Cloud is the future of Gaming

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Shohel Khatri 23rd June 2021 - 6 mins read

Gaming industry has taken a front seat after COVID-19 pandemic and few gaming studios have seen remarkable growth in their DAUs (Daily active users) and MAUs (Monthly active users). This is where the role of cloud becomes inevitable for any large gaming studio.

Over the years many gamers have tried hands-on game development and converting their passion into profession. However, the journey of an indie-game developer to a large gaming studio can be a roller coaster ride. There are a lot of mis-understandings regarding how online games work and what will change when the console moves to the cloud. Everyone knows about big successful games and studios, but we rarely know about what goes behind the success and failure of any online game.

In today’s world one can easily develop an online game from anywhere and creating a game can be a fulfilling experience. So, first let’s take a look at the stages in Game development below:

  • Ideation
  • Development (Graphics + Logic)
  • Backend as a service
  • Create a Basic Prototype
  • Design architecture and development
  • Testing the Game
  • Support and Fine tuning
  • Publish
  • Scale (Customise backend)
  • Load testing
  • Release/ Go-to-Marke

How does Cloud come into the picture?

There are thousands of indie-game developers across the world but only few successful studios with good online games. Once your game is successful and you have around 20,000+ DAUs, that’s where scale comes into the picture. And, that’s where gaming is expanding into the cloud. Moreover, the cloud offers an easy and quick access for gamers as well as developers. Developers can effortlessly unify new changes into their games without any hassles.

The cloud gaming infrastructure must be scalable, flexible, and consistent on performance. With cloud in the gaming industry, game developers of any size can go for resources on demand.

The technology – how does it work?

We’ve heard about words “streaming”, “anywhere anytime”, in Digital Entertainment. Well, its Cloud computing that makes everything possible. Similarly, in the gaming industry, multimedia content is streamed through the network from the server to the user. Here, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the backbone of cloud, allowing gaming studios to scale to larger audiences. Within cloud, the game lives entirely in data centres and on a content delivery network that helps deliver a rich gaming experience with low latency.

A gaming architecture mainly consists of frontend and backend components. These can be hosted on various environments – private or public cloud, or a fully managed service. The main catch here is that a game will work well as long as you are using a good backend provider (backend-as-a-service). But as and when scale comes into the picture (20,000+ DAUs), the amount of money you have to spend on these platforms is huge and the need of developing your own customised backend engine becomes inevitable.

Developing your own backend engine is much easier with current technologies and availability of public cloud. All you need is a good backend team (Node.js, C#, Golang, etc.) that understands scale and architects it for public cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google, Azure, etc.).

Read our blog on: Key Backend Services for Successful Games

What does it mean for gaming studios to switch to the Cloud?

Here are a few benefits it is expected to bring:

  • Compatibility – Any online game can be developed / migrated to cloud.
  • Reduced costs – Gaming companies will only find it convenient and economical as one can control the cost.
  • Infinite scale – Ability to scale on cloud is much higher with customize backend for game operations. And real-time support only ensures that gamers have a good experience.
  • Seamless performance – You can monitor various application and infrastructure parameters to improve the performance of real-time games.
  • Cater to customised analytics requirements.
  • Ownership of data.
  • Cater to Customised game ops requirements – this includes live monitoring of KPIs, remote config, A/B tests, etc.

The future of Gaming in Cloud and way forward

Gaming is an industry that will only continue to grow. With Cloud taking over, there is no requirement of complex hardware, which keeps upgrading every month. Additionally, growth in mobile gamers will directly influence cloud integration with gaming.

According to the statistics as per Analytics Insight, the global cloud gaming market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 41.9% between 2019-2025 to reach the mark of US$740 million.

We can rightly say that it is time for Gaming studios to step up and adopt to cloud technology. Embracing the cloud ecosystem is the only way to stay ahead and be aggressive in the marketplace.

Success for every Game studio right now means choosing the right cloud provider. And, this can be a daunting task which makes a huge difference to the Company’s success. Our cloud-first approach has helped many leading game companies transform their businesses. Take a look at our success stories.

Also, read more about our Services and connect with our experts for complete guidance on your readiness to take on the journey to the cloud.

We will be talking about how to migrate your game from backend as a service to Infrastructure as a service in our next blog. Stay tuned!

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