Leverage Google Cloud Gaming Solution To Create Unbeatable Gaming Experiences

Speeding up game development time has become the aim of gaming companies to maximize overall benefits during the development stage. While successfully launching a game is a significant milestone, ensuring a smooth and immersive gaming experience for players everywhere is still essential. To expand the market seamlessly, reducing friction for new users to experience the game is crucial. Additionally, leveraging big data analysis is necessary to understand player retention rates and cash flow transaction data to optimize the experience of existing players and serve as a source of nourishment for the continuous development of popular games. 

As a premier partner of Google Cloud, CloudMile offers professional cloud optimization services and technical support to assist developers in creating better games. In this article, CloudMile will explore the 4 advantages of how GCP technology helps in the gaming industry.

Advantage 1: Focus on Game Design 

For game development companies, every step from the game production stage is key to whether a game can be successfully launched, survived and bring in stable revenue. In addition to gameplay, art design, and etc., how the game development side takes advantage of the high flexibility and scalability of the cloud to speed up the game development schedule and focus on developing high-quality games is crucial. 

Therefore, in recent years, containerization, which provides a consistent environment coupled with features that facilitate large-scale and faster development and deployment, has been quite favored by engineers. 

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE for short) is Google's platform for managing containerized workloads, making engineers able to manage all Kubernetes clusters effectively through a single platform. They can use GKE to automatically handle the scalability of workload and perform rolling updates mechanisms to optimize system maintenance operations and develop applications on a large scale. It allows game companies to quickly expand or shrink pods and clusters according to their CPU or memory requirements and quickly respond to the influx of lots of players in a very short period of time. Niantic, the developer of Pokémon GO, chose to adopt GKE because it’s pretty easy to scale and manage the Kubernetes nodes with GKE.

Advantage 2: Easy to Automate Data Management 

In the game industry, having a computing host is just the first step. Equally crucial is the ability of the system to store and process data in real-time. Fortunately, GCP offers game companies a wide range of database options, including Cloud SQL for relational databases, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Datastore for non-relational databases, Cloud Bigtable, and Cloud Memorystore for Key-Value databases. Game Companies can choose the appropriate database service that best fits their needs.

After a game is launched, it is necessary to design the leaderboard, establish a payment system, manage the player verification system, record game settings, and etc. Through Cloud SQL, game operators can automate capacity management, backup automation, replication, encryption, and software patches. For small and medium-sized game companies, it means that the configuration can be adjusted flexibly and save data management time and manpower. One of the advantages of Cloud SQL is that it supports various databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. 

As for Multiplayer online games that generate vast amounts of data every day, making high scalability, high performance, and easy data disassembly essential for their databases. Companies that require storage of player data and game status should consider using NoSQL-databases such as Bigtable and Datastore, which are well-suited for these purposes.

Advantage 3: Create a Personalized Game Experience

Once a game is launched, the game industry's top priority is to ensure proper server and traffic control, management, and maintenance. However, the most critical task is to identify popular games through data analysis while continuously accumulating player data to prolong the game's life cycle. By doing so, players are more likely to invest their time and money, which will increase the game's overall revenue. The industry can also leverage analytics reports to optimize popular games and discontinue the expansion of unpopular ones effectively.

GCP Cloud Data Warehousing such as BigQuery, is a primary reason why many game development companies like  the aforementioned developer of "Candy Crush Saga," King , have embraced GCP. BigQuery offers advantages in terms of analysis efficiency, ease of adoption, and cost compared to other data warehouse solutions. Moreover, Google has launched the BigQuery Omni service, allowing engineers to query other third-party data sets on BigQuery without data relocation in advance, even if their data sets are scattered in local and other cloud platform data warehouses. Additionally, BigQuery can integrate with business intelligence (BI) platforms such as Tableau and Looker, enabling the game industry to make data-driven business decisions.

Read more: The Benefits of Data-Driven Analytics for Gaming Companies

Advantage 4: Easy Deployment of Global Scale Online Games 

In terms of global scales game, Google offers optimized technical support and solution which includes Agones, an open-source game-server hosting built on Kubernetes. Agones offers a new way to deploy online game servers that can be executed in bare metal or multi-cloud environments.

In terms of global scale databases, Cloud Spanner is a horizontally scalable relational database hosting service that supports both SQL and ACID transactions with strong consistency over regions and continents. It can be horizontally expanded across multiple regions thus allowing players to have better gaming experience. Since its launch, it has been a favorite among game companies who are eager to expand to the global market . Cloud Spanner eliminates the need for DBAs to manage multiple database sharding and the need to split region databases for data management. Instead, it automatically sharding the data based on request load and size of the data, while maintaining the best performance and high availability. Through Cloud Spanner, the game industry can satisfy cross-regional game players with various transaction ways while maintaining high performance and data consistency.

Begin Your Journey With CloudMile

As a premier partner of Google Cloud, CloudMile offers professional cloud optimization services and technical support to help companies in accelerating their digital transformation. Leveraging machine learning and big data analysis, CloudMile has assisted over 700+ clients companies with business forecasts and industrial upgrades. Contact us for more information: https://mile.cloud/contact