Key Concepts

• A Push Notification is a message that is received by a player's device even when they are not logged in to the game. You've probably see many Push Notifications on your devices every day.
• A Notification Campaign (or Campaign) is an operation that sends a specific push notification to all (or to a subset of all) players.
• A Player Segment (or just Segment) represents the subset of players who fulfil some criterion, see Implementing Player Segments for details.

Overview

A Push Notification is a text message that is delivered to your players' devices, even when they are not logged in to the game. Individual Push Notifications are sent as part of a Notification Campaigns. You can target a Campaign to your entire player base, to players that belong to specific Player Segments, or even to a list of player IDs.

Push Notifications are one way of communicating with your players, but you could also use in-game mails or broadcast messages - each has their own set of pros and cons.

Situations where the use of Notification Campaigns might be useful:

• Reaching out to players who haven't logged in for some time.
• Announcing that an in-game event has begun or concluded.

💡 Good to Know

Players can and will disable notifications from specific apps if they find them to be too obtrusive or annoying, so you cannot guarantee that message will be seen.

⚠️ Requires Batteries

The Push Notification system is built into the Metaplay SDK, but you'll need to configure it to work in your game. See Implementing Push Notifications for details on how to do this.

Working with Push Notifications

Push Notifications can be found in the Push Notifications menu tab of the LiveOps Dashboard:

Creating a Campaign

To create a new Campaign, just hit the New Campaign button at the top of the Push Notifications page. You will be presented with the following dialog:

A Campaign consists of the following fields:

• Name: The name of the campaign to be shown in the LiveOps Dashboard.
• Date: The date and time when the Campaign should be sent. By default, the Campaign is set to start at the current date and time i.e. immediately.
• Firebase analytics label: An optional label for the messages when sending them to Firebase. This will allow you to do further analysis of the campaign in the Firebase console. This label is not sent to players.
• Enable Targeting: See Using Segments for Audience Targeting.
• Locales and Localizations: Notification title and body content in various languages. The set of languages present on the form comes from the game's language configs. Using the locales checkboxes, you can select the desired languages; players using a language not selected here will receive the campaign message in the game's default language instead. The default language cannot be unselected.

Instead of creating a Campaign from scratch, you can also start by copying an existing one:

Viewing an Existing Campaign

By clicking on an existing Campaign from the list, you can view its details and current status.

At the top of this page, you can see an overview that includes the current status of the Campaign. There are also buttons to edit and delete the Campaign. Note that once a Campaign has started you can no longer edit it, but you can cancel it to prevent it from being sent to the remaining players.

When a Campaign's start time has been reached, it will change to a Running state and you will be able to see statistics about its progress.

Stats for completed Campaigns will also be visible here.

⏳ Good to know

The processing of a push notification Campaign can take up to multiple hours with a large player base even when only a subset of the player base is targeted. This is due to the need of scanning through the entire player base for determining if a player is among the target audience. When targeting only a list of players by ID the implementation skips the full database scan and therefore completes a lot faster.