The Studio

Aether Studios, based in Seattle (USA), was founded in 2021 by Dan Furnace with the ambitious objective of developing highly successful next-generation platform fighters and multiplayer brawlers, building upon the world and lore of the Aether universe.

The studio's latest release, Rivals of Aether II, is the direct sequel to the hit indie fighting game Rivals of Aether, which expands the original's scope with upgraded 3D visuals, new mechanics both for the genre and game series, alongside vastly improved online support and performance. Featuring a base roster of new and returning characters, with post-launch plans to add additional playable characters to the game for free.

Published by Offbrand Publishing, which is led by popular creators Ludwig Ahgren and Jason Thor Hall (colloquially known as “Thor”, CEO of Pirate Software), Rivals of Aether II aimed to engage its community with eSports-quality for its “platform battle” core gameplay experience and the highest performance possible for its online play experience to its entire global audience regardless of its locations.

The Challenge

While Aether Studios developers have full control over the core multiplayer gameplay experience within the game, they unfortunately do not control the network players will use when they play the game online.

This is particularly challenging, given fighting games are highly latency-sensitive; every extra frame can be felt at pro esports level, and thus, every effort to minimize latency is critical for the game's success.

As a PvP game ("player versus players"), Aether Studios sought to work with partners across two main "critical paths" of online multiplayer - the game's netcode and the game server hosting infrastructure.

• A netcode (network transport) solution manages communication between players' devices and game servers in an online multiplayer game. It synchronizes player actions and ensures a smooth gameplay experience by handling the latency between player input and data transfer between players while resolving discrepancies (like lag or desync) as to provide both a seamless and fair multiplayer experience.

• The game server hosting infrastructure is the underlying physical or virtual network of machines serving as a middleman passing messages between players, including hardware (e.g., servers), software, and networking protocols working together to support data transmission, network management, and online services. In short, all processes of deploying, scaling and hosting a game's dedicated servers.

To deliver an eSport-like online experience, both elements must be highly optimized and work in unison.

Even more challenging, Aether Studios needed solutions that were easy to implement and operate, given the studio's limited number of developers, all while remaining cost-effective to ensure the game's financial health long after the game’s initial release. The solution also needed to scale efficiently and quickly while maintaining the highest level of quality for hundreds of thousands of players.

The Solution

Aether Studios set its sights on SnapNet for Rivals of Aether II's netcode. A complete netcode solution from High Horse Entertainment that performs client-side prediction, rollback, and reconciliation automatically, dynamically adjusting how the game compensates for latency as network conditions change, alongside additional benefits.

Optimal data transfer between each player's game client and servers are only part of the equation.

Edgegap’s orchestration deploys game servers at the ideal location between players and the servers as it evaluates the best packet route on the network which is critical to ensuring both a fair and low-latency experience for all players. Edgegap's game server hosting and orchestration platform leverages the world's largest edge network, built specifically for multiplayer games, it is the currently the sole orchestration platform that can deploy game servers at the ideal location on the edge for all players in a match.

Edgegap's platform was a perfect fit. Already compatible with Aether Studio's matchmaking solution, making integration achievable in a few days by a single game developer. It allowed the studio to deploy game servers nearest users to 615+ locations worldwide.

Performance: Latency Reduction

Edgegap's orchestration deploys game servers at ideal locations for all players in the match. This "proximity hosting" is possible only by tapping into an edge network including a mix of centralized public cloud data centers and edge data centers located as close to players as a street corner, which directly reduces distance packet round trip time between players. On average, Edgegap's deployment reduces latency by at least 58% latency for all players versus traditional public cloud.

For Aether Studio's players, this meant an overwhelmingly positive play experience, highlighted by the community from day one, alongside praise from game reviewers and content creators, despite tens of thousands of concurrent users.

Latency is such a critical component of the experience that the Aether Studios developers ensured players always had visibility of their "ping" (i.e., “lag” or latency) directly within the game's main UI.  Ping value below 20 milliseconds is considered an extremely challenging goal and is the holy grail of online multiplayer to deliver a consistently smooth online play experience.

Scaling: Launch Day Ready

Games traditionally roll out their release over a 24-hour period, to minimize the impact of traffic surges on backend services and avoid scaling issues that that could negatively impact the game’s experience for players.

As an online multiplayer game, Rivals of Aether II had to launch at the exact same time worldwide, thus creating a challenging scaling situation.

Edgegap's ability to scale and deploy game servers quickly within a location ("burst scaling") and across the world ("multi-region scaling") was the fundamental “make-or-break” moment of Rivals of Aether II's launch.

