Years ago, I was well immersed in the hyper casual games sector. In this market, you have to continuously push new content updates to keep your audience engaged — i.e. ultra-short iteration cycles.

Maintaining short iteration cycles is a challenging process, as each application content update has a high base human cost to it.

It's not always the development cycle that takes long, but the whole update process. That includes QA, store uploads, reviews, waiting for players to update to the new version on time (if they do at all)... that all takes time.

Often enough, issues you find in any point of that process requires starting from the beginning of the cycle. A wbroken build, a bug, an Apple employee not liking your new build, cosmic rays... it can be all sort of things.

To put it simply: just changing a few visual elements could easily take 5 working days (best case). That's above $3000.

That's an expensive pipeline.

You see, after some time I understood the need for being so cautious. It becomes easy to justify its price when you think of the alternative: to mess up the experience of 50+ million players. And as long as you're making good cash, you can afford to pay these numbers.

But at the same time, I was sure there had to be a way to cut corners and use my time better.

Often enough, the game changes were purely cosmetic... and I really wondered if we had to go through the whole release process again. I had then wished we could just upload the new sprite somewhere and let the client update, skipping the rest of the process. Or something like that.

A few months in I discovered the power of asset bundles. The idea was simple: put content into some kind of ZIP files and let players download these. New content, new ZIP file. Easy, right?

The problem of this idea lied on its execution. Asset bundles are extremely complicated to get right and the slight mistake would cost you weeks worth of time to fix.

But here's the key: Unity noticed and reacted to the complexity of asset bundles and decided to engineer a developer-friendly technology. They called it Addressables.

The Unity Addressable Assets system makes using asset bundles pretty much straight-forward. It allows you to cut the biggest obstacles when updating game content.

You tick a few checkboxes here and there, make some code adjustments and you're suddenly ready to update your content as you go.

That means: you will stop spending 40+ hours to update your content and stick to 1 hour.