The Studio

WOLF is a leading social networking app in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It focuses on providing live audio entertainment for Arabic-speaking users.

With a huge user base of millions, and a core of more than 100,000 users, WOLF Qanawat’s community engagement and entertainment app aimed to maintain growth by focusing on what its users wanted more of – gaming. As Danny Kemp, Lead Games Engineer at parent company WOLF, states:

We wanted to enhance our entertainment offering by embedding fun, interactive and social games for our users to play whilst chatting and forming strong social connections.

The Challenge

Operating with a lean team, WOLF needed to prioritise speed to market, over custom development. That meant a solution that would fit naturally into its existing workflow rather than investing time and resources in building everything from scratch. As the team stated:

We are a small team moving very quickly to deliver this initiative so we required something that would seamlessly integrate into our build pipelines. We didn't want to build all of this ourselves.

WOLF Qanawat, like almost all mobile applications and games, is free to download. The business generates revenue through   in-app purchases. Given WOLF’s large user base, minimising cost per user is “mission critical”. As WOLF described:

We didn't want to have huge server costs that would impact our profitability targets.

The Solution

After some research, the team found Edgegap.

Edgegap’s game server hosting and orchestration deploys game servers on the world’s first, and largest, regionless edge network, at a single universal price. Which means WOLF Qanawat can deploy servers on-demand, and just-in-time, seamlessly for both its MENA-based users alongside those around the world cost effectively. 

Before that, though, comes integration. Edgegap’s simple yet in-depth documentation alongside its dedicated Unity plugin made the process seamless for WOLF’s team, who said:

It's intuitive and easy to set up your connection to your Edgegap account and with the tutorials provided you can have something up and running incredibly fast.

Edgegap has integrations for all network libraries and dedicated docs for each of these libraries which is probably the biggest plus for us.

Core to its objective to validate each game before deploying them to their millions of users on mobile, the team at WOLF found Edgegap’s analytics particularly useful to validate its projects, saying:

Edgegap has ready-made tools to track our servers hosted, retrieve logs and check dashboards, all of which was extremely useful for us to deliver our gaming strategy and measure its success.

Selecting a technology partner is about more than just what technology is on offer. Edgegap prides itself on the quality of its support to help development teams integrate well into production, alongside the availability of its developers to help provide best practices and insights with its clients. As Danny highlights:

Edgegap’s support team was very approachable and helpful when it came to us wanting to understand how to integrate with the Edgegap service.

But above and beyond this, the team also offered advice on best practices for implementing various parts of our games and could provide expertise on technical approaches.

Given the large volume of users in WOLF Qanawat, cost optimisation was also a critical factor for the development team. But that usually comes with some trade-off, which was not an issue with Edgegap’s complete suite of tools and integration. Danny says:

We found that Edgegap was  a cost-effective solution that could provide WOLF with the right tools, an easy integration and strong support.

Additionally, Edgegap’s platform and its managed infrastructure solution helped WOLF across specific areas:

• Worry-Free Scaling: Edgegap scales up to 40 deployments per second for 60 minutes and provides just-in-time, on-demand game server deployment. This means WOLF can add games or run campaigns anytime without worrying about having enough server capacity to accommodate a sudden influx of new players.

• Regionless Hosting: Edgegap caches game servers in all 615+ locations across the globe and then makes them available to the game's player base on-demand. This allowed WOLF to publish games and ensured they were available to their app worldwide, instantly.

• Usage-Based Pricing at a Single, Universal Price Point: It’s not always easy to predict the size of a game’s player base ahead of release, or even the normal fluctuations of daily play. Reserve too little computing power and companies risk downtime; reserve too much and companies can end up paying for unused resources. With Edgegap’s on-demand game server deployment, WOLF only pays for real usage 100% for compute.

• Resiliency: Thanks to Edgegap's automated multi-cloud management, players of WOLF Qanawat’s games have had a consistent experience free from server disruptions.

Conclusion

Following our work with WOLF, the social networking platform is preparing for the next phase of its gaming strategy, offering more enticing games, with social media links, opportunities for spectator involvement and monetised gamification mechanics to offer users an elevated in-app experience.

As WOLF’s CEO, Gary Knight, says: “We constantly strive to give our users the best app experience, listening to what interests and excites them, and gaming is definitely our next big focus. We are creating a Gaming Hub that will entice, engage and reward. Our aim is to continue evolving gaming in-app, ensuring current and future users continue to find fun, friendship and monetisation all in one place. Watch this space for Gaming Hub updates – there are many more fantastic games and experiences in the pipeline!”