Powered by LootLocker: How LootLocker’s backend helped unleash Blue Scarab's bold new vision for the MMO genre.

Who

Blue Scarab Entertainment is a Stockholm-based game studio founded by industry veterans including CEO Colin Cragg and CTO Enno Rehling, with deep roots in MMO development. Backed by investments by NetEase and Behold Ventures, the team includes developers from Battlefield, World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Helldivers 2, and Star Stable Online.

Their debut title Equinox: Homecoming is an original Unreal Engine 5 MMORPG blending cozy escapism, horseback exploration, and true-crime storytelling and is out now on Steam Early Access.

Features Used

• Steam Authentication (Docs)
• Character Class & Heroes (Docs)
• Leaderboards (Docs)
• Triggers (Docs)
• Economy & Commerce (Docs)
• Player Management (Docs)

The Story

When Star Stable launched in 2011, the massively multiplayer equine adventure game soon became a sensation. Attracting 21 million registered users, it proved that there was significant business potential in looking beyond traditional gaming audiences at a time when few were. Eventually, however, its audience would age up and move on.

Not that those millions of players lost their appetite for social horse riding in digital realms. Former Star Stable Entertainment CEO Colin Cragg soon stumbled upon groups like the Rift Trails community, who were reinventing Red Dead Redemption as a place to ride together.

Cragg was already deeply familiar with MMOs. Beyond Star Stable, he had also worked in senior roles on genre hits including Funcom’s Age of Conan and Anarchy Online. And in groups like the Rift Trails riders, he saw tremendous potential. Convinced there was an opportunity for a new equine MMO targeting older players, Cragg co-founded Blue Scarab Entertainment, and stepped up as CEO. There he assembled a team of MMO veterans who knew the genre and the technology required for success, and set about building Equinox: Homecoming. However, while Cragg and his team had the experience needed, they were modest in number.

As such, they faced a challenge; how to bring a live, ambitious, massively multiplayer title to market without the headcount or budgets of a vast AAA studio?

“Realistically, just five years ago, the idea of delivering a title like Equinox: Homecoming with a smaller team—without a system like LootLocker—would’ve been completely impossible. It was really the fact that LootLocker existed, and could be a partner in getting it done, that allowed me to consider Equinox as a possibility at all.”

Colin Cragg, Co-founder and CEO, Blue Scarab Entertainment

Any online game needs a backend to connect its players, manage their accounts, and deliver gameplay features and events. But Blue Scarab needed more than a typical game backend. They were looking for a feature-rich platform to power their ambitious social and competitive systems; one that was extensible for custom features, delivered as a managed service so they wouldn’t need to hire a dedicated DevOps team, and equipped with an accessible interface that designers, engineers, and community managers could all use without training.

And they found that LootLocker delivered all of that, and more.

LootLocker’s Character Class and Hero system, for example, let the team create an exceptionally detailed character customisation system directly through LootLocker's web console, without any futher engineeering work required. This not only saved engineers countless development hours, but made it possible for designers to work in LootLocker directly. The results allowed players to express individuality and identity within Equinox, cementing their connection with the game. Players that feel a deep personal connection with a game engage and retain considerably. Strong engagement and retention, of course, can be powerful in lifting your revenues.

Elsewhere LootLocker’s Progression and Triggers systems let player progress and accomplishments be stored securely in the backend, protecting the studio from critical data loss – something Cragg has direct previous experience with when working on a live game with a proprietary backend.

“Every company that's died because of trying to do backends themselves over the last 20 years? LootLocker is something that should mean backend failings don’t kill those games or companies anymore. A backend should be something that allows studios to get their dreams out the door, and keep things working, and that’s what LootLocker does. I can't understate how huge this is. You don't build your own engine anymore. Everyone gets that now. And now you don't build your own backend services company. You just build a great game.

Colin Cragg, Co-founder and CEO, Blue Scarab Entertainment

Blue Scarab also used LootLocker’s Leaderboard functionality to track and share players’ performance in the games timed races – further elevating retention by inspiring players to keep returning to push their scores and outperform friends. Elsewhere, LootLocker’s wide spread of game economy features let Blue Scarab build a rich, strategic in-game economy, deeply integrating it into their in-game store. That store infrastructure was also driven by LootLocker, letting Cragg and his team meticulously and securely manage cosmetic item sales, purchases, special offers, and more. Considering a well-run, technologically capable store can bring monetization increases of up to 40%, Cragg’s case for not building your own backend is increasingly convincing.

Blue Scarab’s engineering team saved significant time by not having to build and maintain these systems from scratch—but that’s only part of the story. Once the game went live and tens of thousands of players flooded in, the challenge shifted to managing those players effectively. For many studios, this would mean community managers relying heavily on engineers to resolve account-related issues. But with LootLocker’s intuitive web console, Blue Scarab’s community team could independently search for players, review account activity, and take action—whether that meant refunding purchases, editing progressions or wallets, gifting content, or updating custom metadata. All without needing to loop in engineering.

It is also worth noting that building your own backend requires developers to invest tens of thousands of hours of work, equating to hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs. Many years ago taking a proprietary approach to backends might have been the only option. Today, making your own tends to mean considerably less functionality and reliability at a far greater cost. Or you could pick a partner like LootLocker.

“From our perspective, thanks to LootLocker we've been able to focus on just making a good game. That entire burden and cost and distraction of backend development, support, transactional records, and everything else, has been able to be pushed to the LootLocker team, and all we really have to do is connect to it, knowing it works, which is amazing.”

Colin Cragg, Co-founder and CEO, Blue Scarab Entertainment

Equinox: Homecoming is currently live in early access over on Steam, and delighting early adopters who cherish a horse riding game built with older players in mind and a generation of players who’ve moved on from Star Stable.