Cubzh: Building a vibrant and authentic gaming community with Prelude

Cubzh is a cutting-edge gaming platform that merges the creativity of Minecraft with the community-driven spirit of Roblox.

Founded by Adrien Duermael and Gaëtan de Villèle, Cubzh is designed to be the next-generation Lego, where everything is built with cubes in a fully programmable metaverse. With over 10K worlds and 25K items already created, Cubzh empowers users to play, create, and collaborate seamlessly.

Whether you’re building games, coding, or designing objects, Cubzh offers powerful tools for all skill levels. It’s a space where artists and coders can work together effortlessly, with a focus on creativity, ownership, and recognition.

Bringing together a high-quality, dynamic and creative community

As you might have understood, Cubzh is driven by its community. It’s a playground where users create, play, and share their unique content. Cubzh caters to a diverse audience and needs to ensure that all users, regardless of age, have a fun and enjoyable experience. However, as the platform grew, it faced increasing challenges, especially regarding internet fraud.

Battling fake accounts and bots

One of the challenges Cubzh encountered was managing an influx of cheaters and malicious users, creating fake accounts and bots to occasionally disrupt the platform's community-focused environment.

As Cubzh wants to focus on the quality of its user base, rather than the quantity as other players in their field usually do, they needed a way to prevent these accounts from joining their application.

Dealing with these accounts internally required time and resources that could have been better spent enhancing the platform. Implementing robust verification processes became necessary to minimize these disruptions, and to allow the team to focus on developing and improving the overall user experience.

As Adrien Duermael, CEO of Cubzh, mentioned, “We needed to ensure some level of protection, especially since there’s a recurring problem on platforms like ours with many fake accounts, bots, and people using cheat engines.”

Safeguarding their younger audience

With the ability to have friends and chat within the app, Cubzh acts as a true social platform attracting a younger audience, with many users aged between 9 and 12.

To protect this audience, reassure parents and comply with COPPA, Cubzh needed a solution to collect approval from parents or guardians of users under 13.

Creating a fair marketplace with real rewards

One of Cubzh’s innovative approaches includes the Makers’ Marketplace where users can earn in-game money, called Pezh, by creating successful games and get rewarded for their creation. Players can also earn Pezh by being engaged users, with gamified rewards for logging in every day, submitting new creations and so on.

But for this dynamic to be fair for all players, they had to find a way to prevent them from creating several accounts to earn more Pezh and rig this freemium mechanic.

Phone verification with Prelude: a game-changer for Cubzh

Seamless user verification to build a high-quality community

Prelude stepped in with its advanced user verification tools, which quickly became the backbone of Cubzh’s strategy against fake accounts.

New users must provide their phone number (or their parents' phone number if they are under 13) to complete their registration. Prelude's SMS verification API helps Cubzh verify that each user is legitimate.

This implementation, done in one day, now empowers Cubzh to:

• secure younger users and reassure their parents

• ensure the quality of their community by keeping away cheaters and bots

• prevent users to create multiple accounts to rig the game mechanics

“The Prelude API is really easy to use, we were able to implement the solution in less than a day. Since then, we've seen a real improvement in the quality of our user base and in our user’s churn rate.”

Real-time analytics of their user onboarding

Cubzh team can also use their dashboard within Prelude to keep track of all the new users. Phone verification being the final stage of their 3-step registration process, tracking the conversion of users who complete this step is crucial to this team, as it directly reflects their user acquisition metrics.

Analysis of this data enabled them to better understand their user base. For example, they discovered that users in the US converted twice as much as the global average.

The development team shares its dashboard with Cubzh's marketing manager, who uses it to track new users from its acquisition campaigns on YouTube Shorts or TikTok Ads, enabling him to assess the quality of the audience he’s targeting.

Shared knowledge and negotiated prices that benefit all customers

Another benefit of Prelude that was crucial for a small team like Cubzh’s one, is the fact that our knowledge is shared across our clients.

Once a phone number is flagged as spam for one of our clients, it will be flagged as such for all our clients by our self-learning algorithm. One blocked attack will benefit all.

Working with companies of all sizes, including apps like BeReal with millions of global users, allows us to build valuable in-house knowledge. This expertise is particularly beneficial for small teams aiming to create quality-focused communities.

Cubzh quickly discovered additional advantages when implementing Prelude. These included direct access to support through Slack and benefiting from Prelude's relationships with providers, which allows us to negotiate better prices on behalf of all our clients.

"If you're looking to implement phone number verification quickly, Prelude is perfect—it can be set up in less than a day. I also appreciate that Prelude consistently works on reducing costs with various providers, which directly benefits us. Plus, the fact that major players are already using the platform is very reassuring."