Introducing Friends & Followers: Cross-Platform Friendships Made Simple

🎵 So no one told you game dev was gonna be this way,

Cross-platform dreams are there but your infra is D.O.A,

It's like you're always stuck in a solo life,

When your friends play on Switch, on Steam,

Xbox, or PlayStation 5, but... 🎶

Games today are more cross-platform than ever, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to play with friends across different devices. Supporting cross-platform friendships can be technically challenging, which is why many successful games end up building their own in-game friends systems—allowing players to connect, communicate, and coordinate without relying on platform services.

We’ve seen this approach work brilliantly in games like Brawl Stars (and pretty much every Supercell game), where players can quickly add each other using a unique in-game ID. But building and maintaining a system like that takes time, effort, and ongoing support. Something most developers are not able to do.

That’s why we built Friends & Followers, a fully managed, cross-platform friends and followers system, now available to all LootLocker users after a year in beta. Better yet, this new system is already live in games you might have played, such as The Gang's Blade Ball Area which pits online players against each other in a modern take on the clasasic dodgeball game!

With LootLocker Friends, your players can:

• Send friend requests using a unique 8-character ID
• Accept or decline incoming requests
• Remove friends at any time
• Block or unblock players to prevent unwanted contact

And beyond these core features, LootLocker Friends also supports Followers, a one-way connection where a player can follow another player without approval. The followed player is not notified but can see who’s following them and choose to block followers.

In the future we'll also be updating Friends to include an Online / Offline status, helpful when you want to know who's available to team up with for a gaming session.

Built for Players, Controlled by You

Behind the scenes, you have full control through the LootLocker Web Console. Here you can view any player’s entire relationship status.

For example, you can view their accepted friends.

You can view a list of blocked players.

And view a list of which players the player you're currently viewing follows, or is followed by.

All while easily being able to manually edit each list by adding new players or removing exisitng playes.

Ready to Drop Into Your Game

The Friends feature is documented and integrated across both Unity and Unreal SDKs, so you can get started quickly and deliver a seamless social experience to your players—no matter what platform they’re on.