How Gaming Companies Can Build a Scalable Web Architecture

The gaming industry is frequently pressed to react quickly to the demands of its global audience. Customer expectations for more immersive gaming experiences on more gaming platforms are always rising. A very challenging environment has been established for game developers, ranging from always online and live service games to the ever-rising player requests for more and more content. Players demand regular and continuous releases, and studio management frequently has to coordinate distributed teams that may be located in different time zones. To overcome these obstacles, life must be made easier for already overworked game creators with better tools and procedures. The best technology and production practices must be used to do this, and game creators have built a number of processes to take ideas from conception to completion.

DevOps approaches, on the other hand, go beyond agile’s capacity to enable responsive development and beyond conventional cloud providers’ capacity to give a low latency experience, which can improve the effect and ease of the game development process. 

Main challenges in the gaming industry

1. Infrastructure Scalability

One of the most challenging aspects of building and managing a gaming platform is the ability to support an immense amount of traffic. Epic Games’ multiplayer game, Fortnite, hosts over 200 million players worldwide simultaneously and can’t afford to lose gamers due to infrastructure or application issues. In efforts to capitalize on a reliable, scalable, low-latency game platform, Epic uses AWS Game Tech services. Epic operates on the cloud with a scalable cloud architecture to host their last-man-standing game, platform, and analytics pipeline. Cloud providers supply game companies with the tools they need to not only build their games but also evolve, scale, and massively expand them to meet the growing demands of players.

2. Continuous Increase of Customer Expectations

All game development companies strive to improve the customer experience. Efficient processing of games, user-friendly interfaces, and the delivery of millions of petabytes of consumer data available at the touch of a button are the basic expectations for continuous customer engagement. The new standard for modern, large-scale game platforms is frequent upgrades.

3. Distributed Teams

The requirement to collaborate with data availability and consistency across distributed game development teams around the world is essential to preserving agility. For operational flexibility and scalability, using a platform that can support on-prem, cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid is crucial. It is becoming a typical requirement to be able to securely deliver production software to distant sites in order to support global deployments.

4. Agile Application Compliance and Security

This presents a significant challenge for game production companies in terms of brand reputation and corporate governance. Teams are under constant pressure to accelerate development without compromising security, traceability, or compliance as the demand for faster releases grows. When aiming for continuous updates and zero vulnerabilities, businesses must apply the latest innovations to software development to stay ahead of the competition.

5. Automation, Orchestration, and Continuous Delivery

Automating shortens the time-to-market and also ensures regulatory compliance. Adopting a platform that can facilitate the orchestration and automation of your DevOps pipeline will boost development productivity and streamline internal operations.

Critical Steps for Building Scalable Cloud Gaming Architecture

Today’s game development companies require a fully automated, end-to-end DevOps platform for releasing secure software releases from code to production in order to meet customer expectations and stay ahead of the competition.

1.  Make Your Game Platform Globally Available

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the foundation of the entire Internet, so it makes sense to use the DNS web service not just for domain registration but also for handling the crucial records needed to map players to your infrastructure. You may further control how your players connect thanks to routing regulations that are customizable and efficient. In a global setting, those are crucial to the sustainability and scalability of your game. Your game will also require scalable compute, or servers that operate games, microservices, APIs, and other crucial tasks, in addition to a scalable DNS service.

Instead of sitting around and piling up costs, these servers must adapt dynamically to the number of users connected to meet demand.

2. Embrace Infrastructure Resiliency

In order to ensure your clients’ access to your services at all times, you must have a resilient infrastructure and DevOps platform.

While there are services that might help enhance performance, you might want to make more specific changes to collaborate with them more effectively. More recent operating-system-level containerization software has made it possible to create containerized workloads, which let code exploit servers more effectively. The foundation of the present DevOps environment, efficient CI/CD practices—depends on containers. To proactively lower latency and still be able to scale and satisfy player demand, you can instantly deploy new or more containers. Your game becomes more versatile and adaptable with each added container.

Compared to traditional applications, containers deploy more quickly, let developers simply package and test their apps, and scale various workload components with ease. Utilizing well-liked open-source orchestration tools, cloud providers offer native solutions for establishing resilient container infrastructure.

3. Deliver an Engaging Experience

As part of your DevOps processes, there’s a way to continuously gather feedback before and after your initial launch. You can leverage platform automation to get real-time analytics via APIs and instantly monitor traffic patterns and general performance. You will also be able to track what kinds of attacks are being prevented as well as how. With the help of these technologies, game creators may safely transmit games to players while also ensuring low latency and an engaging experience. 

You should choose service monitoring to keep tabs on instances or other backend infrastructure.

4. Monitor and Analyze Player Activity

It’s important not only to store data but also to analyze it. Meanwhile, players generate huge volumes of activity data, which is pretty hard to analyze without the proper services and tools. Gaming companies can utilize these services to send enormous volumes of data to backend storage systems and perform in-depth analyses to influence business decisions and outcomes. Game platforms require databases in addition to analytics to store user data like profiles, progress, achievements, etc. Database engines and technologies for a range of use cases, including non-relational, relational, and graph databases, are offered by cloud service providers. All of these managed database services have been tested for dependability and performance, and they can scale along with your application.

Additionally, customers that use an API-driven platform maintain full control over their accounts.

Additionally, by using an API-driven platform, your users retain complete control over their accounts, sites, and all the services they’re using. As part of your DevOps methods, you may automate analytics, updates, and deployments.

5. Unified DevOps Platform

Adoption of DevOps within every organization is crucial for complete digital transformation. A comprehensive solution that offers speed, security, efficiency, and high availability is required by the gaming industry. To give developers and administrators a smooth DevOps experience, you should unify all software products under a single user interface and set of controls.

DevOps and Managed Services for Game Development Companies

There are many factors to take into account when developing a scalable, resilient, and reliable gaming architecture. Nevertheless, there are also considerations to adjust to your specific game development regulatory requirements and business operation model. However, you can more readily achieve your objectives if you make use of the right service options. In order to get there faster and free up your development teams to work on innovations and upgrades rather than infrastructure problems and outages, an experienced partner can assist you in comprehending and deploying the necessary services. A managed services provider like ITGix can take your game to the next level by enhancing the scalability and performance of your games and applications with different cloud services and game tech-specific capabilities.