“Put your own stamp on the game, not on the plumbing”

• We speak to Skillz and Beamable at the former’s acquisition of the latter and what it means.
• Developers share their insights on building their own tooling and tech stack.

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The old mobile monetisation playbook is caving under the weight of rising UA costs and increasing pressure to extract more value from every player. In that environment, simply layering ads on top of IAPs or optimising the same funnel doesn’t cut it.

Instead, developers need to sharpen their focus on ways to take back control of progression without taking on more technical debt. 

This is the playbook Justin Graysmark, founder of EPlay Studios, followed to build a successful business around competitive games for real rewards. 

Today, his portfolio spans 25 titles and two million installs. It’s growth he attributes to a simple and consistent formula. “Find out what the audience likes and build backwards from the player perspective.” Just as important, he understands that developers win by investing in the experience, not the underlying infrastructure. “If players feel a game is fair and competitive,” Graysmark says, “they’ll be back.”

It’s a similar story with Derek Day and Jamie Young, cousins and co-founders of Emerald City Games. After bootstrapping their studio from a basement in 2008 and going on to ship major licensed titles, including Star Trek and Tomb Raider, they learned that the real edge comes from choosing carefully what to own. As Day puts it, the goal is to “put your own stamp on the game, not on the plumbing”.

Moving beyond the core

Increasingly, growth is moving beyond the core, pushing developers to treat competition, progression, live ops and monetisation as part of the same business. Touch Mechanics knows this firsthand. Brothers and co-founders Carl and Grant Crossley have spent more than 20 years rebuilding familiar formats like bowling, darts and now pool for mobile with controls that feel fair, intuitive and earned.

Their games have lasted because they got the core loop right first. And that, more than any one feature, is what makes the wider system matter. As Carl puts it: “If the game doesn’t feel right at the centre, nothing layered on top will save it.”

Connect the dots and developers are looking for more ways to build monetisation into the player experience. They also need more room to shape progression and live ops, and fewer reasons to spend time building infrastructure that doesn’t differentiate the product in the first place. Fortunately, platforms are catching up. 

A “business operating system” for studios

It’s a perfect storm of pressures, where UA budgets are rising fast, monetisation has to do more work and developers are being pushed to think bigger.

That shift was one of the clearest signals at GDC this year, where the conversation moved from making games to running them as businesses. It’s driving developers to explore more monetisation options, demand more control and tolerate less drag from systems and infrastructure. 

To understand what that means in practice, PocketGamer.biz head of content Craig Chapple and I sat down on-site with executives from Skillz and Beamable to unpack how platforms are evolving to give studios more ways to build, launch and scale. 

We also dug into what has changed since Skillz acquired Beamable in February. The deal brings Beamable’s backend and live ops technology into the Skillz platform, allowing it to expand beyond competition infrastructure alone into the systems developers need to build, operate and monetise live games.

That matters because developers are increasingly being asked to run live games like businesses, but too many are still doing it through disconnected tools, slow workflows and infrastructure. “The problem gets even worse when those systems sit in silos, teams move slower, spend more and learn less,” Beamable co-founder and CPO Jon Radoff tells us. 

The focus for the Skillz and Beamable partnership is on building what Radoff calls “a business operating system for a game studio”. The goal is to give developers more room to shape progression, experiment with virtual economies and add revenue streams around competitive monetisation.

That also explains why Skillz is broadening its overall approach and positioning itself to create “several different ways developers can monetise, not just through tournaments, but through the kinds of progression and engagement systems players now expect in live games,” Robert Burnett, interim CEO of Beamable and head of new content at Skillz, tells us.

The company’s earlier model centered around competitive monetisation, but it also limited front-end freedom and left developers with only one revenue stream: wager-based tournaments. Pro SDK is designed to open that up. 

Released at GDC, it expands the development framework inside Unity, giving developers more control over the full gameplay experience while opening up richer meta systems and more flexible monetisation. It also marks a shift in where Skillz fits in the game lifecycle. 

“With Pro SDK, developers get more control over how competition sits inside the game, how progression works around it, and how monetisation can extend beyond a single revenue stream,” Burnett says.

Rapid development 

GDC also marked the debut of Puzzle Blockz, a game that shows the combined Skillz-Beamable stack in action.

It also gives us a glimpse of what can happen when “competition, progression and live ops stop sitting in separate layers” and start working as part of the same business system, Burnett explains. “Technology in a vacuum is dangerous,” he adds. “Unless you properly integrate it into a product, you really can’t tell if it works.”

Burnett claims bringing Beamable into Puzzle Blockz took “less than three days”, giving the team access to a much richer progression and content system than it had originally planned. 

Developers want more ways to monetise, more control over how those systems fit inside the game and fewer reasons to spend time owning infrastructure that doesn’t differentiate the product.

The next growth layer will belong to developers – and the platforms – that treat monetisation, progression, live ops and competition as part of the same business.