Online gaming can only be delivered with the right infrastructure in place. It is one of the critical components to be successful. It is no longer about choosing a dedicated server – getting the right mix of IT Infrastructure is vastly more important. Online gamers need real time experience which demands super high latency. In the past gaming was just a client-server model where most of the game publishers would set up on-premise or Colocation infrastructure and could deliver the games. Today games are massively multiplayers with virtual worlds and intertwined single-player experiences.
In 2019, the value of the cloud gaming market had hit $1.15 billion. Further market size is predicted to reach USD 56.57 billion by 2027, exhibiting a CAGR of 15.7%. The increasing adoption of online games will have a positive impact on the cloud gaming market. Game developers have shifted their focus towards the launch of high-end graphics games based on cloud services. In addition, the integration of Augmented (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) Technology and emphasis on next-generation networks such as 5G products and services will bolster healthy growth of the market in the foreseeable future.
We have already seen tech giants like Google, who are launching services and infrastructure for the cloud gaming industry. It’s not just about picking up servers or a few VM’s that will make your gaming successful. If your IT Infrastructure can’t deliver it will fail and not perform.
High Level Components
This is just an High Level overview of how the online gaming infrastructure looks like.
The frontend components of the gaming architecture include:
- Frontend Platform services that provide extra-game functionality
- Dedicated game servers that host the game.
The backend components of the gaming architecture include:
- Game Database, persisted in the system of record and typically stored in the game database – it can be in the form of SQLDB or BigData.
- Analytics Backend that stores and queries analytics and gameplay events.
These components can be hosted on a variety of environments:
- On-premises
- Colocation
- Private cloud
- public cloud
- fully managed solution
Any combination that is taken should meet your latency requirements for communication between the components and end users.
The Importance of Having the Right Gaming Infrastructure
Any cloud based games come with multiplayer functionality and require high bandwidth. One of the most important things game publishers take for granted is the scalability of the infrastructure. Without a scalable infrastructure the whole environment will fail.
Hence to ensure best performance and better gaming experience there is no other way then to have a Hybrid IT Solution in place. Having a Hybrid IT mix strategy will help you design your infrastructure that can have multiple Points-of-Presence along with a native multi-cloud build into the same strategy.
Types of game servers with your Infrastructure
Most of the world talks about publishers owning a dedicated server. When we talk, we will always talk in terms of infrastructure. There are ample datacenters who will offer powerful dedicated servers that are running in the basement of a house without required bandwidth or low latency. Which is why we always talk about infrastructure.
Few of the high level requirements for game servers are:
- Real Time Simulation
- Session or match based games
- Massively multiplayer persistent worlds
- Request/response based servers
- Externalizing the game world state
- Game DB
- SQL DB or
- NoSQL DB
- Analytics
- In game analytics
- Game Publishers
This is just an overview of different components of a gaming infrastructure. Moreover, the right infrastructure can not only assure high performance and extremely low latency, but also the users will get additional dependability, security, and service availability for the users.
How To Select A Dedicated Infrastructure For Gaming Needs?
We are no longer living in a world where gaming servers are always 1:1 ratio. The number of components for computation or SQL or just front end serving is never about “First among equals”. Games with real time simulation and multiplayer sessions necessitate additional scaling tactics that assure minimal latency and maximum compute power, cross-scalability, etc.
Game Infrastructure needs:
- Maintaining the game server with an immediate response time practice
- Global distribution of dedicated game servers to cut off latency and redundancy
- Sufficient validation on the game server to keep exploits and intruders away
- Strengthening the dedicated game server against DDOS ( denial of service) attacks and other threats
- On the client-side, implement delay for communication retries
- Create sessions/ externalizing process state
The infrastructure should be capable of bearing the varying workloads appropriately. So, it is necessary to plan the IT resources in the upfront and keep these factors in mind when designing.
Importance Of Hosting Provider
When it comes to underlying game servers or CPU class most of the hosting providers will have it within their inventory. Servers are a commodity. What makes a hosting provider like us better than others is the service quality and the solutions that we can provide.
A gaming infrastructure is high performance and requires additional product/industry expertise. With GCH being your hosting partner we possess some of the top professional support that is required for your gaming infrastructure.
We will advise not only on the equipment that you need to buy but also on how you can implement CI/CD (continuous integration and either continuous delivery or continuous deployment). We have inhouse expertise that can handle almost all your infrastructure requirements. Any other DC will tell you the RAM to use or storage to use. This is simply giving you a more managed experience is where we come in.
CONSULTING SERVICES
- Consulting on design and implementing Private Cloud architecture
- Deployment Pipeline towards Continuous Delivery/Continuous Deployment for more frequent and faster live deployments, CI Pipeline implementation
- Personalized analysis and consultation to build private cloud solution
- Modernizing and optimization existing Cloud infrastructure
- Cloud architecture design
- Automated bare-metal provisioning, monitoring, and management of virtual machines
- Shared storage in multi-tenant secured environments
What’s next
Gaming Infrastructure solutions for game developers or publishers follow a common pattern: clients talk to a frontend of services and game servers, which communicate to a backend of analytics and state storage. You can run each of these components on-premises, in the cloud, or some mixture of the two.
Talk to Geek Crunch Hosting and see what will be best infrastructure fit for your requirements from development to production.
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