Gaming companies are facing complex decisions as they try to build gaming infrastructures that can cost-effectively support growth while delivering peak performance for players.
Latency is one of the biggest areas of concern for online game companies because of its potential ongoing negative impact on subscriber churn and in-game transaction conversion rates. These issues can be divided into server-side and network-side components. Understanding where a game falls within the latency-sensitivity spectrum is a key component of infrastructure planning.
Infrastructure solutions used to minimize latency include:
Server-side:
The use of bare-metal hardware
High-speed network options like 10Gbps switching
Customized servers with specialty elements like high I/O disks
Network-side:
Overriding BGP routing decisions through multi-carrier optimization
Using UDP and TCP acceleration techniques
Leveraging edge caching for static file delivery, such as game patches
Latency is one of the biggest areas of concern for online game companies because of its potential ongoing negative impact on subscriber churn and in-game transaction conversion rates. These issues can be divided into server-side and network-side components. Understanding where a game falls within the latency-sensitivity spectrum is a key component of infrastructure planning.
Infrastructure solutions used to minimize latency include:
Server-side:
The use of bare-metal hardware
High-speed network options like 10Gbps switching
Customized servers with specialty elements like high I/O disks
Network-side:
Overriding BGP routing decisions through multi-carrier optimization
Using UDP and TCP acceleration techniques
Leveraging edge caching for static file delivery, such as game patches
The video game market is estimated to reach $92.5 billion globally by 20141, due, in part, to the velocity of social media and mobile device adoption. As a result, gaming companies are facing complex decisions as they try to build gaming infrastructures that can cost-effectively support this growth while delivering peak performance for players.
The success of an online game depends on a variety of variables, including the target audience and engagement strategy, device platform choice, game play and logic, and monetization and analytics capabilities, to name just a few. However, underlying all of these elements is the IT infrastructure that supports the entire online gaming stack. While a public (or virtualized) cloud may be ideal in some cases, bare-metal cloud servers, managed hosting, private cloud or colocation may be better suited for others. It depends on the type of application, whether it’s a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), mobile, social, or casual game, as well as the use case, such as new game launches, trailer streaming, testing and development, or massive, on-demand scaling.
Online gaming is a progression of technological advances rather than a particular class of games, and it is important to consider these five key factors, identified by Internap, when building an online game infrastructure.
