Developers can now integrate competitions with leaderboards and prizes into team-based, multiplayer games using GameOn services and the new Team API methods. Multiplayer games are rising in popularity as it allows gamers to spend time playing with their friends and family. Players can form teams, clans, guilds, and more with others from all over the world and play together or battle others, all without boundaries. By bringing players together, developers can seed a community around their titles as players form teams and relationships globally.

Integrating GameOn competitions into team-based games is just as simple as with single player games. Similar to single player games, developers with team competitions will submit individual player scores to GameOn. The main difference is that developers will also provide a player-to-team mapping (via the new Team API methods) so that GameOn can aggregate the scores to a team level. GameOn will then enable a leaderboard with team names and scores.

Developers can still create the same type of competitions: single round, multi-round, and leagues, set number of attempts, allow ranking by a defined metric, and set entry requirements by location or custom-defined criteria. And, for the winners, developers can also offer in-game items as prizes to the members of the victorious team.

Getting started

To get started using the new Teams workflow, you'll need to create a new team via the POST /teams method. This call requires a maximum team size which is used by GameOn to limit the number of players that can be added. Next, you can add players to a team by calling PUT /teams/{teamId}/players or remove them with DELETE /teams/{teamId}/player. To get details about a team, including the team members, call the GET /teams/{teamId} method.

After the teams are set up and players are assigned, you can enter the entire team into a tournament. From there, you'll enter a player as you would for a single-player tournament by calling POST /tournaments/{tournamentId}/enter. You'll need to provide the Team ID in the body of the request.

Once a player is part of a team, you can call GET /matches/{matchId}/leaderboard to get the team leaderboard for the tournament. This allows you to get the leaderboard for any tournament and returns a team leaderboard. Finally, when you are ready to submit scores for that player, you can call PUT /matches/{matchId}/score. For team-based tournaments, the player's score will automatically contribute to the team that the player is representing.

Redeeming team in-app prizes

In team tournaments, the in-app prizes are awarded to each team member who submits a score in the tournament. Because of this, you want to ensure that the digital prize(s) used when creating the tournament can be claimed by multiple players in your game (i.e. you should avoid one-use codes). At the end of the tournament, every player in the winning team will redeem the same prize.

It's important to note that only team members who submit a score will receive prizes. Any players on the team who do not submit at least one score before the tournament closes will not receive a prize.

Get started with GameOn

You can learn more about the new API methods for teams by checking out the teams documentation here.

To learn more about GameOn, watch this video of a few developers who share their experience integrating it into their games.