Branch Drives Meteoric Growth with Daily

Creating Branch

Seattle-based Branch was launched to help people communicate with friends around the world while playing games together online. With millions of monthly active users, and four billion server conversation minutes daily, it is successfully enabling people to chat, hang out, and stay close with friends and communities through voice, video, text and gaming. Today, its flagship web-based game, Castaways, is a runaway hit, well on its way to becoming one of the world’s most popular games.

But it didn’t start out this way. In fact, Branch began with a small thud rather than a thunderclap of success, until serendipity changed the company’s course and fortunes.

“We started as a back-office app to facilitate virtual communication between people working remotely, using Daily’s voice, video and chat features,” said Charles Vien, Co-Founder of Branch. “It fizzled, but we discovered that remote workers liked playing the minigames in the app. We added some game mechanics and levels, recognized an opportunity and pivoted into a true game studio.”

Branch Becomes Fun & Games

Branch now has millions of people playing games and creating places for their friends and communities, talking for over four hours per day on the platform. Its flagship game, Castaways, is a hugely popular online multiplayer social island survival sandbox game.

Players can create their own worlds on islands on which they can use their creativity and collaborate with others to do everything from starting tree farms and raising crops like strawberries, pineapples and sugar cane.

They engage in all of this while communicating and having fun interacting with others. Unlike most other games, Castaways players can own the rights to, and profit from, their imaginative creations through Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).

“In Castaways, people form guilds, factions and build large cities while meeting and working with others,” said Vien. “It enables spontaneous conversation and communities, all of which hinge on the ability to communicate through voice and chat.”

Daily Doesn’t Leave Branch Stranded

Given Castaways is predicated on social interactions, the need for seamless voice and chat service is critical. “As a mass multiplayer game, communication between players is essential for them to build connections,” said Vien. “When we launched our first iteration of the game users experienced communication lag times because communications from anyone near a given player got picked up. These lag times negatively impacted the user experience.”

Branch turned to Daily for help. In only one day it implemented Daily’s API platform. “That really changed everything because using Daily’s track subscriptions APIs players only picked up voice and chat from other players subscribed to them, and from those who were talking, which is really important,” said Vien.

In October, with its voice and chat issues resolved, Castaways launched its next iteration with an island on which users could play and interact. The game’s popularity skyrocketed. “We went from about a hundred people a day playing to 500,000 users in three months.”

Vien has high praise for Daily’s voice and chat technologies. “It just works flawlessly and with a click of a button — and our users love it,” he said. “It’s made our ability to execute and iterate on this product way easier. As an engineer, the less I have to worry about breaking the better, especially with a small staff.”

Seeds of Relationship Planted

Branch was already familiar with Daily and its robust video, voice and chat services because they were part of its initial back-office app for remote workers. “It was a no-brainer to stick with Daily once we transitioned to a gaming focus,” said Vien. “We had an excellent experience and relationship with their devs team, their pricing is great, and their technology literally took us 30 minutes to incorporate into our first product.”

Other intangibles impressed Vien. “In development, giving feedback to a partner like Daily, and seeing it actually be quickly incorporated is really important, because as an in-browser game we are constantly breaking down every barrier that you can think of,” said Vien. “We don’t have the time and resources to develop everything in-house. That’s why the ability to work closely with a rockstar team like Daily — that can ideate with us and say, “here are APIs to solve your problem” — is another reason why we love and appreciate Daily.”

Daily’s Benefits

• Ability to quickly integrate voice and chat into the Branch platform (under 30 minutes)
• Daily’s voice API capable of refining player-to-player communications
• Simple implementation of Daily API for voice and chat (one day only)
• Excellent, affordable pricing
• Time and money saved on integration with zero maintenance
• Great existing relationship with Daily’s Development team
• Collaborative and responsive developer support

Not Just Surviving, But Thriving

The benefits of Daily’s services aren’t always easily measurable, but Branch clearly recognizes them. “The social features that Daily enables us to provide to our users can be unquantifiable but critical to our success,” said Vien. “Our player retention is directly affected by the social mechanics empowered by Daily. Our retention on a 30-day scale for Castaways island owners is about 80%, which is very high for an online game.”

Moreover, Branch’s NFT model is thriving. “Since we released the latest version of Castaways, we’ve made a little over half a million dollars in royalties in the secondary market from NFT sales,” said Vien.

• 80% player retention rates for island owners over 30 days, nearly double the average for a web-based games
• 4 weeks development time saved with Daily
• 500,000 active users added in only three months
• Significantly improved player communications with Daily’s APIs

The next stage for Branch is to focus more on growth and player retention, while continuing to enhance the experience for Castaways fans. “We’re building a grand exchange marketplace so players can sell items that they farm and craft, and scaling our team to support more growth,” said Vien. “Daily will definitely be a part of our future success.”