How Omeda migrated to Pragma and improved matchmaking

How Omeda migrated to Pragma and improved matchmaking

Founded in 2020 by Robbie Singh, Andrea Garella and Steven Meilleur, Omeda Studios is a fully remote game studio that builds community-driven games. Its first title, Predecessor, is a third-person action shooter MOBA that is live on PC and console. As a follow-on to the fan-favorite title Paragon that Epic shut down in 2017, Predecessor amassed one of the largest engaged audiences for an indie game developer, with more than 250k signups and nearly 50k Discord members prior to launch.

By the numbers:

• 5 months to migrate
• 1 million+ players
• 70% improvement in average match quality rating
• 66% reduction in average matchmaking queue time

Problem

While Omeda's previous backend provider allowed them to get the basics up and running, they quickly hit a wall where adding new online features became extremely slow and difficult.

With only a few months until the Predecessor global free-to-play launch, the Omeda team determined that their backend was not reliable nor customizable enough to enable them to confidently deliver the game that fans had patiently waited for. The team couldn't build the custom matchmaker and a variety of meta game features they knew their player community needed. They were stuck with a "black box" backend that was preventing them from building the game as envisioned. Also, without access to the backend source code, they couldn't thoroughly test it, run it locally, and check for performance.

We really needed to be able to build the best matchmaker for Predecessor and for our community. And so that was probably the biggest single feature that drove our desire to want to be able to build everything from the ground up.

Solution

After thoroughly researching the landscape of backend providers, the team decided to partner up with Pragma on Predecessor for a few reasons:

• Complete extensibility, so that they could build everything they wanted for their loyal players.
• Full ownership, control and source code access, so they didn't have to take risks with third-party dependencies, and so that they'd have the ability to make the changes they want when they want.
• The experience of the Pragma team and their hands-on support model, including pre-launch load testing and live ops, so that they could launch and run the game with confidence.

We just needed to be able to control our own destiny, and you can't do that unless all of the code is in your hands and have the flexibility to make any changes you want.

Outcomes

Co-Development

For their backend engine, live game hosting and co-development, the Omeda team worked closely with the Pragma, Amazon GameLift and Code Wizards teams. Importantly, to ensure a seamless cutover, they thoroughly and realistically load-tested their backend using Pragma's standard, giving them the confidence that the game would stand up to more than 1M CCU.

After just 5 months, the new Pragma-powered backend was ready to go live, a remarkable feat of teamwork, expertise and technology.

Cutover

On March 28, 2024 Predecessor released as free-to-play (F2P) with global cross-platform play support for Epic Games Store, Steam, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S. The Pragma-powered backend helps Omeda serve over 1 million players.

Player Love

The live-game cutover was seamless and did not disrupt the player's experience, and it was followed by an increase in positive reviews and favorable comments from the player community. As an example, the new matchmaker that the Omeda team built on Pragma cut the average distance from highest to lowest player in a lobby by almost 70% and decreased average matchmaking queue times by 66%.

Taking on a rebuild of this nature and scale under this kind of time crunch and making the flip weeks before our free-to-play date was a pretty wild move but the talent and effort on the Omeda and Pragma teams was up for the task and we couldn't be happier.