What is Bunch?
Bunch is a party app and developer platform for multiplayer games. The Bunch Developer Platform allows you to integrate voice and video chat into your games for free, while driving social traffic to your game through friends and communities on Bunch.
Why Integrate the Bunch Platform with Your Game
Bunch helps you increase engagement by adding high quality voice and video chat in your game through a complete party platform that is:
- intuitive for your players to use
- easy for your teams to integrate
- gives you the flexibility and tools to create the optimal party experience.
Unlike building your own in-game chat systems, the Bunch experience also persists outside your game through the Bunch app which is specifically designed to drive players and their friends back to your game. If Bunch friends or fellow community members don't have your game, the Bunch app guides them through the install process before dropping them into the game session to maximize their chances of playing together. The result: valuable, sustainable social loops based on the organic community activity that already exist around multiplayer games.
Product Guide
Bunch Party Kit
Bunch Party Kit is designed to provide an intuitive and rewarding party experience that players love, while giving developers a seamless, integrated social layer that drives measurable value for their games. Party Kit is comprised of four distinct component services that combine to provide a complete party platform and are packaged together in an SDK which will be available for iOS, Android, and Unity starting in October 2021.
To learn more about how the Platform works please explore its main components listed below. Click on each card below to open a page with more detailed description.
FAQ
Yes! All parties provisioned through the Bunch Party Kit are voice-only by default regardless of which Party Type (Voice-Only or Video & Voice) you set for your game. If you configure parties for your game as Voice & Video, your players can add video through the Control Panel in the Expanded Overlay. The Bunch Platform will guide players through granting the appropriate camera system permission on behalf of your app if necessary. This permission approval is only required once, but players need to turn on video within parties on a per party basis.
The Bunch Overlay has minimal interference with the gameplay because:
- your players can minimize or hide the Overlay, as well as move the minimized Overlay to anywhere along the screen's edges
- the minimized Overlay fades to semi-transparent when players are not talking
- and you have programmatic control to:
- show/dismiss the Overlay
- set the default position and state of the Overlay
- pin/unpin the position of the Overlay
The User Controls and Developer Settings outlined above work in harmony to enable you to create the optimal party experience for your game.
Technically, you can reserve parties for your game through Bunch Party Kit and allow your players in a random match to join them. However, we strongly recommend that you only prompt players to join a Bunch party if they are already friends or connected in a mutually agreed upon social construct within your game, e.g. a clan, as it creates a safer environment.
We expect the SDK package size to be around 4-5 MB, but since the SDK is still in development we will only be able to confirm the final size in mid-Oct '21. As a fully embedded experience there are UI and tech components (WebRTC) which need to be included in the SDK, but we are working diligently to make it as small as possible without compromising the user or developer experience.
We ran a comprehensive performance benchmark study based on our legacy tech stack and the impact of Bunch on game performance was negligible. Our new tech architecture is expected to minimize performance impact even further. We will be able to share an update once the new platform and Bunch app are generally available together in late Q4' 21. Until then, we are including our original performance benchmark with the legacy tech stack below to assuage any concerns.
Study Summary: Based on a comprehensive performance benchmark study, Bunch does not significantly impact frame rate performance/stability or power consumption and has very small impact on CPU/GPU usage.
Performance testing was conducted on low-, mid-, and high- spec'ed devices with games of low, medium, and high fidelity graphics across short, medium, and long play sessions. The aggregate data of the six test devices while playing games with high fidelity graphics for medium length sessions summarized in the following slides are representative of the performance impact across all scenarios. Complete benchmark results are available upon request.
Bunch Party Kit requires:
- Android 5.0 and later
- iOS 9.0 and later.
We noticed that under certain circumstances (combination of OS version and the rendering engine) it’s possible for the Bunch Overlay not to render correctly on Android, for example it can appear as if there was a clipping rectangle applied to the surface on which it is drawn. This is caused by the OS rendering engine doing some level of drawing composition with the layers above surface views, and can be fixed by explicitly calling yourGLSurfaceView.setWillNotDraw(false)
Technical Implementation Guide
To learn how to integrate Bunch Party Kit into your game, follow the implementation guide and SDK reference.
Bunch Investors & Partners
Bunch is funded by some of the most successful developers of multiplayer games from all across the globe.
