Games That Ship and Retain Players
We build mobile, PC, and web games that pass certification, run on the phone your player actually owns, monetize without alienating the audience, and survive day 30. Unity and Unreal seniors, live-ops engineers, and producers who've shipped against real deadlines — not just made vertical slices that never reach the store.
You don't need a vertical slice.
You need a game that retains players on day 30.
Most game projects don't fail at design — they fail at shipping. The vertical slice looks great, then performance collapses on the target device, the soft launch numbers are flat, the monetization curve never bends, and the team runs out of runway before the live-ops loop is built. We design for the metrics that matter: retention, performance, install size, ARPDAU, and the cert team's checklist.
Soft launch numbers nobody can move
D1 is 22%, D7 is 4%, ARPDAU is flat, and there's no instrumentation to tell you which level players quit on. The team is throwing features at it instead of fixing the funnel.
Runs at 18fps on the target phone
Looks beautiful in the editor on a gaming PC. Drops to 18fps on the mid-tier Android the marketing team is targeting. Profiling never happened because there was no time.
Monetization that scared off the whales
Aggressive interstitials in the first session. Paywall on level 3. The 1-star reviews are about ads, not the game. The CPI is fine but the LTV is broken.
What You Actually Get
No vague deliverables. Here's exactly what lands in your hands.
A shipped, certified build
iOS, Android, Steam, console where applicable. Passes Apple, Google, Steamworks, and platform-holder certification. Store listings, age ratings, and assets all delivered.
Real telemetry and a tuning loop
GameAnalytics, Unity Analytics, or a custom pipeline. Funnels, retention cohorts, level difficulty curves, monetization events. Designed so the team can act on it weekly.
A live-ops backend
Remote config, A/B tests, events, leaderboards, IAP, server-authoritative economy. Built so designers can ship a new event without an engineer in the loop.
Source, art, and IP in your name
Your repo, your Perforce or Git LFS, your store accounts, your art source files. If we walked away tomorrow, your next studio could ship the next update.
A Real Game Development Team
Shipping a game well takes more than a Unity tutorial graduate. Six roles you get on every Pillai Infotech game build.
Senior Gameplay Engineer
Unity (C#) or Unreal (C++ / Blueprints), state machines, input, physics, AI behavior, ECS where it pays off. Has shipped multiple titles and knows what survives contact with players.
Performance & Graphics Engineer
URP, HDRP, custom shaders, draw call budgets, GPU profiling on real devices. Sets the frame budget on day one and enforces it on the target hardware, not the dev box.
Technical Artist
The bridge between art and engineering. Asset pipelines, texture budgets, LODs, lightmaps, shader graph, animation rigs. Stops the art team from accidentally killing the frame rate.
Live-Ops & Monetization Engineer
Remote config, A/B testing, IAP, ads mediation, server economy, anti-cheat. Designs the loop so the game keeps earning after launch — without burning out players.
Game QA with a Device Lab
Real phones from $150 Androids to flagship iPhones, gamepads, and the consoles you're targeting. Soak tests, balance passes, regression suites. Catches the bugs the cert team would catch — first.
Producer & Cert Lead
Walks the build through Apple, Google, Steam, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo cert. Handles age ratings, IARC, GDC, ESRB, PEGI. Knows what gets a build rejected and how to fix it the same day.
You See Everything. In Real Time.
Every Pillai Infotech project comes with a dedicated client dashboard. Kanban boards, live logs, test results, meeting notes — it's all visible the moment it happens. No status-report theatre, no "we'll get back to you", no surprises at the demo. You work with us like you work with your own team.
Kanban Board, Live
Every epic, every story, every task — visible on your dashboard. Drag, comment, reprioritize. It's the same board our team works from.
Documented Everything
Every decision, spec, API contract, and architecture diagram lives in the dashboard. Searchable, versioned, linked to the tasks they shaped.
Live Logs & Test Results
Build logs, deployment logs, test suite results — streamed to your dashboard the moment they run. You never have to ask "did the build pass?"
Meetings → Tasks, Automatically
Every meeting is recorded, transcribed, and every action point is auto-converted into a tracked task assigned to the right person. Nothing gets lost between calls.
Sprint Burndown & Velocity
See exactly how much work is done, how much remains, and our velocity over time. If a sprint is slipping, you see it the same moment we do.
Comment, Approve, Decide — In-Place
Comment on any task, approve designs, sign off on specs, and raise blockers directly in the dashboard. Everything tied to the work, not buried in email threads.
Games We Know How to Ship
We pick the engine and the architecture to match the game, not a portfolio piece.
📱 Mobile casual & hyper-casual
Tight loops, fast onboarding, ad-monetized, IAP-light. Built for sub-100MB install size, 60fps on mid-tier Android, and a soft-launch playbook.
⚔️ Mid-core mobile RPG / strategy
Server-authoritative economy, guilds, PvP, gacha or progression systems, live events. Built for D30 retention and a long content roadmap.
🖥️ PC and Steam indies
Unity or Unreal, Steamworks integration, achievements, cloud saves, controller support, Mac and Linux builds where it pays off.
🎯 Hybrid-casual
Casual hook with mid-core depth. The genre that's eating mobile. Built around a 7-day retention curve and a metagame that gives players a reason to come back.
