IaaS and GaaS: The Cloudy Future of Video Games
Over the past 5 years, graphics and gameplay in video games have stepped far forward. The design principles themselves have also changed. Game developers today have to quickly make changes to projects, scale and adapt their IT infrastructure to changing development processes and user requirements.
But managing your own infrastructure takes time and distracts from the core business of creating games, so gaming industry participants are increasingly using virtual infrastructure as a platform for developing, testing, running and supporting games.
/ photo by John_Schiel CC
After the success of its first game, Angry Birds in 2009, when the total number of downloads exceeded three billion, Rovio Entertainment thought about a scalable cloud-based server system. Rovio was looking for a solution that would help to cope with a sharp increase in the number of users and provide the necessary amount of resources depending on the load. In this company helped IaaS-solutions.
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The game industry and IBM are seriously interested in: the first step was the acquisition of SoftLayer, which served 25,000 users. Since then, the number of active users of IBM SoftLayer has grown to 130 million people, and in early 2014, two gaming companies KUULUU and Multiplay switched to the IBM SoftLayer cloud platform. Multiplay, one of the largest hosting servers for online gaming, serves approximately 100,000 players from around the world every night, with projects such as Minecraft, Battlefield 4, DayZ, Starbound and Team Fortress 2 on its list.
Today, cloud services are used to automate tasks, greatly simplify the process of testing and bringing the product to market. Companies are coping with the processing of large amounts of data, solving the problem of unexpected load growth due to a sharp increase in the number of users. For example, Multiplay is able to cope with the “arrival” of 25 thousand new users at any time. Also, cloud technologies have a positive effect on user experience - the cloud greatly simplifies the process of updating customers.
Last but not least, cloud technologies enable dialogue between consumers and game developers. David Bailey, CEO of Mediatonic game developer, says that priority is now given to analytic work with users. The same opinion is shared by the creators of Angry Birds, who have focused on social functions, the reward system, the ability to pay from the application, and so on.
Today, the Hatch cloud platform used by Rovio Entertainment processes thousands of user requests and analytic information every second and is a mix of Java technologies, Angular, NoSQL databases, Hadoop, and additional real-time systems. The platform easily scales and serves more than 250 million users monthly.
/ photo Taka Umemura CC
Gaming as a service (GaaS) is a new developing direction in the gaming industry. GaaS consists of three components: hardware (IaaS), a platform for launching game content (PaaS), a platform for delivery to an end user (SaaS).
David Bailey believes that GaaS seems to be “eroding” the relationship between publishers and developers, offering the latter more control. Mediatonic launched the GaaS Game Fuel platform, which resulted from several years of experience and experience publishing games with Microsoft, Disney and Time Warner. Cloud technology allows publishers and developers to analyze and manage virtually any aspect of the game: content, monetization, complexity, etc. With the help of Game Fuel, all team members can make changes that will be immediately available to users.
However, GaaS technology has another purpose. They allow the client not to download or install games. They are stored on the server side, where they are launched, and the user sees on his device only the results of the “code operation”. This makes it possible to play on a less powerful device than the program requires.
The pioneer in this area was the service OnLive, which was developed for about 7 years and saw the light at the end of 2009. However, after 5 years of existence, it was bought by Sony and after some time closed. The reasons for this were the difficulties with playing games on different computer configurations and the need for a constant good connection. Perhaps the technology at that time were not ready.
However, today flagships in the field of graphics card manufacturing (nVidia and AMD) offer solutions designed specifically for cloud services. Therefore, at the end of 2014 in Russia, the launch of the Playkey cloud resource took place, which operates according to a similar scheme as OnLive.
The resource is based on Intel processors and nVidia Grid video cards. As the company says Playkey, the service is able to transmit a picture in 720p resolution at 30 frames per second at maximum graphics settings. To do this, it is enough for the user to have a modest processor and 5 Mbit / s Internet.
