As web gaming is growing, more and more needs to be taken into consideration when designing a new game or platform. This sentiment is underlined by a recent quote from John Carmack: “I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen. How f*d up is that?”
To dig a little deeper, you must realize that most browsers and online games are tested (A/B) throughout their lifetime in order to stay on top of the leaderboard, and the modern worldwide gaming audience logs in from a number of different platforms – including PCs, mobiles, tablets, and televisions.
It’s well-known amongst the online gaming community that choosing a good network is crucial – not only for a positive user experience, but also for your budget. For the game developer, having a stable, low latency backbone allows you to sleep peacefully at night. Being able to service a worldwide audience from just a few selected locations saves money, while giving you the freedom to react to whichever audience eventually adopts your game.
The web already has a lot of great sources on how to build a new platform so we’ve decided to share some of them.
Increasing performance and player satisfaction will increase the value of your game and ultimately your company, resulting in a higher DAU/MAU. However, measuring these statistics is a full time job of its own and we’re sure you would rather spend time on your core business! A good example of a tool that could speed up this process is Photon, a cloud based network engine. The brilliant research blog ‘Highscalability’ and the latest article by Rob Hawkes (Technical Evangelist from Mozilla) about web standards for the upcoming years will also help by giving you the latest insight around architectural challenges. Combine all this information with the generic stock of your hosting provider and you will definitely keep the costs low, allowing you to be lean and mean!
It’s also important to involve a hosting provider as early as possible. Sharing your design and finding out whether your hosting provider fits your development needs, saves you valuable time. What’s more, choosing a provider which makes it easy to move and combine different product lines such as dedicated servers, cloud and CDN will give you the opportunity to automate and to be (even more!) successful.
Questions? Get in touch with us , we’re always happy to help