How Leaderboards Make Your Game Replayable And Fun

How many games have you played that contain a leaderboard? Would it be a leaderboard listing players best scores, but also one listing the best time for a given level.

And more importantly, do you remember how you felt in that moment when you beat your best friend's score? How incredible that was?

This competition can be one of the things that made you love this game, isn't it? But also, it is probably what makes you restart a level again and again, until you improve your personal record or even maybe the world record for a few months!

If you think about it, there are games which are solely based on this competition:

• Super Meat Boy: amazing fast-pace platformer, where one of the most challenging and fun part is to beat your own time?
• Temple Run: the higher the score you get, the best you are!
• Super Hexagon: challenging game on its own, but how fun is it to beat your friends scores?
• Many racing games, where obtaining the faster time for a track is how you become the winner,
• ... and the list goes on and goes on with a lot and a lot of arcade games.

There is also a complete scene and many groups of people doing this for all their favorite games: speedrunners. For whom the ultimate objective is to complete a game as fast as possible to be the fastest in the world. Have you ever seen how fast people can finish Super Mario Bros.? This is a bit different, but it strongly illustrates how beating a score or being the fastest at finishing a level can make a game replayable and fun.

Using a service such as GameRank will let you focus on your game. Meanwhile, we will deal with maintaining and scaling the backend of the fierceful competition that leaderboards create in your game.

Please email us at contact@gamerank.io for feedback, questions or suggestions!