 What's up everybody on the mangas, you are awesome and Pred Assessor recently announced their partnership with Excelbyte, a company that specializes in providing back-end support for games. This of course begs the question, who is Excelbyte, why does Pred need them, and what the fuck does back-end mean if you're not talking about somebody's ass? Well, you're in luck cause I went and did all the research so you can sit back with a cup of whatever the hell you want and listen to my possibly incorrect and almost certainly poorly explained breakdown of the partnership. Let's start with the most important part, what does back-end encompass? Insert mom joke here. For starters, back-end provides access to the game on multiple platforms. This could be going from Epic Launcher to Steam, or from PC to PlayStation, or even mobile if they decide to make a paragon trading card game or some shit. This is of course especially exciting to hear, as it's a precursor to future console development. We know that Ometa plans to eventually release the game on console, but it's always nice to see them taking steps to make that happen. Excelbyte also offers analytics with their support. Clearly presented data from the game that will help Ometa make a variety of decisions. For example, some characters can seem oppressive, but actually aren't that impactful overall. Chimera comes into mind. If you were to read back through player accounts of how overpowered Chimera was in Paragon, you may actually believe that he was. However, I'm sure the back-end analytics show that he was just fine. Balance decisions aren't the limit. There's all sorts of data that back-end support can provide to help the developer improve the player experience. Excelbyte will also allow Ometa to track their player retention, how many new players, how many players are staying with the game, and how long people are playing. I would personally love to have access to all of this information for all the different games on track. They can also provide an Ometa-specific launcher that will double as a social hub. They can engineer so that you can make, invite, and play with friends no matter what launcher they use to download the game. The same goes with what I consider a true cross-platform console to PC. A bit less exciting, but completely necessary, back-end includes monetization. Excelbyte can streamline the purchasing process for the game and allow for a wider variety of payment options for the consumer. They can also assist the development with split payments for community-created content. I kind of doubt that will ever come into play with Predecessor, but I think it would be cool if talented community members could create, share, and monetize their own skins or mods or something. Now the most important part of all of this, Excelbyte will handle matchmaking. They have a section called play that will create lobbies based on parameters that Ometa selects and put them into games. Parameters don't have to just be elo either. They can do player experience, or they can match latency, or they can just do a combination of all of the above. I'm pretty sure that's what failed during the last stress test for Predecessor, and I know for certain that that's what failed for Ethereum's last stress test. I think it was probably the main reason Ometa teamed up with Excelbyte, and good on them for identifying a weakness and finding a proper resolution. So who is Excelbyte? They're a fairly new company, however they were founded by industry veterans, in an environment where almost all games are online, even single-player games, the need for this type of service has been growing. AAA Studios have often had their own departments devoted to back-end support, but Excelbyte offers the same level of expertise to independent developers. It's pretty exciting to see Ometa Studios listed among the likes of Gearbox 2K and Bandai Namco. Why does Ometa need this service? Well, while we don't know exactly what happened with the last stress test, we do know that the players that were able to get into matches had great games with zero server issues. Everyone I've talked to stated that there was no rubber banding, shots and abilities were all landing as they should, and the game didn't freeze up at all. However, at some point, people stopped being able to queue into a game. They would either sit in matchmaking forever or when they did queue up, the game would immediately drop. This isn't indicative of the servers being stressed, this means that the back-end matchmaking broke for some reason or another. I'm sure Ometa already has great people working on these systems, but partnering with Excelbyte will give these people the tools they need to make the game even more successful in the future. All in all, this partnership will serve to strengthen the player-based lead that Predecessor already has over the other pair of zombies. I have no idea when they plan to do another stress test or if they even will do another test prior to full alpha launch, but I'm confident that this partnership will ensure that whatever they do next will be far more successful than their last outing. Ometa has demonstrated in the past that they can capitalize on their strengths, now they've shown us that they are humble enough to identify their weaknesses and seek help to fix them. I'm eagerly awaiting my next chance to get my hands on Predecessor. If you liked the video or found it informative, please hit that like button and consider subscribing if you want more stuff like this, but for now, this is the Mangoo signing off. You guys, have a good one.