
With a simple SDK integration, game teams gain access to a multitude of features enabling faster and streamlined game development, growth through user acquisition, flexible LiveOps and game monetization. Beacon supports game teams throughout the entire lifecycle of the game.
We want game teams to be able to focus on crafting the best games, while Beacon aims to take care of the rest. Using shared services offered by Beacon in a game speeds up development and reduces maintenance effort.
The Beacon dashboard allows game developers, analysts, LiveOps managers, and UA specialists to quickly configure and customize the game, bringing the perfect experience for every player.
Launch – baseline tools to launch your game
Beacon features a set of tools and services that simplify game project setup, development, and publishing. Among them, access to a wide knowledge base and best practices shared by the game teams across Rovio, analytics pipeline, data visualization and highly customizable dashboards, asset management for seamless in-game content updates, a game server configuration template, build tooling, and a buildtracker for building and distributing games to app stores and others. Tools that fall under the Launch area of Beacon also ensure that best practices as well as platform and regional regulations are addressed early on in the project.
Grow – marketing toolkit to ensure profitable user acquisition
Beacon assists game teams in running user acquisition campaigns smarter and more profitably. Both internal and third party tooling, designed to maximize the impact of digital marketing efforts, is included in the platform. For example, Beacon leverages Singular for attribution and campaign measurement.
Revenue attribution and real-time dashboards, dedicated to tracking the performance of user acquisition campaigns, offer a single 360 degree view on players.
Audience Builder allows granular segmentation of the audience and exporting user sets for user acquisition campaign targeting.
The business intelligence specialists embedded in the Beacon team provide solutions for campaign performance modeling, automation, and measuring return on investment.
Engage – out-of-the-box features to keep players engaged
We have first-hand experience and a deep understanding of the perfect set of ingredients required to grow the audience and create life-time fans. Beacon tools for player engagement play a big role and allow you to do just that.
With Beacon, you can easily configure and run user segmentation and experiments, to determine what content, offers, campaigns, price points, level difficulty, and so on work best for a given player segment.
Personalization and prediction are aided by machine learning (ML) technology, which is available out of the box with Beacon. Built-in ML makes it possible to create highly personalized experiences for each and every player, catering to individual preferences that are measured across a wide range of touch points.
Beacon helps game teams deliver a fun and rewarding experience that players want to come back to over and over again.
Experiments framework and reports is one of the fundamental parts of Beacon. It aids A/B test executions to ensure that the ideal campaign or offer is selected for individual players.
The LiveOps Calendar is another great example of how we bring our games to life every day – with in-game seasonal events, daily events, offers to be scheduled on-the-fly across multiple time-zones – all configured in the Beacon dashboard.
Beacon includes support for in-game messaging, push messages, surveys, chat, and unified user account management to help drive user engagement which, in turn, contributes to higher user retention and LTV.
Earn – Intelligent tools to maximize game monetization
Beacon allows configuring and managing game monetization with both in-app purchases and ads, with segmentation and ML available to enhance the configuration.
For in-app purchases, Beacon offers a single catalog for virtual products featured in the game and works seamlessly with the application stores including Apple’s App Store, Google Play, Amazon, Windows, and Steam.
Beacon opens up access to a large number of ad networks, and allows player targeted ad placement and ad format configurations – rewarded video, interstitials, banners, and cross-promotion.
Beacon’s monetization toolkit is powered by our in-house mediation, developed over the course of over ten years. Beacon mediates over 30 different ads sources as well as Rovio’s own cross promotion and brand campaigns, and has been benchmarked against the leading mediation platforms available on the market.
Player safety and privacy
Players are at the very heart of the Beacon platform, as every feature is developed with player experience and player safety in mind. The Beacon platform helps game developers create a safe environment for the players, across all aspects of the game.
With Beacon, game teams gain access to a range of player safety features including profanity filtering for the user-generated content (UGC), age check, and player reporting tools.
Players’ privacy is considered throughout Beacon functionality and players’ personal data is handled in accordance with the latest legislation and regulations to ensure that players are protected. For players, Beacon enables control over their data sharing to third party partners, as well as data erasure. This significantly minimizes the amount of time a game team would normally need to comply with GDPR, COPPA, and other privacy legislation.
In addition to the functionality included in the Beacon SDK and platform overall, the team of experts behind Beacon ensures that all the latest requirements from platforms, regulators, 3rd party SDKs, and other relevant regulators are monitored and fulfilled well in time. On top of technical solutions, the Beacon team offers guidance and advice to the game teams on the necessary changes and execution.
Powerful technology at the core of Beacon
The platform at the core of Beacon ensures interconnectedness and a solid foundation for all Beacon services and features. It comprises data, build tooling, microservices, and cloud infrastructure.
Data as a service offers a single “source of truth” to operate services and automate actions: ingestion, data pipeline and transformation, machine learning.
Build tools and infrastructure as a service are available for games to build on, commit and manage the QA and publishing processes.
Microservices and capabilities, like the Beacon Unity and native SDKs and the Beacon Dashboard, are designed from the ground up to make our product offering easy to adopt and make the most of.
Cloud infrastructure hosts data and services, running 24×7 year round with recorded uptime of over 99.95%. Beacon is built on Amazon Web Services.
Made by game developers
The culmination of over 10 years of mobile game industry learnings, Beacon makes it easy to provide a safe and amazing user experience for players. Beacon is available to all Rovio game teams from day one, providing a comprehensive platform for launching and operating games of any genre.
Beacon is so much more than a platform. It is a team of game technology experts and enthusiasts, working alongside game teams, to support them every step of the way in creating the most delightful experiences for the players.