Instant phone controllers
for indie games
Let your players turn their phone into a game controller in under 2 seconds. Don't spend time building and maintaining a controller for your game and the networking infrastructure to keep it running — spend that time on what you care about, your game!
Built on the gamepad your players already know
One full-featured game controller — themeable per game, reactive to what's happening on screen, with optional native-app polish. Players scan a QR from inside your game and connect instantly — no app download required.
Familiar gamepad buttons and joystick
D-pad, thumb-stick, A/B/X/Y face buttons, L/R triggers, and a pause button — the layout players already know. Inputs stream to your game in under 20ms on local WiFi.
Inputs
Customizable per game
Theme the controller to match your game — button palette, accent color, labels, which controls are visible. Configured once in the dashboard, pushed to every player — no rebuild, no code change.
Configurable
Put your HUD on the controller
Health, stamina, ammo, score, mini-map — any HUD element can render on the player's phone instead of cluttering the main screen. In local multiplayer, each player sees their own stats privately; the TV stays clean.
Render on phone
Dialogue choices, polls, and text prompts
Trigger a question from your game and the phone pops a full-screen overlay — single choice, multi-select, or free text. Answers stream back as they come in; your code awaits the result and moves on.
Prompt types
Reactive to game state
Your game broadcasts state, the controller reflects it. The pause button flips live when you pause, the UI tints with each player's team color, a 'your turn' indicator lights up in turn-based rounds, and the whole controller dims when a player is eliminated.
Reactive to
Persistent user profiles
Players set their display name and avatar once on their phone — it rides into every game built on dropcontroller. No 'what should I call you?' on every round, and the identity survives reconnects, WiFi roams, and return visits.
Profile carries
Extendable modules
Beyond the gamepad, compose purpose-built modules into the controller: a private inventory, a hidden card hand, a mini-map, a drawing canvas, or tilt/motion input. Each one is a drop-in component that stacks alongside the rest — and you can ship your own.
Module library
Bring the controller to life with the (optional) iOS controller app
Players who install the free dropcontroller iOS app get haptic rumbles that actually feel like a real gamepad — your game's events drive them directly, so hits land with a thump, engines purr, and close calls buzz under the player's thumbs. Same API, same events — no browser chrome, faster resume, and your code doesn't change.
App adds
Familiar gamepad buttons and joystick
D-pad, thumb-stick, A/B/X/Y face buttons, L/R triggers, and a pause button — the layout players already know. Inputs stream to your game in under 20ms on local WiFi.
Inputs
Customizable per game
Theme the controller to match your game — button palette, accent color, labels, which controls are visible. Configured once in the dashboard, pushed to every player — no rebuild, no code change.
Configurable
Put your HUD on the controller
Health, stamina, ammo, score, mini-map — any HUD element can render on the player's phone instead of cluttering the main screen. In local multiplayer, each player sees their own stats privately; the TV stays clean.
Render on phone
Dialogue choices, polls, and text prompts
Trigger a question from your game and the phone pops a full-screen overlay — single choice, multi-select, or free text. Answers stream back as they come in; your code awaits the result and moves on.
Prompt types
Reactive to game state
Your game broadcasts state, the controller reflects it. The pause button flips live when you pause, the UI tints with each player's team color, a 'your turn' indicator lights up in turn-based rounds, and the whole controller dims when a player is eliminated.
Reactive to
Persistent user profiles
Players set their display name and avatar once on their phone — it rides into every game built on dropcontroller. No 'what should I call you?' on every round, and the identity survives reconnects, WiFi roams, and return visits.
Profile carries
Extendable modules
Beyond the gamepad, compose purpose-built modules into the controller: a private inventory, a hidden card hand, a mini-map, a drawing canvas, or tilt/motion input. Each one is a drop-in component that stacks alongside the rest — and you can ship your own.
Module library
Bring the controller to life with the (optional) iOS controller app
Players who install the free dropcontroller iOS app get haptic rumbles that actually feel like a real gamepad — your game's events drive them directly, so hits land with a thump, engines purr, and close calls buzz under the player's thumbs. Same API, same events — no browser chrome, faster resume, and your code doesn't change.
App adds
Try it right now
Scan with your phone to feel a live game controller — no signup, no install.
Tap in for a live game controller — no signup, no install.
Try the game controller demo →Drop in a controller. Ship.
Host a room, pass "gamepad", handle inputs. That's the whole SDK surface.
using DropController;
var room = await DropController.Host(
new HostOptions(appId, apiKey)
.WithControllerTemplate("gamepad")
);
room.OnPlayerJoined += (e) => {
Debug.Log($"{e.Player.Name} joined");
};
room.OnControllerInput += (e) => {
// e.Input is a gamepad event: button, stick, trigger, dpad, or pause.
HandleGamepadInput(e.Player, e.Input);
};Unity (Asset Store distribution) and JavaScript today. Godot, Bevy, LÖVE, and Phaser SDKs in the monorepo — landing soon.
Ship a game, not a platform
The real-time stack is handled. You keep your revenue, your brand, and your engine of choice.
