The game backend with live ops built in.
From your first player to a million a day. Player accounts and cloud saves, leaderboards, friends, teams, chat, an inbox and a wallet, plus live ops your product team launches from a console. SDKs for Unity, Godot and web.
Open source. Run it on Lonca Cloud or on your own servers.
Overview: how the game is doing right now, and which events are on air
All screens show synthetic data.
Configured, not coded
Events, rewards and schedules are set up in the console by your product team. No server code and no app release to launch one.
Every system a live game needs
Players, cloud saves, leaderboards, tournaments, teams, chat, inbox, wallet and promo codes, designed to work together.
Unity, Godot and web
Generated SDKs for Unity, Godot and web games, with retries, token refresh and typed errors built in.
Cloud or self-hosted
Use Lonca Cloud and our platform team keeps it up, or run the open-source core on your own infrastructure.
The whole game backend, not just live ops.
Accounts and saves, leaderboards and PvP, friends, teams and chat, a wallet and promo codes. Every system is built in and works with the others, so a reward from any event lands in the same inbox and wallet.
Player accounts and cloud saves you don't have to build.
Sign-in, linking, sessions, cloud saves, profiles and stats, with privacy requests handled across every system and support tools your team can use without an engineer.
Sign-in
Start as a guest on the device, then link Google, Apple, Facebook or a username and password. If an account is already linked elsewhere, the player can switch this device to it.
Sessions and bans
Short-lived tokens with rotating refresh, a cap on sessions per player, revocation within seconds, and temporary or permanent bans.
Cloud save that never overwrites silently
One versioned save per player with conflict detection, history and restore. The player's other devices are told when their copy is stale.
Profiles and stats
Display name, avatar, level, friend code and your own typed fields. Stats that sum, keep the max or the latest, daily, weekly, seasonal or all time.
Privacy requests
Deletion runs across every system after a grace period, and players can export their personal data. Apple and Meta deletion callbacks are handled.
Support tools
Restore a save, reverse a transaction or re-deliver a reward from the console. Every action lands in the audit log.
Leaderboards and competition, ready on day one.
Global, friends, team and country boards with seasons and rewards, tournament rooms through live ops, and async PvP with ratings and leagues.
Boards for any score
Keep the best score, the latest, or add and subtract. Rank players, teams or attributes such as countries. Ties go to whoever got there first.
Every view players expect
Top of the board, around me, around a friend, friends only, team members and country boards.
Seasons and archives
Reset on a schedule, keep an immutable archive of every period, and send period rewards through the inbox.
Score pools
Combine 2 to 64 boards into one live ranking without copying scores.
Tournaments and leagues
Room-based tournaments, brackets and leagues with promotion and relegation run as live-ops events, with bots filling empty seats.
Async PvP
Defence snapshots, Elo or trophy ratings with seasons and leagues, opponent search that skips friends and teammates, loot, shields, revenge, a defence log and replays.
An economy that adds up, every time.
Currencies, items and bundles on a ledger that never goes negative, lives and timers that refill on their own, and promo codes your marketing team can run.
Wallet and ledger
Soft and hard currencies, items, bundles and exchanges. Every transaction is atomic, never negative and applied exactly once, and refunds and chargebacks can be reversed.
Your choice of authority
Start client-authoritative and switch to server-authoritative later with a guided migration.
Lives, energy and boosts
Lives and energy refill on their own, and timed boosts such as unlimited lives or double XP expire on time.
Build and upgrade timers
Slot groups, speed-ups with a maximum cost the player agreed to, and refunds on cancel.
Offline spending
Spends made offline sync when the player reconnects, within a window you set.
Promo codes
Shared codes, unique batches of up to a million, and personal codes. Global caps are never exceeded and codes can't be guessed.
Live ops your product team can launch on its own.
Events are configured in the console, not written in server code. Pick one of the event types every hit game runs, set the rewards, rooms and schedule, test it in staging and publish.
Templates you can clone and export
Every event type above starts as a template you adjust. Copy a definition from staging to production, or export it as a bundle.
