It’s all déjà-vu. Several select AWS services have been down for hours over the last few weeks. This has created havoc for tech-centric and regular companies worldwide. The gaming world is living the repercussions and essential work-from-home tools such as Slack have faced critical issues.

In gaming, time passes, and the same mistakes are made. A team of experimented developers, whether in large AAA settings where hundreds of people work on the new big hit or where a handful of small independents (indies) work hard for months to build what they believe to be the best video game ever. Days before launch, stress and anxiety are at a fever pitch. The release date comes and goes. Players flock to the new ‘it’ game and the reviews are stellar. Developers are proud and the bottom line is growing! That’s when the imaginable happens…Server problems.

More than a typical issue, this is usually due to poor planning and sometimes bad luck. Some developers can’t plan for the massive influxes and can’t control what they quite frankly don’t control server outages. After all that hard work, you’d think there was a better plan to adapt and maximize revenue. But when deciding on server providers, it’s usually the cheapest option that gets selected to save costs and cut corners. The affordable price can mean cheap hardware, less redundancy, longer time to scale and even overused servers. Why risk that hard work going to waste when there are solutions to mediate this issue?

The medicine to treat this headache is simple; multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud server solutions. This option makes sure that there isn’t reliance on a single network or a single provider. At Edgegap, we simplify things by doing the heavy lifting of integration and infrastructure management behind the scenes so that clients don’t have to think about it. We’ve seen many outages from our point of view at Edgegap, and we have not been affected every time. The workload is sent to the nearest unaffected server, where we can offer the best experience for the end user. 0 downtime, no user complaints, and the show went on as if nothing had happened.

Selecting your hosting provider is critical to your game’s success. Ensuring the provider can scale with your game’s popularity is essential. We are starting to see more and more server/game orchestrators on the market who rely on a standard fleet of servers to allocate rather than looking at this from an on-demand perspective. Those orchestrators are not only charging you more than the amount of traffic you have (to make sure you can always allocate); they will only manage their infrastructure, providing a single point of failure. See the Microsoft Azure outage or Amazon Web Services outage. Everybody is at the mercy of these problems, from indies like Among us to large AAA like Square Enix.

Edgegap specializes in managing and orchestrating game servers and components worldwide. The solution exists. Don’t miss the boat on additional revenues, a better gamer experience, and take control.