This situation has historically created massive challenges for even some of the world’s biggest AAA games with massive resources, that Aether Studios didn’t have access to. Failure to capture this audience at launch means negative reviews and a heavy, negative financial impact on any studio’s finances.

Fortunately, Edgegap's orchestrator has been benchmarked to deploy 40 game servers per second, sustained for 60 minutes, giving Aether Studios peace of mind ahead of launch. Concretely for Rivals of Aether II, on launch day its onramp started at 3.33 new deployments (“matches”) per minute, reaching nearly 30 new deployments per minute at peak. All deployments had a sub-0.05% error rate, resolved automatically with smart matchmaking without impacting user experience.

For context, here were the fastest deployments on launch day on Edgegap’s platform – a particular feat given other orchestration platform can range from 15 seconds up to several minutes for cold-start deployments.

While launch-day metrics such as concurrent users (“CCUs”) are kept confidential by the studio, the week prior saw the game made available for free during Steam's Next Fest event, where it was played by over 118,000 unique players, totaling 1 million matches over 7 days and more than 15 million minutes of playtime during the same period - a massive popular success which helped propel the popularity of Rivals of Aether II ahead of its official launch.

Global Distribution - Revenues per Market vs. Operational Costs

Dedicated game server hosting has an intrinsic challenge; it costs money to run servers, and the farther they are from established markets, the costlier server hosting and data egress become.

This is a particular challenge for non-traditional games markets such as South America, the Middle East, and Asia, where players often lament the severe lack of server locations, making multiplayer games nearly unplayable unless players are lucky to be living within a major city where centralized data center is located. This often leaves out millions of players living away from these urban centers, as these data centers often are the sole location available as they are expected to serve entire continent.

From a financial perspective, higher server costs in regions with low revenue per user (Latin America, Oceania) often lead to losses, which then leads game developers to disable locations in these markets. This further reduces the player base due to the poor online play experience, which spirals the game toward death due to a lack of players and increased number of negative reviews.

Thanks to Edgegap's regionless hosting alongside orchestration that uses co-tenancy hosting (i.e., where multiple virtual games servers can share a server’s physical resources) in its public pool, game studios can seamlessly share locations at a single price point globally without the need to individually purchase locations.

In combination with Edgegap's unique "pay-per-use" pricing, which only charges for game servers when deployed, our platform enables all game studios to leverage on-demand locations in markets that would be unprofitable in “single tenancy” scenario with other hosting providers or orchestration platforms.

While Aether Studio's situation is private, Edgegap's Product Manager, Jakub Motyl, mentions:

All server performance, scaling, and location availability metrics mean nothing if game server hosting isn't economically viable for the studio in the long term.

Edgegap's uniform pricing worldwide ($0.00115, per minute, per dedicated vCPU) with access, on-demand, to 615+ locations worldwide through our regionless hosting made estimates and final costs unbeatable.

Flexibility - eSports Tournaments

Access to the world's largest network boosts the everyday online multiplayer experience, but connecting an unfair location for players during eSports tournaments would break Rivals of Aether II's ambition to become part of the eSports elite.

Thanks to Edgegap's flexible orchestration and decision-making, Aether Studios adapted deployment rules to pick server locations ensuring no unfair advantage for remote tournaments.

In this scenario, Aether Studios followed Edgegap's server score deployment strategy. The server score strategy uses Edgegap's patented placement methodology, optimizing server placement for each match individually. The system performs non-intrusive telemetry to approximate each player's network proximity to server locations and chooses the server maximizing responsiveness (lowest ping for all players on average) and fairness (balanced ping for all players).

Integration and Support

Aether Studios' team was supported every step of the way by Edgegap's team, often daily and multiple times a day, starting from integration through monitoring during milestones from BETA to launch, alongside hundreds of exchanges to optimize game servers, matchmaking rules, and relaxation strategies, providing insights from players to improve Edgegap's network health and location availability.

Ultimately, open communication helped Rivals of Aether II deliver unparalleled quality from day one, engaging thousands of players daily, alongside continuous improvements month after the game’s initial release.

Conclusion

To deliver on its ambition to lead the platform battle genre, despite limited resource in comparison to its competitors, Aether Studios spent years to find, integrate and optimize its online play experience with external partners. Which directly helped its game, Rivals of Aether II, deliver on its promise.

The impact on the online play experience brough by Edgegap’s orchestration platform performance contributed to the game’s success at launch and beyond. All at a fraction of the costs of traditional orchestration platforms.