Shai Magzimof, co-founder and CEO of Nextpeer, the leading multiplayer SDK for mobile game developers, spoke about the benefits of multiplayer capabilities during Casual Connect USA 2014. “One of the biggest things to remember when making it multiplayer is to keep it simple,” he explained. “A lot of game developers tend to think that multiplayer is very complicated, and actually there are some ways to make it much more simple.”
Magzimof always dreamed about working in the games industry. But in Israel, the industry is not large, so his answer to this situation was to form a company and create his own opportunities. Now, he finds it great fun to play games at work with no one thinking it’s wrong or a waste of time.
Some Family Fun
Magzimof became excited about the video games at a very early age. One of his first memories is seeing his father come home from work, have dinner with the family, and begin playing one of his C&C (Command & Conquer) strategy games on the PC in their home. Eventually, he and his brother became addicted to playing as well, and at least once a week, they would get together with his uncle and have their own LAN party. They would bring all their computers into the living room, create a local HUB (this was before they knew of Wi-Fi and dynamic IP address), and play for hours.
Socializing Digitally
Today, he describes himself as a digital socializer, playing with friends online every weekend, although he does enjoy reading and watching movies as well. One of the games he enjoys most is Call of Duty, and since most of his friends live in other cities or countries, the best time for them to connect is through playing as a group against other groups. He also plays 2048, saying, “It is just addicting, and it is even better because the developer behind it is using our multiplayer SDK.” Another game he plays with friends is Dota and only a month ago he got hooked on League of War from MunkyFun and Gree; although he admits he doesn’t know why, he says, “I can’t miss a day without playing at least 30 minutes.” He also plays Minecraft with friends on a daily basis.
Rise of the Smartphones
Magzimof credits the rise of mobile gaming with something that gives him great satisfaction: Almost everyone understands what he is doing. His mother, father, grandmother, and his siblings are playing games on their smartphones that are integrated with Nextpeer. They can see what he has created. He states, “It’s an amazing feeling to see everyone in your family using your product, especially since I’m only 23 years old.”
Discovering A Challenge
The most difficult challenge Magzimof sees facing the games industry today is discovery. He points out that it is very difficult to get a game out and into the mass market; and only the largest and wealthiest gaming companies can afford the cost of acquiring large numbers of users. There are rare, successful indie developers with highly addictive games, but he emphasizes that it is extremely difficult to get into the top ranks of the app stores.
Nextpeer attempts to alleviate this problem through cross-promoting players in their multiplayer games. Magzimof claims, “Our theory is that players want good games, and if they like our multiplayer mode, they will probably like a game with a similar multiplayer mode.”
He believes the future will bring many games adding multiplayer functionality and discovery tools. He sees playing together online becoming more and more popular as discovery becomes more difficult. These are exactly the issues Nextpeer is working on, to enable developers to add multiplayer mode to their games and to get discovered.
At Casual Connect USA, Magzimof was excited to announce that Nextpeer had reached 120 million downloads of their multiplayer SDK.
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