We built LEADR because we kept hitting a wall. Because we noticed something: the leaderboard solutions that exist are, frankly, boring. They store scores. That's it, job done. But leaderboards can be so much more than a sorted list of numbers.

We also believe adding a leaderboard to your game should be both straightforward and worthwhile, whether you're a seasoned pro, solo dev, or just making your first game. You want players to compete, compare scores, and keep coming back.

Instead, you're faced with a choice between bad options: lock yourself into Steam or a console platform, wrestle with an enterprise backend that wants to run your entire game, or spend your time building something from scratch - when you should be making your game.

The Problem With Platform Lock-In

If you ship exclusively on Steam, their leaderboard API works fine and gives you the basics, but there's a catch. Your game only exists within Steam's ecosystem. What happens when you want to release on itch.io (where most indie games start anyway), port to mobile, or even release on consoles? The big platforms - Google Play Store, Apple's Game Center, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, etc - similarly each have their own leaderboard systems, none of which talk to each other.

Cross-platform play is increasingly expected by players, but you end up either fracturing your player community and maintaining multiple leaderboard systems, or settling for some unwieldy and probably overkill Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS).

We wanted something that works the same way whether your game runs in Steam, a browser, on a phone, or on a console. LEADR is platform-agnostic by design: if your game has access to the internet, it can use LEADR.

The Problem With BaaS

On the other end of the spectrum, services like Azure PlayFab offer comprehensive game backends with simple leaderboards included. PlayFab is seriously powerful, backed by Microsoft's infrastructure and used by major studios.

But for small studios or a solo dev shipping their first game? The learning curve is steep, the feature set is overwhelming, and the pricing model requires a spreadsheet to understand. You don't need a live service CMS, in-game chat, player segmentation, A/B testing, and fraud detection for your puzzle platformer's speedrun board. You need a great leaderboard.

LootLocker takes a more indie-friendly approach with simpler pricing and a focus on smaller teams. It's a solid service. But like PlayFab, it's built as a general-purpose backend that happens to include leaderboards. Leaderboards are a checkbox feature, not a core focus.

The Solution: Do One Thing Brilliantly

LEADR follows the Unix philosophy: do one thing and do it well. We're not trying to be your authentication provider, your cloud save system, your player inventory, your analytics platform, and your economy backend all at once. We focus exclusively on leaderboards and the social features that turn individual play sessions into community experiences.

This focus means we can move faster and further on the features that matter. It means simpler integration, clearer documentation, and pricing you can understand at a glance. It means we're not splitting attention across fifteen different services.

Does your game need user accounts, matchmaking, multiplayer servers, cloud saves, and micro-transactions? Use the tools that specialise in those things. LEADR plays nicely with whatever stack you're already using. We're not here to own your game's entire backend; we're here to make one part of it excellent.

Leaderboards as Social Infrastructure

What gets us genuinely excited about LEADR though, and what we think the existing solutions miss entirely, is the potential of leaderboards as social infrastructure.

A traditional leaderboard is passive. Players submit scores, other players view them. The data sits there, inert.

But what if leaderboards were active participants in your game's community? What if they could generate shareable content automatically, integrate with streaming platforms, power seasonal competitions, and create moments that spread beyond the game itself?

We're building LEADR with this vision in mind. Web pages that showcase your game's top runs with embedded replays and player highlights. Integrations that let streamers display live challenges on screen. Tools that turn "I got a high score" into content worth sharing.

The specific features are evolving as we work with the game dev community to understand what matters most. But the core belief stays the same: leaderboards shouldn't just store data. They can and should be a key social component for your game and help your community grow.

Open Source at the Core

LEADR's core platform is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence. You can read the code, understand exactly how it works, and even self-host it if you prefer.

This isn't just about transparency (though that matters). It's about trust and longevity. Game backends have a habit of shutting down, pivoting, or getting acquired and deprecated. When you build on a closed platform, you're betting on that company's continued existence and goodwill. With LEADR, the code is yours regardless of what happens to us. If we disappeared tomorrow, you could spin up your own instance and keep running. We've seen this model thrive in the web development space and we think that's how game development infrastructure should work too.

We're not the first to take this approach. Nakama from Heroic Labs and Talo both offer open-source game backends with managed cloud options. We respect what they've built. But they're full-service platforms covering authentication, matchmaking, storage, analytics, and more. Nakama targets studios and enterprise customers; Talo aims at indie developers. Both are feature-rich to the point of being overwhelming if all you want is to create more buzz around your game.

Built using the exact same open-source core, the LEADR cloud service offers a convenient, fully managed & hosted option, with advanced features that fund ongoing development. The foundation will always be available to everyone.

Built for the Long Term

We're a small, bootstrapped team based in Europe. No venture capital pushing us to include AI, blockchain or whatever's trendy this quarter. No relentless pursuit of growth or enterprise sales targets forcing us to add more and more features and complexity that our users just don't need.

We're building LEADR to be sustainable for the long term, growing alongside the game dev community rather than trying to extract maximum value from it. Our interests are aligned: we succeed when indie games succeed, when developers keep coming back because LEADR genuinely makes their games better.

Join Us

We're still early in this journey. The core leaderboard functionality is about to launch, alongside SDKs for Unity, Godot, and more to come. The ambitious features we've described are on the roadmap, shaped by conversations with developers about what would actually help.

If you've got thoughts on what leaderboard infrastructure should look like, frustrations with existing tools, or you just want to follow along as we build this, we'd love to hear from you.

Join the LEADR Discord or get started for free.