Hosting infrastructures for developers

The game market and gamer community are growing day by day. Quality of experience depends on the infrastructure each game is built around.

The online gaming community is expected to top 56.8 million players by next year. The growing video game market is expected to reach $152 billion worldwide in 2019. Therefore, considering community feedback, developers have to offer a smooth experience to the online gamer community and must improve these experiences. Quality of experience depends on the infrastructure each game is built around.

Features of common infrastructures

For offering a good experience to the player, developers need to decide on the infrastructure type. This selection is crucial for development, providing updates and preventing hindrances to the success of the game down the line. Developers must select different infrastructure types due to different game characteristics. The more common infrastructure types are managed hosting, unmanaged hosting, and backend-as-a-service (BaaS) infrastructures.

Managed hosting

Managed servers come with features and applications installed by the vendor. They provide added potential such as autoscaling. On the other hand, these preprogrammed managed hosting options can be more expensive than unmanaged hosting and can be limit the creative flexibility of the developer.

Unmanaged hosting

Unmanaged servers come with little “pre-loaded” features and applications installed. Game developers can install whatever features and applications they deem necessary for their game. It is an option cheaper than managed hosting, but developers would need a team to manage scaling during peak hours.

Backend-as-a Service (BaaS)

BaaS is a cloud service model that outsources all the behind-the-scenes aspects of a web or mobile application to a third party. Developers only have to write and maintain frontend. It provides pre-written software for activities that take place on servers, like user authentication, database management, remote updating, cloud storage, web hosting services, and more.

If a service provider changes the structure or function of their infrastructure, a developer must work with the third-party to make the appropriate changes. Although it can pose challenges for developers who prefer to consider and design for the user experience first, many developers choose to use BaaS as their preferred infrastructure for larger, online games.

Both the physical proximity of players and network speed of users in all deployed infrastructure architecture help reduce lag-time and enhance overall game performance.

After the games are released, developers skipped to the maintenance step. To sustain player count, they should make updates and add-ons. Developers should gather, keep, and interact with large amounts of data collected from these games. They can prefer to use container services to integrate infrastructure such as Kubernetes. These containers aim to help developers manage their infrastructure, make development much easier, and offer data backup for players. They prevent game-breaking errors and bugs.

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