MMOs in the Instagram Era: Highrise (S18) - YC Gaming Tech Talks 2020

TL;DR

Highrise is a social-first MMO with 5M+ downloads and >$1M monthly revenue, built with a 50/50 architecture: native Swift/Kotlin for UI and C for the game engine, bridged via Objective C and JNI. The core insight is that players stay for social connections, not the game, so the UI must feel like Instagram/Snapchat to prevent user churn to other platforms.

Key insights

• Traditional game design adds social features as an afterthought; Highrise inverts this by starting with messenger, newsfeed, guilds, profiles, economy, and then adding a game (fashion contest).
• The social-first approach solves the “long-term attention” problem: players join for the game but stay for the friends they meet.
• Early versions of Highrise saw users move to other social platforms after playing because the UI didn’t feel like an app; this drove the decision to use native UI instead of a game engine.