Customer story

Real Cricket 22 boosts engagement and retention with Challengermode tournaments

Challengermode’s API integration enables Real Cricket 22 to simplify tournament hosting for their community and powered the game’s largest competition to date.

12

months since launch

76k

community-hosted tournaments

173k

unique players

641k

tournament signups

Företag

Nautilus Mobile is an Indian game studio and the developer of the Real Cricket franchise, one of the most popular cricket games on mobile with million... Visa mernautilusmobile.com

Location

India

Industry

Gaming

Key features used

Game Integration APITournamentsIn-game discoverabilityVisa alla

Kontakta försäljning

The problem

Real Cricket 22 wanted to give its community a way to run their own tournaments without needing to leave the game or deal with complicated third-party tools. At the same time, Nautilus Mobile needed a platform capable of handling the game's largest official competitions without that complexity falling on their internal team.

Community-powered tournaments via API

Nautilus Mobile integrated Challengermode directly into Real Cricket 22 using the Challengermode API. The result was an in-game tournament browser that lets players discover open tournaments, sign up, and compete without ever leaving the app. No separate account registration, no external links — just cricket.Players can choose between 2-over and 5-over match formats, and select whether to compete using their ranked in-game teams or custom esports rosters. That flexibility matters: different players want different stakes, and both formats drew their own audiences.Crucially, the API integration is self-service by design. Any community member can create and host their own tournament at scale — setting the format, entry conditions, and prizes — without Nautilus Mobile having to manage each event manually. This opened up tournament hosting to the entire player base, not just the developer.

76,000 tournaments and 641,000 signups

Within 12 months of launching the integration, Real Cricket 22 had seen 76,000 tournaments created and 641,000 tournament signups across 173,000 unique players. Those numbers reflect consistent, recurring engagement — players returning to compete, not just logging in once.Automated prize payouts played a direct role in keeping players engaged. Winners received their prizes without delays or manual processing, which meant every tournament felt worth entering. That reliability translated into repeat participation and stronger retention across the player base.The integration proved durable. Real Cricket 22 has since evolved into Real Cricket 24, and the Challengermode integration carried forward with it — evidence that the competitive infrastructure built for RC22 became a core part of the franchise's identity, not a one-off experiment.

Self-service hosting at scale

The 76,000 tournaments created in 12 months were not run by Nautilus Mobile. They were run by the community. That distinction matters: the API integration turned every motivated player into a potential tournament organizer, creating a competitive ecosystem that grows on its own.Challengermode handles the infrastructure — bracket generation, participant management, result tracking, and prize distribution — so community organizers can focus on building events their players actually want to enter. Nautilus Mobile gets the engagement benefits without carrying the operational load of tens of thousands of individual tournaments.This model is what made the scale possible: the community drives tournament volume and the platform handles fulfillment. No studio has the bandwidth to manually run 76,000 tournaments. But a well-integrated API can.