Game Over: Latency, Lag, and Gaming Infrastructure for Developers

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The last few years have seen the rapid rise of e-gaming as a popular sport, thanks to streaming services like Twitch and the growing legions of dedicated fans and players. Popular games like League of Legends and Dota 2 now host massive tournaments that offer substantial rewards for players. In fact, the Dota 2 tournament in 2015 offered a prize of more than $6.5 million to the winning team, a testament to the incredible popularity of online gaming.

The uptick in demand for online gaming creates a challenge for game developers.

Gaming companies have to be able to adjust their infrastructure according to a wide range of variables, accommodate for fluctuation in demand while at the same time delivering content at lightning-fast speeds. In a market where downtime or sluggish performance means ‘game over’ for players and developers alike, gaming companies need to ensure that they offer maximum speed and reliability.

As any gamer will tell you, the most frustrating game play experience is “lag,” the result of high latency in content delivery. A recent study Leaseweb conducted found that more than half of gamers experience unplanned server outages while playing games, and 84 percent of online gamers have had games freeze or crash on them while in the middle of game play. This kind of experience is a literal deathblow within the game, and can obliterate customer retention as well. Lagging, crashing or freezing is often taken as an indicator of a poorly designed game or carelessness on the part of the developer.

Fortunately, Leaseweb offers a comprehensive set of solutions that allow game publishers to deliver the best possible experience to their players through an innovative five-part approach.

  • Low latency and high reliability. When every millisecond counts, it’s important for your network to deliver information as quickly as possible. Our network, one of the largest in the world, delivers a 5.5 Tbps bandwidth capacity and a core uptime of 99.9999%, reducing latency by substantial margins for our gaming customers with state of the art regional data centers. With our extensive existing network, which now includes 10 U.S. data centers with our recent acquisition of Ubiquity Hosting, we have points of presence across the country, providing maximum speed and low latency for gamers across the continental United States.
  • Improved performance, increased revenues. Our next-generation Content Delivery Networksdeliver your games at lightning-fast speeds to feed this massive market. And the better the experience, the greater your success.
  • Tailored performance optimization. It’s no secret that different workloads perform better on different architectures. We provide a choice of powerful dedicated serverspublic and private clouds or hybrid solutions to deliver your games in the most efficient way.
  • Scalability that responds to market and usage realities. When a game takes off the surge in demand can be overwhelming. Leaseweb allows you to scale up or down with demand, deploying new virtual or dedicated servers with ease. This allows you to manage costs effectively by only paying for the infrastructure you need.
  • The agility of a start-up, industry-leading speed and infrastructure. Thanks to our agility and the ability to respond to individual customer needs, we pride ourselves on thinking and operating like a startup while still providing the low latency of many larger service providers. Because our data centers are close to your end users and connected to the global Leaseweb network, we’re able to provide an advantage for companies that rely on real-time data transmission while offering services that compete or exceed those of even the largest global infrastructure providers.

Together, this approach allows us to deliver high definition, multi-player games globally with the speed and availability required for a seamless gaming experience, and continue delivering that same experience no matter how much demand grows.

You can learn more here or schedule a meeting with Leaseweb at GDC!

 

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