HeadSpin Gains Momentum in Mobile Gaming Industry with New Customers and NetEase Partnership

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 20, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Mobile performance platform leader HeadSpin announced today it has signed several new mobile gaming companies, including Zynga (Words with Friends), Bandai Namco Studios (Pac-Man) and Jam City (Panda Pop). Further expanding the reach of the HeadSpin Mobile Performance Platform (MPP), the company also announced a partnership with NetEase to help game developers with automated and compatible testing across HeadSpin's global device pool.

HeadSpin enables game developers to identify potential performance issues and bottlenecks to improve user retention and increase revenue from their games. "Our gaming customers said that over 30 percent of people left their game due to a bad experience, and they needed help to bring that number down," said HeadSpin founder and CEO Manish Lachwani. "With the HeadSpin platform, mobile gaming developers now have the tools they need to ensure they provide outstanding customers experiences, so players stay fully invested in their games."

As mobile gaming apps are among the highest grossing in the Apple App Store and Google Play store, they rely on a client-heavy architecture in which content is preloaded into an app. These apps require a different set of tools than what exists in the market. HeadSpin's platform helps mobile game developers monitor client-side app performance in extreme detail all the way down to the code level. It can tell a developer which specific lines of code are actually impacting the CPU, using up device memory, etc.

Game developers such as Zynga, NetEase and Jam City are utilizing the platform's real-time data collection and are creating more engaging games with it. "The HeadSpin platform helps us understand client side and client-server performance issues in international markets. This helps us fix these problems in our game prior to launch," Zynga Senior Architect Ajinkya Apte said.

HeadSpin's groundbreaking partnership with NetEase will bring a lot of value to game developers. NetEase's Airtest Project is the leading automation testing solution for game developers. It is a cross-platform UI test automation integrated development environment (IDE) for apps and games. AirtestIDE currently supports testing of Android and Windows applications, with support for iOS coming soon. NetEase has been using this technology to test several of its flagship games, including Fantasy Westward Journey, A Chinese Odyssey, Onmyoji, Knives Out and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. This partnership will unlock a powerful solution for game developers to improve the performance of their games.

"The NetEase-HeadSpin partnership will help game developers with exactly what has been missing. Until now, third-party game developers haven't had the ability to create, execute and automate tests, as mobile games are very complex and have a lot of moving parts. With NetEase's Airtest Project and HeadSpin, it will be easier for them to automate their functional and performance tests on global devices. This will significantly improve their game performance and revenue potential," NetEase Director of Quality Bo Xiong said.

As competition becomes more fierce in the $70-billion mobile gaming market, gaming developers need to greatly reduce if not completely eliminate bad user experiences such as low FPS (frames per second), battery/CPU drain and difficulty with in-app purchases. These issues can be costly, negatively affecting user retention and revenue. To mitigate these issues, mobile game developers   need full visibility into client-side game performance so they can precisely monitor factors such as video quality and third-party game engine performance while also understanding how these factors can affect one another.

With HeadSpin, mobile game developers can:

• Test gaming experience using real devices in real locations under real network conditions. No other mobile platform on the market today can do this on a global scale like HeadSpin.
• Understand game performance across multi-cloud devices. The HeadSpin dashboard gives mobile game developers high-quality insights such as FPS data and perceptive quality metrics (such as blur or flickering) — and show how they correlate with CPU, disk, memory and other I/O usage.
• Assess comprehensive client-side and client-server metrics. Find root causes of FPS drops, locate where the drop occurred and quickly determine how to address the problem.
• Test and monitor performances of in-app transactions. HeadSpin lets developers test and monitor different kinds of in-app purchases (credit cards, gift cards, Apple Pay, PayPal, bill to a telco network, etc.) to ensure a fast and easy purchase experience.
• Track third-party game engines. Show how programs such as Unity, Unreal and Cocos2d impact app performance and user experience.
• Understand performance of advertising campaigns. Companies want to see the performance of in-game advertising campaigns and understand the impact of these advertisements on player retention and engagement.

Recently, HeadSpin acquired NimbleDroid to create the industry's most comprehensive platform for mobile app and site testing, performance management and user experience monitoring. For mobile game developers, the addition of NimbleDroid technology to HeadSpin's platform helps them better deal with the growing complexities of user environments, device fragmentation and different network characteristics — enabling them to do their jobs faster and better.

About HeadSpin
HeadSpin is the complete solution for all your mobile performance and user experience needs. Through its Mobile Performance Platform (MPP), HeadSpin provides mobile application developers, carrier networks, device OEMs and CDN providers with detailed visibility into user experience issues across every layer of the mobile ecosystem — from client to server. MPP consists of more than 22,000 SIM-enabled devices in more than 150 locations. This enables customers to quickly debug, test and optimize for user experience and performance under real-world conditions around the world. HeadSpin's customers serve approximately 3 billion of the world's mobile users. Find out how why HeadSpin is trusted by some of the largest enterprises in the world at https://www.headspin.io or on Twitter @HeadSpin_IO.

Media Contact:

Kristen Strem
[email protected]

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