OSS Privacy & OSS Analytics, How Heroic Labs Struck a Balance
Heroic Labs solves the toughest development, scaling and operational challenges for the world’s largest online games for mobile, console, PC, or cross-platform. Heroic is a YC success story having graduated, remained a leader in the industry, and grown without taking any further investment. Their OSS project has had around 9 million downloads to date.
About Heroic
Heroic Labs solves the toughest development, scaling and operational challenges for the world’s largest online games for mobile, console, PC, or cross-platform. Heroic is a YC success story having graduated, remained a leader in the industry, and grown without taking any further investment. Their OSS project has had around 9 million downloads to date.
“Scarf will be the de facto open source performance tool that I will be using to measure the success and the popularity of any open source product that I create,” says Mo Firouz, co-founder of Heroic Labs. “I think Scarf is the only way that you can measure open source effectively.”
Challenge
Heroic Labs is keenly aware of how important privacy is to an open source community. They also know that they can better serve their community if they know where the community is, what they’re doing with the technology, and how they use the product. Their challenge was finding a way to get that data while respecting the privacy of their users.
“Open source is the critical piece that differentiates us from the rest of the offerings in our space,” Mo pointed out. “We needed a way to understand usage, location, and the popularity of the project.”
Solution
Once Heroic started using Scarf, they learned that they were even more popular than they thought they were. Using Scarf, they were able to determine where, by country, their users were downloading from, and how many per day.
“I would definitely recommend Scarf to others,” Mo continued. “We were able to measure downloads of the game server and see which SDKs were more popular whilst still protecting our users’ privacy. Previously, there was no direct correlation.”
Result
Heroic has moved past its concerns over user privacy, having used Scarf for years without incident. The project has continued to grow in popularity and in addition to the Nakama open source project, Heroic now has two more commercial offerings.
Key outcomes
- Enhanced performance indicators
- Maintained user trust while adding analytics to their OSS project
- Validated open source strategy
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