Customer Story

Challenges

Game development environments are high-pressure, fast-moving, and technically demanding. Long build cycles, complex debugging, and tight deadlines make it difficult to maintain morale. The company struggled with developer burnout, inconsistent recognition, and rising turnover—impacting release timelines and innovation velocity.

• Limited recognition for sprint completions and development milestones: Engineers lacked acknowledgment for weekly and monthly delivery cycles.
• ‍Heavy debugging workload with little motivation: No structured gamified incentives for resolving critical bugs or reducing technical debt. ‍
• Innovation efforts remained informal and under-rewarded: Hackathons and creative prototypes were celebrated inconsistently. ‍
• Low cross-team morale and collaboration gaps: Developers had no simple channel to appreciate teammates for knowledge sharing or technical support. ‍
• Turnover risks due to high-pressure environments: Long hours and limited appreciation increased burnout and churn. ‍
• Slow adoption of new technologies and upskilling: Teams had minimal motivation for advancing technical certifications or learning new engines.

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Personas involved

• ‍Developers, Engineers, QA teams: Receive recognition for sprint completions, bugs resolved, innovations built, skills acquired, and collaborative contributions via Empuls.
• Engineering Managers & Tech Leads: Trigger sprint rewards, review code milestones, recognize performance, and drive team engagement.
• Product & Delivery Teams: Celebrate feature deployments, coordinate hackathons, and manage innovation incentives.
• ‍HR & People Teams: Manage tenure rewards, skill development incentives, and engineering well-being programs.
• ‍Finance Teams: Validate reward budgets, track payouts, and maintain compliance.
• ‍Program Admin / Super Admin: Configure workflows, manage integrations with engineering tools, and maintain recognition rule versioning.

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The solution

The game development company transformed its developer experience by shifting from ad-hoc recognition to a structured, milestone-driven engagement ecosystem powered by Xoxoday Empuls.  

The platform delivered instant recognition for sprints, bug fixes, innovations, collaboration, and learning achievements—making progress feel meaningful rather than routine.  

This approach aligned naturally with engineering workflows, motivating teams, strengthening culture, and sustaining productivity across intense development cycles.

• ‍Sprint milestone recognition for productivity: Xoxoday Empuls automated recognition for sprint completions, feature deployments, and engineering milestones, rewarding developers instantly and sustaining momentum across demanding development cycles. ‍
• Bug bounty & quality incentive programs: The company gamified its quality assurance workflows using Empuls—rewarding developers for bug fixes, performance optimizations, code quality improvements, and technical debt reduction, resulting in cleaner builds and fewer regressions. ‍
• Innovation & hackathon awards: Xoxoday Empuls enabled meaningful rewards for hackathon winners, creative prototypes, and breakthrough ideas, building a culture of experimentation and next-gen feature development. ‍
• Peer-to-peer recognition to strengthen collaboration: Developers could appreciate teammates for code reviews, pair programming support, knowledge sharing, and problem-solving, promoting cross-team trust and engineering unity. ‍
• Tenure & loyalty celebrations: Through HRMS integration, Empuls automatically celebrated work anniversaries, project releases, and major career milestones, reducing burnout and increasing loyalty. ‍
• Skill development rewards: The platform rewarded developers for completing technical certifications, new engine training, cloud learning, and emerging technology courses, accelerating upskilling and technical excellence. ‍
• Seamless integration with engineering ecosystem: Xoxoday Empuls integrated smoothly with Darwinbox, Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Microsoft Teams, payroll systems, SSO, Outlook, and Gmail, syncing sprint events, code commits, bug resolutions, milestones, and reward triggers in real time.
  This eliminated manual tracking and created a unified experience that matched developer workflows.

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Impact

• ‍41% increase in developer productivity, powered by sprint-based recognition.
• ‍36% reduction in critical bugs, driven by gamified QA incentives.
• ‍3× higher hackathon and innovation participation, resulting in faster feature experimentation.
• ‍52% increase in peer recognition, strengthening collaboration and engineering culture.
• ‍28% improvement in skill certification completion, accelerating team capability.
• ‍PHP 14.7 million in automated developer rewards processed in one year, boosting morale and retention.
• ‍23% reduction in engineering turnover, supported by consistent appreciation and milestone-based loyalty rewards.

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Conclusion

By deploying Xoxoday Empuls’ employee recognition and engagement solution, the game development company built a high-performance engineering culture centered on recognition, innovation, and continuous improvement. Automated sprint rewards, gamified quality programs, peer appreciation, and upskilling incentives boosted motivation while reducing burnout and churn.  

With seamless integrations into engineering tools and HR systems, our solution aligned recognition with real developer workflows—strengthening productivity, collaboration, and long-term retention across the Philippines.

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