Schedules you set once
Run an event once or on repeat, with an interval, a count and a window. Every occurrence freezes its own content, so editing next week's event never changes this week's.
Stages, rooms and bots
Time-boxed or score-boxed stages, rooms that fill by level tier, rooms that merge, and bots that top up empty seats so an event feels full from the first day.
Prize tables
Rank brackets, places, thresholds, milestones with free and premium tracks, and pool splits. Rewards go to the inbox and are claimed exactly once.
Who sees what
Eligibility by level, platform, app version, audience and country. Lonca works out each player's country itself, so there is no country setting to get wrong. Event policy sets exclusion groups, priority and how many events a player sees at once.
A flow builder, not a script
Wire triggers to actions: when a room fills, add bots; when a stage ends, advance; when the event ends, grant prizes. Flows are checked when you save, and webhooks reach your own server when you need them.
Every hit game runs the same events. Every studio builds them by hand.
The biggest casual games run tournaments, races, team battles and passes under their own names. Lonca's template library is designed around 18 of these event types, so a product manager picks one, sets rewards, rooms and a schedule, and launches.
Tournament
Compete for rank in rooms of players at their level over a few days.
rooms · stages · rank prizes
Race
First to reach a target in a small room wins.
target · room size · place prizes
Team vs team
Their team faces other teams; the team score decides.
team rooms · in-team rank
Team goal
The whole team fills one chest or beats one boss together.
shared target · team size tiers
Partner co-op
Two players progress together toward one goal.
pairs · invites · shared milestones
Season pass
Climb tiers on a free track and an optional premium one.
milestones · free + premium
Card album
Collect cards into sets for set rewards.
collections · set rewards · card packs
Board game
Earn moves from levels and travel a board of rewards.
moves from levels · milestones
Daily reward
Come back each day for a wheel spin or a calendar gift.
day-indexed calendar
Dev, staging and production for every game.
Every game gets three environments, each with its own players, data and keys. Build against dev, rehearse events in staging, and ship to production when they're right.
- Nothing crosses over
- Players, saves, wallets, leaderboards and API keys stay in their own environment.
- Rehearse live ops
- Dev and staging have test players and a time offset, so a three-day event plays out in ten minutes before anyone sees it.
- Promote, don't rebuild
- Copy an event definition from staging to production, or export it as a bundle.
- Test traffic stays in its lane
- Load tests and QA in dev and staging run apart from production, so they never slow live players.
Keeping a game online is a job of its own.
High availability, fault tolerance, horizontal scaling: most game teams learn what these mean the day an event goes viral and the backend falls over. On Lonca Cloud they are our job, not yours. Self-hosting? The open-source core is built the same way.
High availability
The backend keeps answering even when one of its servers goes down.
With Lonca: Every part of Lonca is designed to run in more than one copy. On Lonca Cloud the target is 99.9% availability a month, with one platform team on call for every game.
Fault tolerance
When something breaks, nothing a player earned is lost or handed out twice.
With Lonca: A save or a reward is confirmed only after it is safely stored, rewards are claimed exactly once, and caches rebuild themselves from durable logs. The recovery target is under 15 minutes.
Horizontal scaling
Adding more servers when more players arrive, instead of buying a bigger one.
With Lonca: Lonca's API servers keep no player state, so more can be added at any time, and the data layout is designed for a game at 1M daily players.
Traffic spikes
The minute an event starts, everyone opens the game at once.
With Lonca: Busy writes such as scores and team totals go to memory first and reach the database in batches, and rate limits per player and per game keep one busy game from slowing the rest.
Security and isolation
Each game's players and data stay separate and protected.
With Lonca: Passwords are hashed with Argon2id, access tokens are signed and expire after 15 minutes, every connection uses TLS, and every query is scoped to one game. Export and deletion requests run across every system.
Running it every day
Monitoring, alerts, upgrades and someone awake at 3 a.m.
With Lonca: On Lonca Cloud, one platform team runs it for every studio, so you get the backend without the pager. Self-hosting? You run it, on the same design, with usage metering built in.