🌐 Web & instant games
WebGL, HTML5, Facebook Instant, Telegram Mini Apps, Discord Activities. Designed to load in under 5 seconds and run on a 4-year-old laptop.
🥽 AR / VR experiences
Quest, Vision Pro, ARKit, ARCore. Built with the comfort, tracking, and battery realities of headsets — not desktop assumptions ported over.
The Game Stack We Use
Unity when it wins, Unreal when it wins. We pick the boring tool when it's the right one.
Engines
Backend & Live-Ops
Monetization & Ads
Analytics & QA
A Six-Stage Game Delivery Process
Built around the reality that retention, not the vertical slice, is what saves a game.
Concept, Loop & Target Device
Core loop on a whiteboard, target platform and minimum device picked, monetization model decided, and a CPI / LTV target written down. Week one, in writing.
Prototype on Real Hardware
A playable core loop running at 60fps on the actual target phone within four weeks. If it doesn't feel right at this stage, we kill features, not deadlines.
Vertical Slice + Soft Launch Build
One full feature, end-to-end, with telemetry wired in. Soft launch in two markets, real CPI, real D1/D7. Decisions made on data, not opinion.
Production with Performance Budgets
Frame, memory, draw call, and install-size budgets enforced every sprint. Tech artist and engineer review art before it lands. No regressions ship.
Cert & Launch
Apple, Google, Steam, console certification. Age ratings, store assets, screenshots, trailers, review notes. We walk the first submission through and handle rejections.
Live-Ops & Tuning
Remote-configured economy, A/B tests on the funnel, weekly events. Retention and ARPDAU dashboards reviewed every week for the first 90 days.
Three Ways to Engage
Game projects don't fit one shape. Pick the one that matches your stage.
Game Scoping Sprint
Two-week engagement to lock the core loop, engine, target device, and monetization model. You leave with a real budget and a soft-launch plan.
- Engine + platform decision
- Core loop prototype
- Honest budget + timeline
Fixed-Scope Game Build
End-to-end delivery from concept to store, with telemetry, live-ops backend, and a soft-launch readiness review.
- Fixed scope, fixed price
- Includes soft-launch tuning
- 60-day post-launch warranty
Embedded Game Squad
A dedicated gameplay + tech art + live-ops squad working alongside your team on a continuous content roadmap.
- Eng + art + live-ops + producer
- Monthly retainer, scale up/down
- Best for: live titles
Honest Answers to Game Reality Questions
The questions every smart buyer asks before signing. Here's what we tell them.
Unity or Unreal?
Depends on the game. Mobile, casual, hybrid-casual, 2D, isometric, web — Unity wins almost every time. AAA-feeling 3D, photoreal, FPS, console-first — Unreal wins. We benchmark both for your specific game on your target device before recommending, and we'll tell you if Godot is a better fit for your budget.
How long does it take to ship a mobile game?
Hyper-casual: 8–14 weeks. Casual / hybrid-casual: 4–8 months. Mid-core RPG or strategy: 9–18 months. Vertical slice in 6 weeks, soft launch by month 4, global by month 8 is a healthy mid-core cadence — and the only one that gives you data before you spend the marketing budget.
How do you hit 60fps on a mid-tier Android?
Frame budget on day one, profiled on the actual target device weekly, draw call and triangle budgets enforced on the art pipeline, shader complexity capped, lightmaps baked, LODs and texture atlases mandatory. Performance is a constraint, not a polish phase. The phone the marketing team will target is on the engineer's desk from week one.
What about monetization without alienating players?
A test we use: would the player still recommend the game to a friend after their first paywall? If no, the monetization is broken. Rewarded ads beat interstitials. IAP for content and convenience beats pay-to-win. Soft currency timers beat hard paywalls. We tune against ARPDAU and D30 together, not in isolation.
How do you handle live-ops?
Server-driven config from day one — no client deploys to change a price, an event, or a balance number. Remote config (Firebase, PlayFab, custom). A/B tests on the funnel. Event calendar that designers run themselves. Live-ops is built into the architecture, not bolted on after launch.
Who owns the game source, art, and store accounts?
You do. Code in your Git, art in your Perforce or Git LFS, store accounts in your company name. Signing keys in your control. If we disappeared tomorrow, your next studio could ship a build next month.
Can you handle console certification?
Yes — Switch, PlayStation, Xbox where you have the platform-holder relationship. We've been through the cert checklists and know what gets bounced (TRC / TCR / XR violations, idle disconnect, save corruption). We won't submit until we've passed the checklist internally.
What about anti-cheat and server authority?
For competitive or economy games: server-authoritative state, signed actions, replay validation, rate limiting, anomaly detection. We assume players will try to cheat and design the trust boundary accordingly. No "trust the client" shortcuts in the economy code.
Can you do art and audio, or just engineering?
Both. We have in-house technical artists and partner with art and audio studios we've shipped with before. We'll quote engineering-only if you have an art team, full-stack if you don't, and tell you honestly which is the better fit for your budget.
Can you sign an NDA before we share details?
Always. NDA before the first call. Design docs, prototypes, and store data stay under your control. We're happy to work inside your tooling if compliance requires it.