Containerized server hosting: global reach, scalability and cost savings

Sep 18, 2020

You’re building an amazing game! You’ve got a winning prototype, and you know for sure this game will be a hit once people start playing. But if you’re a small studio, you may be wondering how you can scale the product quickly, or even afford a global rollout of your new game. Being global might not be top of mind right now, but how can you know if your game would have a great market fit in Korea, or if a famous Brazilian Youtuber will start playing your game as happened for Among Us (Kotaku)?

Read on to see how Edgegap can help you solve the problems of global reach, scaling, and cost savings. 

Global Reach 

Microsoft corporate vice president of cloud gaming Kareem Choudhry believes “gaming is as culturally impactful as music, television, and movies”. He says that “of the world’s 8 billion human beings, over 2 billion are gamers” (via Wired). That’s a huge potential audience to play your game, but how can you afford to reach them?   

If you’re a smaller studio you won’t have your own global game infrastructure like the big studios. Instead, you’re probably going to deploy your back-end architecture (game servers, databases, etc.) to a public cloud service.  

What you need is a distributed on-demand approach to delivering your game server. If you use a service like Arbitrium to determine the best place to launch game servers, you won’t need to spin up the game servers until you actually have players ready to play.  Maybe you thought your game would be popular in Northern Europe because you have a Viking character, but it falls flat on that market? You don’t have to pay anything since the infrastructure there never had a match to deploy. You get a big player boost in South America because a famous Twitch streamer loved your game? No problemo, we’ll make sure to scale on-demand.

In the cloud, it’s true that you only pay when you have active virtual machines (VM) running. However, these machines can take a few minutes to start up, which doesn’t make sense when you have players ready to play. The traditional way to solve this is to start VM as you anticipate the demand, but you still end up with machines that can stay unused for minutes or hours. And you still have to pay for the time it takes for the VM to boot up…

With Edgegap, you never need to worry about extra on unused cloud infrastructure. Even if you’re a small studio you can make your game available to everyone with our distributed on-demand hosting, and Edgegap can help you do that.

Scalability

Great – now you see there is an option to make my game servers available in more geographic locations, but how can I scale it to millions of players? I know anyone who sees this game will want to play it with their friends, but what if they all come to play at the same time?  

Big game studios have issues with scaling popular new games, and they have tons of people to manage it! How can I be sure I don’t have scaling problems when I launch? 

This is also something Edgegap can address. In addition to determining within seconds the best datacenter to use to deploy a game server for a new match, Arbitrium will scale your game servers within seconds, and monitor results throughout the duration of the match.

This is possible by using container-based architectures and the power of edge computing. Edgegap is happy to help you migrate your current services to a container-based solution that puts you in a position to be able to scale your games as needed. 

Cost Savings 

Of course, every studio wants to keep costs low. Edgegap helps with that by using a distributed on-demand gaming network. Game servers are launched only when there are players ready to play.

And since Edgegap not only finds the best place to launch servers so that the players have a great experience playing and can actually launch and monitor the game performance during the game, you’re going to have happy players and great reviews. It’s hard to put a price on that, but it sure costs less than dealing with online reviews telling everyone your awesome game was down on launch day! 

Ready to learn more? 

Are you trying to figure out if you can achieve global reach with your game, have the resources to scale it so everyone has a great time playing, and do all that while still keeping costs low?  

Edgegap can help you tap into a distributed on-demand gaming network. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re looking to benefit from the next generation of gaming infrastructure! Get in touch at info@edgegap.com 

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