How Fractal consistently delivers active players to BattleTabs

Fractal Authentication and Tournament products helped BattleTabs increase acquisition, engagement, and retention

The Gangbusters team sets out to build what they call “community driven social games” — which is exactly what their hit BattleTabs is. It’s easy for anyone to pick up and play but highly competitive, which according to Gangbusters, is key for building engaged communities that can rally around debate and strategies.

Since community is a critical pillar for the team, they’re always looking for ways to enhance and grow it. Brandon Wu, CEO at Gangbusters, and Michael Cann, CTO, share how Fractal Authentication and Tournaments helped increase player acquisition, community engagement, and retention.

• Game: BattleTabs
• Studio: Gangbusters
• Fractal products: Authentication and Tournaments

Encouraging community content

“BattleTabs has always had a super engaged community — our players organically create a ton of content, videos, and side projects. In fact, one of our players even built their own game based on BattleTabs!

We were hugely inspired by our community’s creativity and wanted to encourage them to keep at it. We knew we needed a way to create additional content and events on top of our core game.”

Finding Fractal

“To do that, we needed the help of a third-party platform — specifically, one that we could trust, as we didn’t want anything to disrupt our game or existing community.

We were evaluating a few different options when we learned about Fractal. Being a big name in the space, we were confident we could trust them. Plus, since we didn’t have a huge Twitter following and we needed a way to stand out, we figured Fractal’s reputation could give us a boost.”

The foundation of a great player experience

“Fractal is best known for its tournaments and community experiences. To make that work well behind the scenes, we needed to implement Fractal Authentication — which we did through their React SDK.

Since the first time we integrated it last year, we’ve been happy to test out various versions of Fractal Authentication. In fact, we were the first partner to integrate their latest version — which has proven to be the best experience for our users. Now players just click Launch Game on Fractal and it automatically links their BattleTabs account to their Fractal Account. There’s zero friction for our players, and they get all the benefits that come with a Fractal Account — like the tournaments.”

A steady stream of players

“In the past, our community would organize their own tournaments, so we knew Fractal tournaments were going to be a good fit. Since we had the Fractal SDK integrated, it was easy for us to set up — and the results were great every time.

Hands down, our best tournament was last Christmas. Usually, the holidays are a slow time for us, but when we ran a tournament with Fractal, our numbers never fell — instead, we maintained a steady stream of players all week.

Top traffic source

Today, Fractal is a top five traffic source for us. We’ve seen that other distribution channels provide a huge spike when we first go live but die out fairly quickly — it’s usually hard to stand out against the tons of new games that get released every day and it’s difficult to get featured.

But we can rely on Fractal being consistent and spiking when we run events together. In fact, many of our players chatting in our Discord, which are our most active players, say that they first came from Fractal.”

Sharing a player first philosophy

“It seems like Fractal genuinely wants our game to succeed — and we see that in the support they give. Case in point: we once asked whether the SDK supports some function and the next day we got a response that it couldn’t but now it does. It was super impressive that Fractal built something just for us overnight.

We appreciate that everyone at Fractal seriously understands putting players first. There are some other platforms that hard sell us on their tokenomics, but at the end of the day, serving players and making good games is the most important. Fractal has that same philosophy and we see it in their tech, products, and service.”