Open source. Run it your way.
Lonca's core is open source. Let us run it on Lonca Cloud, or host it yourself on your own infrastructure, with the same live ops, game systems and SDKs.
Lonca Cloud
We run it for you: scaling, failover, upgrades and on-call. You get a console and an API, priced by usage.
- Run by one platform team for every studio
- Designed for 99.9% monthly availability
- Usage-based pricing, aiming for a fraction of in-house cost
Self-hosted
Run the open-source core on your own servers, in your own cloud account or region. No license fee; you run the infrastructure.
- Your data stays on your infrastructure
- The same backend as Lonca Cloud, without the billing
- Usage metering built in for capacity planning
Many games share one backend.
Most game backends run a stack of services per game, each kept at spare capacity and mostly idle off-peak. Lonca is one modular backend where many games share each pod, like car pooling: fewer pods, each one fuller. Every game's data, limits and keys still stay apart.
Today: a stack per game
Game A
Game B
Game C
Lonca: games share pods
Aiming to cut the cost of running a game by more than half.
A casual game at 1 million daily players, per year. In-house means two backend engineers plus highly available infrastructure. Lonca's figure is our target price, not a quote.
In-house
$1.34M – $2.16Ma year
2 backend engineers at $72K–$180K each, plus highly available infrastructure at $0.10–$0.15 per daily player per month.
Lonca Cloud (target)
$600Ka year
$0.05 per daily player per month, no backend hires. 55%–72% less.
Estimate for a casual game at 1M daily active players. Lonca Cloud's price is a target, not a quote. Self-hosting has no license fee.
How Lonca compares.
A fair look at the backends casual studios use today, including where Lonca is not ready yet.
- Nakama vs Lonca
- Strengths
- Open-source game server with a full game feature set
- Trade-offs
- Event logic lives in server code you write; live ops (Satori) and meta systems (Hiro) are separate paid products
- Metaplay vs Lonca
- Strengths
- Source code access and a strong live-ops dashboard
- Trade-offs
- Unity and C# only, and it expects engineers to write the server logic
- PlayFab vs Lonca
- Strengths
- Mature, works with any engine, many game features
- Trade-offs
- Events and game logic still need CloudScript
- Unity Gaming Services vs Lonca
- Strengths
- Simple setup with game features built in
- Trade-offs
- Unity-first, and live ops need Cloud Code
- Firebase vs Lonca
- Strengths
- Simple setup, any engine, good auth and data
- Trade-offs
- Every game feature is built by hand
- Supabase vs Lonca
- Strengths
- Open source, simple setup, any engine
- Trade-offs
- Every game feature is built by hand
Lonca
- Strengths
- No-code live ops, every core game system, Unity, Godot and web SDKs, open source on Lonca Cloud or self-hosted
- Trade-offs
- Early access: not generally available yet
| Option | Strengths | Trade-offs |
|---|---|---|
| Nakama | Open-source game server with a full game feature set | Event logic lives in server code you write; live ops (Satori) and meta systems (Hiro) are separate paid products |
| Metaplay | Source code access and a strong live-ops dashboard | Unity and C# only, and it expects engineers to write the server logic |
| PlayFab | Mature, works with any engine, many game features | Events and game logic still need CloudScript |
| Unity Gaming Services | Simple setup with game features built in | Unity-first, and live ops need Cloud Code |
| Firebase | Simple setup, any engine, good auth and data | Every game feature is built by hand |
| Supabase | Open source, simple setup, any engine | Every game feature is built by hand |
| Lonca | No-code live ops, every core game system, Unity, Godot and web SDKs, open source on Lonca Cloud or self-hosted | Early access: not generally available yet |
Tell us about your game.
Join the waitlist and we'll write to you personally before early access opens. Or book an early access call and we'll walk through your game and backend together.
- SDKs for Unity, Godot and web games.
- Open source: Lonca Cloud or self-hosted.
- Built for casual and mobile games with live ops on day one.
- A founder answers every signup.