Did you know that we help launch more than 50 games each year?
The gaming infrastructure required to develop, launch and maintain a game is vital and can make or break its success. Many of you will remember or at least have heard about the Diablo 3 launch disaster and the recurring “the servers are busy at this time. Please try again later” message that plagued players.
In a message to players, Blizzard admitted that its servers were overwhelmed by demand, saying “we’ve been humbled by your enthusiasm – and we sincerely regret that your crusade to bring down the Lord of Terror was thwarted not by mobs of demons, but by mortal infrastructure”.
This incident shows why the relationship between a gaming company and their gaming infrastructure partner needs to be collaborative and trusted.
Whether the gaming company is a developer, publisher, managed hosting provider, or service provider, it’s essential that trusted collaboration starts at the outset and lasts the lifetime of the partnership.
Our motto “Make customers happy. Keep them happy” is important to us because while the smooth launch of a new game is critical, so is maintaining an amazing player experience. As co-founder of Bossa Studios Irme Jele said, “you can make an amazing game, but you can’t make a success. Your players make the success”.
Delivering that player experience from launch and beyond is only possible if games are supported by gaming infrastructure that is designed and managed for the unique needs of each game. Which is why we will always rise to the challenge and find ways to combat our customers’ pain points, enabling them to deliver consistently high performing games with consistently high performing bare metal game servers.
Sometimes, that means trying our hand at something new. This was exactly the situation our gaming team found themselves in with one of our gaming customers not long ago.
Our gaming customer approached us and asked if we would be willing to look into setting up a new network peering relationship directly with Valve’s network for Steam.
The customer was beginning to push an increasing amount of traffic through Valve’s network, to enable the end user (the player) to have the best possible experience when downloading and playing their favourite games via Steam, which is why they needed our help.
By peering directly with Valve on one of their public internet exchange points, that process is far quicker.
It’s just one of the extra steps that our gaming team are willing to put in to improve the experience of the millions of players who are connected to our servers in multiple data center locations every year, and to keep our customers happy, of course.
Our gaming team are gamers (and passionate ones at that). So, we understand the importance of player experience. We are also proud of how customizable our offering is. If you need something and it improves the gaming infrastructure environment for you and potentially also our other customers, we will do our utmost to achieve it.
That is just one example of how we put our customers first. Our gaming team also provides:
We have verticalized our account managers to ensure that our customers are looked after and advised by industry experts who know their space inside out.
As gamers and gaming infrastructure specialists, our gaming team knows what it takes to build a dedicated gaming servers solution that offers fast provisioning, low latency and outstanding value to ensure a successful game launch.
And if something does go wrong, they’re there, right where their customers are, providing support and communications through the customer’s platform of choice. Whether that’s Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack or a phone call.
Not all components for dedicated gaming servers are made equal. Similarly, the infrastructure setup that works for one game, doesn’t necessarily work for another. Some developers may need to prioritize high CPU frequency while others may not be focused on the cores’ frequency but instead more cores per server.
For example, we know that as single-threaded applications both Minecraft and Rust are heavily reliant on processing power/high CPU clock speeds and therefore high frequency cores are a must when specifying high performance dedicated servers for these games. Rust, in particular, has some of the highest hardware requirements in the game industry, needing a huge amount of server power to make the massive in-game world available to players.
Our gaming team has that knowledge and can therefore advise customers on the best dedicated gaming servers set up for them to help avoid infrastructure hosting mistakes.
In today’s economic climate, efficient infrastructure spending is crucial. But it’s not always easy to do. The key is looking at how to optimize infrastructure from the beginning but also regularly and consistently following the initial setup.
Our gaming team works collaboratively with customers to carry out in-depth proof of concepts at the start and then regular evaluation of the gaming infrastructure throughout their relationship with us. Our CRO and gaming expert Isaac Douglas wrote about the importance of both of these approaches in his “lessons from a decade in hosting”.
Out of all the industries, gaming is hit by the most distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks globally, accounting for 35% of all DDoS traffic worldwide.
The industry’s success plus its increasing integration of new capabilities like microtransactions make it an attractive target. As the report referenced above stated, “cyber-criminals know there is value in gaming, and they will continue to invent ways of getting it or exploiting the flow of virtual funds.”
It’s why we’re constantly looking at how we can help improve our security offerings, such as advancing our DDoS mitigation to protect our customers as the threat of attacks increases.
Not only have we built our infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform to allow for fast provisioning of dedicated gaming servers to scale in line with your concurrent users (CCU), we also don’t lock customers into contracts.
This is to better enable developers to scale up or down with demand and their player base easily. Because our gaming team works so closely with customers, they know what they need when they need it. This includes knowing when future projects, new games or the latest updates are coming up so we can help them plan their infrastructure.
As customer Indifferent Broccoli said, “the team is on top of news in the gaming world. More than once, they've given me a heads up when a new big game update is coming out. They proactively help me prepare for the influx”.
Our gaming team is always up for the challenge – by listening to our customers and understanding the issues they are having, or the goals they want to achieve, we will work together to find a customized gaming infrastructure solution.
Jarrod Palmer is our gaming industry specialist. He knows the issues our customers face and how best
to help them. He's also a great Warzone player and is the UK office FIFA champion.
