Case Study: Pocket Gems achieves higher player engagement and a global real-time community with PubNub

How Pocket Gems Improves Player Engagement

Pocket Gems, a San Francisco–based mobile game studio with 11 years of experience, builds graphically rich multiplayer titles including the 3D real-time strategy game War Dragons (initial build 2013). As War Dragons grew, the team found their in-house chat and update systems couldn’t scale for fast-paced, multi-player battles and global events, creating a risk to real-time gameplay and player engagement.

Pocket Gems implemented PubNub in 2014 to power in-game chat, real-time updates, and Datadog dashboards—deploying chat overnight and scaling to support worldwide weekly battles with up to hundreds of concurrent players. The result: seamless private and group communication, instant event notifications, easier issue detection and response, and higher player retention and engagement—many players who joined after PubNub’s deployment remain active today.

Pocket Gems

Ashik Manandhar

Engineering Director