From 3,000 Assets to a Single Batch Operation

Let us set the scene.

We were working on BTX, a mobile multiplayer shooter targeting the Indian market. The game went on to hit over a million downloads and a peak of 200,000 concurrent players. If you know the Indian mobile gaming space, you know the device range is wild. Entry-level Android sitting right next to mid-range hardware, all expected to run the same game. The developers were upfront about it: zero audio processing budget. Every CPU cycle was going to server-side operations. Nothing left for us.

Now, the audio scope wasn't small. Hundreds of assets; guns, variations, layers, each one carrying non-dynamic effects. Distortion, saturation, EQ work that shaped how those sounds fundamentally sounded. All of it baked into Wwise events because that's what the quality needed.

And all of it eating CPU the game couldn't afford.

What the "fix" actually looked like

The solution wasn't complicated to understand. Print the non-dynamic processing into the files. Bake it out. Remove the runtime overhead.

What was complicated was doing it.

Go back to Pro Tools. Find the session. Find the asset. Apply the processing. Rename it correctly. Export. Go to the right folder. Reimport into Wwise. Rebuild the event reference. Test it. Move to the next one.

Now do that somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 times.

We are not exaggerating. That was the actual scope. And the worst part wasn't the volume, it was the realisation that none of it required a creative decision. Same steps, same process, same outcome, every single time. We weren't sound designing anymore. We were doing data entry with audio files.

That bothered us more than the hours did.

The moment it clicked

At some point in the middle of that project, we stopped and thought, this is a simple process. There's no reason a human should be doing this manually. It can be automated.

So, we started asking around. Talked to audio directors, got their read on it. Turns out this wasn't a BTX problem. This was everyone's problem. Studios had workarounds, Reaper scripts, manual spreadsheet tracking, internal tools that kind of worked, but nobody had built something that actually solved it properly.

That gap is where Malleant came from.

What it looks like now

Malleant connects to your live Wwise session and places a bridge at the SFX object level, the lowest level of the hierarchy, directly at the source file. That placement matters because it means what you hear during audition is processed before the signals are summed, exactly as those files will sound after export. What you hear is what you get. No approximation.

You build your plugin chain with your full VST library. Audition it against the live game signal. When it's right, you export, Malleant finds the original file locations automatically, exports back to where they came from, and reimports into Wwise in one step.

The BTX job that took days now runs as a single batch operation.

The non-dynamic effects are baked into the file. The runtime CPU overhead is gone. The game runs on more devices. And the dynamic effects, the ones that actually need to respond to gameplay are untouched. Malleant only handles what it should.

What it won't do

Worth being clear about this: Malleant doesn't replace your DAW. If you need to go back into the individual layers of an asset and rework the underlying sound design, that's still a DAW job. Malleant works on what's already in your Wwise session.

It solves one part of the workflow really well. That was always the intention.

Why we still think about this project

BTX hit over a million downloads. 200,000 concurrent players at peak. And the audio problem we were solving on it, getting non-dynamic processing off the runtime CPU on devices that couldn't afford it, that problem exists on every game at every scale. BTX just made it impossible to ignore.

It doesn't have to work that way.

Conclusion:

If you want to see the batch workflow running on an actual session, we do one-on-one demos, reach out and we'll find time. Beta is free and open at app.freefallinterface.com if you want to get into it yourself first.