Bandai Namco Mobile: Using the Latest in Game Tech to Build on a Legacy

Bandai Namco Goes Mobile

If you’ve been gaming at any point in the past 50 years chances are the name Bandai Namco immediately conjures up waves of nostalgia and memories of countless hours with your favorite title from their legendary catalog. In 2019, Bandai Namco Mobile was established in order to bring those decades of experience and expertise to the mobile gaming industry, and we here at Heroic Labs could not be more excited to be a part of that journey by providing our industry leading game tech to this innovative studio.

Andre Parodi, Engineer at Bandai Namco Mobile, recently joined us for an in-depth discussion about his own journey to and through the gaming industry, and how Heroic Labs is enabling their small and dynamic team at Bandai Namco Mobile to accelerate their development cycle and focus on the fun, creative aspects of the job while we help solve the complexity of the backend.

An Eclectic Journey into the Present

A self-described “lifelong casual gamer” and Mechanical Engineer by formal education, it was only an innate curiosity and desire to explore and learn that led Andre down the path of a self-taught developer, then to Barcelona where, on a whim, he found himself interviewing for a position with King - now the mobile gaming giant best known for Candy Crush - as they were establishing a local studio.

He started with King as a backend developer (and ultimately moved up to Technical Director), working on early titles such as Papapear and the Bubble Witch series. The technology and methodology in use during those days would hardly be recognized in today’s industry - all the hardware was on-premise, the entirety of the tech stack was developed in-house, and there was little option but to build anything you needed yourself. It was these years spent with King at levels ranging from entry-level dev to senior management that shaped Andre’s views on the intricacies and difficulties of building and maintaining all of your internal tooling and infrastructure.

A New Start with a Legendary Legacy

In much the same way that happenstance found Andre with King as they launched a Barcelona office, it also led him to Bandai Namco as they launched their mobile focused studio in the same city.

As the first engineer in this new studio with “the freedom of a gaming startup with the resources of a gaming giant,” the initial inclination was to follow historical patterns and build their own in-house stack. But again that natural curiosity and desire to explore the latest developments in technology called out:

“By this time all of these systems had been built countless times throughout the industry, and unless you really have to build it yourself there’s no reason to, game tech has improved so much in the interim, with Heroic Labs as a prime example.”

In building out this studio, Bandai Namco wanted to keep the team small, highly experienced, and diversely capable. These same principles would guide the search for their backend, and wider game tech provider.

A Lot of Options, One Clear Choice

As the gaming industry has grown so has the ecosystem of game tech companies supporting it, so the Bandai Namco Mobile team had no shortage of options when it came to finding a backend solution and game tech provider.

The studio conducted extensive due diligence on the range of solutions available in the market, eventually exploring the solutions provided by our partner Amazon Web Services (AWS) which recommended Heroic Labs. From the vast network of AWS partners, Heroic Labs and the Heroic Game Stack remain the premier and most recommended solution for the gaming industry.

“With Nakama and Hiro the implementation of most meta features was already done, and we could get up and running very quickly. Heroic Labs provides a lot of the plumbing that you don’t want to be doing - building, deploying, scaling - and works great right out of the box.”

The simplified development cycle provided by Nakama and Heroic Labs also came with cost benefits as well, with a fixed, predictable pricing model as opposed to the per-API, usage based fees usually standard with SaaS platforms that could quickly lead to ballooning and unmanageable expenses. Coupled with the reduced long-term risk exposure due to Nakama being open-source, the decision “became an obvious one.”

A Hiro of the Highest Order

The Bandai Namco Mobile team were also excited by the products and benefits of the Heroic Game Stack beyond those provided by Nakama and Heroic Cloud. Hiro has become an indispensable tool for Andre and his team as they develop the next generation of titles for Bandai Namco Mobile:

“Anyone adopting Nakama for mobile games would see immediate value with Hiro. You could release a full game using Hiro’s configurations alone, no custom development required. The APIs are well designed, and extensible, enabling us to do in 2 days what would have been a full sprint’s worth of work before.”

A New Chapter

Bandai Namco Mobile were founded with the aim of creating innovative games and new intellectual property to complement the tremendously successful games and IP coming from Japan. As an integral partner on that journey they have selected Heroic Labs and our suite of products to build and power all of their upcoming titles.

With Hiro and the rest of the Heroic Game Stack, we’re excited to be part of the next generation of games from Bandai Namco Mobile as they build upon the legacy of Bandai Namco and bring their new titles into the mobile gaming arena.