The audience of the service today is small, and, as users note , it still has some drawbacks (for example, difficulties with moving the cursor), but the technology itself has a certain potential and, perhaps, in the near future, it will become more widespread.
But managing your own infrastructure takes time and distracts from the core business of creating games, so gaming industry participants are increasingly using virtual infrastructure as a platform for developing, testing, running and supporting games.
/ photo by John_Schiel CC
After the success of its first game, Angry Birds in 2009, when the total number of downloads exceeded three billion, Rovio Entertainment thought about a scalable cloud-based server system. Rovio was looking for a solution that would help to cope with a sharp increase in the number of users and provide the necessary amount of resources depending on the load. In this company helped IaaS-solutions.
')
The game industry and IBM are seriously interested in: the first step was the acquisition of SoftLayer, which served 25,000 users. Since then, the number of active users of IBM SoftLayer has grown to 130 million people, and in early 2014, two gaming companies KUULUU and Multiplay switched to the IBM SoftLayer cloud platform. Multiplay, one of the largest hosting servers for online gaming, serves approximately 100,000 players from around the world every night, with projects such as Minecraft, Battlefield 4, DayZ, Starbound and Team Fortress 2 on its list.
Cloud benefits
Today, cloud services are used to automate tasks, greatly simplify the process of testing and bringing the product to market. Companies are coping with the processing of large amounts of data, solving the problem of unexpected load growth due to a sharp increase in the number of users. For example, Multiplay is able to cope with the “arrival” of 25 thousand new users at any time. Also, cloud technologies have a positive effect on user experience - the cloud greatly simplifies the process of updating customers.
Last but not least, cloud technologies enable dialogue between consumers and game developers. David Bailey, CEO of Mediatonic game developer, says that priority is now given to analytic work with users. The same opinion is shared by the creators of Angry Birds, who have focused on social functions, the reward system, the ability to pay from the application, and so on.
Today, the Hatch cloud platform used by Rovio Entertainment processes thousands of user requests and analytic information every second and is a mix of Java technologies, Angular, NoSQL databases, Hadoop, and additional real-time systems. The platform easily scales and serves more than 250 million users monthly.
/ photo Taka Umemura CC
Gaming as a Service
Gaming as a service (GaaS) is a new developing direction in the gaming industry. GaaS consists of three components: hardware (IaaS), a platform for launching game content (PaaS), a platform for delivery to an end user (SaaS).
David Bailey believes that GaaS seems to be “eroding” the relationship between publishers and developers, offering the latter more control. Mediatonic launched the GaaS Game Fuel platform, which resulted from several years of experience and experience publishing games with Microsoft, Disney and Time Warner. Cloud technology allows publishers and developers to analyze and manage virtually any aspect of the game: content, monetization, complexity, etc. With the help of Game Fuel, all team members can make changes that will be immediately available to users.
However, GaaS technology has another purpose. They allow the client not to download or install games. They are stored on the server side, where they are launched, and the user sees on his device only the results of the “code operation”. This makes it possible to play on a less powerful device than the program requires.
The pioneer in this area was the service OnLive, which was developed for about 7 years and saw the light at the end of 2009. However, after 5 years of existence, it was bought by Sony and after some time closed. The reasons for this were the difficulties with playing games on different computer configurations and the need for a constant good connection. Perhaps the technology at that time were not ready.
However, today flagships in the field of graphics card manufacturing (nVidia and AMD) offer solutions designed specifically for cloud services. Therefore, at the end of 2014 in Russia, the launch of the Playkey cloud resource took place, which operates according to a similar scheme as OnLive.
The resource is based on Intel processors and nVidia Grid video cards. As the company says Playkey, the service is able to transmit a picture in 720p resolution at 30 frames per second at maximum graphics settings. To do this, it is enough for the user to have a modest processor and 5 Mbit / s Internet.
The audience of the service today is small, and, as users note , it still has some drawbacks (for example, difficulties with moving the cursor), but the technology itself has a certain potential and, perhaps, in the near future, it will become more widespread.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/312040/
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