Broaden your audience with players that skipped the console
- Phone is the controller — no console, no gaming PC
- Casual players become customers — they'll pay for a great game, just without the hardware
- Solo or party — same zero-install join flow
Networking handled
- <20ms latency — direct WebRTC on local WiFi
- Transparent relay fallback on restrictive networks
- Zero-loss reconnection across screen locks and WiFi roams
SDK, not a walled garden
- Keep 100% of your revenue — no platform cut
- Ship anywhere — Steam, consoles, your own site
- Your brand on top — dropcontroller is invisible infrastructure
Your stack, any browser
- Unity · Unreal · Native · JS — plus raw WebSocket
- Any mobile browser — no app install, QR to join
- Offline / LAN capable once players connect
Want the deeper dive — ordered delivery, binary wire protocol, edge signaling? Read the architecture →
Worlds — a GraphQL API for everything your players own.
Profiles, characters, worlds, and the objects placed inside them — one typed graph your game can query. Dropcontroller handles the account, the schema, and the sync. No auth screens, no backend to run, no "save got wiped when I switched devices."
Accounts & auth, already handled
Every phone that plays a dropcontroller game already has an account — no signup forms, no passwords, no OAuth flow for you to run. Identity is anchored to the device's secure profile and optionally linked across devices. Your game gets a stable player ID, forever.
Profile & preferences, set once
Display name, avatar, handle, controller preferences — set the first time a player scans a QR to join any game. Every dropcontroller room they join after picks it up automatically.
On the Player object
When a phone joins a room, the SDK hands your game everything you need to render a profile next to the score:
{
id: "plr_8kQ...",
displayName: "Zoe",
avatar: "https://...",
preferences: { /* ... */ },
}Many gamesaves per player, per game
A player keeps as many parallel saves in your game as they want — a fresh run, last weekend's campaign, the world they're building with their sister. List them, pick one, keep going.
const saves = await player.listSaves();
// [{ id, name, updatedAt, ... }, ...]Save the world — or just the seed
A gamesave holds a world
blob (full state), a seed
(for procedurally-generated starts), and characterRefs
pointing at the player's characters. Share a seed as a string and a friend can spawn the
exact same starting world.
await save.write({
seed: "emerald-harbor-1847",
world: { /* tiles, state, your shape */ },
characterRefs: ["chr_..."],
});Characters live on the player, not the save
Level, loadout, skin, unlocks — character data sits on the player's account, separate from any particular world. Take your level-40 rogue into a brand-new seed, a friend's hosted save, or your own campaign from last month. One character, many worlds.
Objects belong to the world
A castle your friend built, a chest your party dropped, the shop Seraphine set up — objects live inside the world they were placed in. Unlike characters, they don't travel with the player. Visit a friend's world and you see everything they've built; go home and your own world is untouched.
Schema versioning & migrations
Games evolve — new inventory slots, renamed fields, split a blob into typed shards. Bump your schema version and ship a migration function; existing saves lazily upgrade on read. No "loading an old save will break," no wiping production state when you iterate.
dropcontroller.defineGame({
schemaVersion: 4,
migrations: {
3: (save) => ({ ...save, /* rename loot->items */ }),
4: (save) => ({ ...save, /* add equipped slot */ }),
},
});Connect with your players and see what they really want
Every phone already running your game is a direct line to the player holding it. The built-in help desk turns that line two-way — gather feedback, run polls on what to build next, and collect bug reports with device context attached. Nothing to integrate, no third-party service to pay.
Open feedback channel
One tap from inside the controller opens a feedback sheet — free text, per-player, threaded back to your dashboard. See what players love and what frustrates them without waiting on a Steam review.
Run polls in-app
Push a poll to every player who's touched your game — "which boss should we rework?", "vote on the next character class", "is the new map better?" Results stream in live while players are still online.
Bug reports with context
When a player taps "report a bug," their submission travels with device info, your game's version, recent console logs, and an optional screenshot. Triage faster than email ever will.
Pricing that stays out of your way
The SDK is free. Local network sessions always cost $0. You only pay when traffic routes through our cloud relay or you outgrow your tier's data cap.
Hobbyist
Personal projects, prototypes, learning
- Unlimited local-network sessions
- Up to 32 devices, under 20ms latency
- Discovery, session management, reconnection
- End-to-end encryption
- Full no-code controller designer
- 100 MB world data storage
Controller
Indie games and small commercial projects
- Everything in Hobbyist
- 3,500 cloud relay device-minutes included
- Analytics dashboard and session insights
- Custom branding / white-label controllers
- Priority support
Worlds
Games with persistent players, saves, and worlds
- Everything in Controller
- World data API — profiles, characters, saves, worlds, objects
- Custom schema for world objects and characters
- CRUD via SDK — create, read, update, delete
- 10 GB world data storage included
- Player help desk — feedback, polls, bug reports
Usage overages
When you exceed your tier's capsper device-minute
per GB
per GB / month
Contact us for volume pricing if you're consistently exceeding 50,000 device-minutes per month.
Everything you need so you can just focus on your game - we can't wait to see what you make
Don't spend time building and maintaining a controller for your game and the networking infrastructure to keep it running. Put that time into the gameplay that makes people laugh, compete, and come together around a screen.