Winding down after a hectic day by playing games online, is a pleasure enjoyed by many.
As such, the market is surging, with an estimated 3 billion gamers around the world joining virtual realms and immersive digital environments. Perhaps not surprisingly, the gaming industry is making more money than both the music and film industries put together, according to one report. Cloud is a huge driver in making gaming accessible, transforming the gaming experience with access-from-anywhere gameplay, fast updates and enhanced security.
Lag; the curse of the gamer
There’s one particularly transformative change that Cloud has brought to the industry: the multiplayer gaming experience. It’s quickly overtaken single player gaming as games like Overwatch, Call of Duty, Sea of Thieves and Fortnite have pioneered sociable, strategic gameplay with rich content, while services like Xbox Cloud Gaming ramps multiplayer gaming up another level, with access from mobile devices, tablets and PCs facilitating a seamless, global competitive experience. But there’s a problem. The traditional public cloud, which is often situated far from both urban and rural populations, is prone to causing lag between players because of the distances. Not only does this hamper performance, it also diminishes the multiplayer experience for gamers.
Low latency, though, gives players a strong competitive advantage with swift responses, faster reactions and smoother game transitions. It’s not a quick-fix response though: other than checking and upgrading Wi-Fi connections, or upgrading to more powerful and expensive gaming PCs and consoles, there have been few options for gamers that truly transform their experience. As well as being frustrating for gamers, this runs the risk of stifling the creativity and innovation that the gaming industry has trailblazed over the past few years.
Game servers with performance to match
Now, the tech industry is addressing this, reengineering its networks to give gamers the ultimate user experience. Tech companies and collaborations are taking a hybrid, distributed approach to connected digital networks, building game servers on true Edge infrastructure. This ‘decentralised’ approach involves pushing computing resources such as servers to the network edge, so servers are located as close to gamers as possible. If the player’s device doesn’t have to wait for a response from a data centre located many miles away, latency is reduced – and if it doesn’t have to jostle for space with huge volumes of traffic, the network is decongested and gamers finally experience the gameplay of developers’ dreams.
That’s why Edgegap’s pivotal partnership with Colt Technology Services and CIN, is so exciting. It has delivered the world’s first game server running on true edge computing. It has successfully integrated Edgegap’s technology with Colt and CIN’s physical infrastructure network, and London has been chosen as the first location. Edgegap’s provides the gaming industry’s premier server orchestration platform, which has been combined with Colt’s edge computing platform and network on demand connectivity deployed through CIN’s Street Arc. The combined effort of the three companies has built the underlaying digital infrastructure to support the gaming application. The integration dramatically improves multiplayer gaming experiences for Londoners, eliminating the lag and latency issues that are so typical in densely populated areas where there is greater demand for available bandwidth. The lag and latency often disadvantage city-based gamers, whose game play can be slowed to such an extent as to impact their gaming performance; ‘lives’ or points can be lost by even the briefest of delays between command and action.
Making everyone a winner
Edgegap’s work with CIN and Colt emphasises its commitment to responding to, and meeting the shifting demands of modern multiplayer games, as Mathieu Duperre, CEO and Founder of Edgegap, explains.“Considering the frequent outages and performance glitches from the industry’s major players, it is obvious that the era of relying solely on expensive centralised infrastructure is coming to an end. And, with performance expectations of gamers continuing to rise, we firmly believe in the importance of moving to a more hybrid, distributed approach if those expectations are to be met. We’re truly delighted to be working with Colt and CIN and using our collective strengths to improve the multiplayer gaming experience”.
By leveraging its patented technology, Edgegap ensures near-zero latency, by deploying game servers in locations closest to players. Furthermore, it guarantees unrivalled reliability with an industry-leading 99.99% availability – achievable only through edge cloud infrastructure. The integration dramatically improves multiplayer gaming experiences for Londoners, eliminating lag and latency issues and leaving them free to focus on honing their skills, strategies and competitive advantage. As developers explore even more feature-rich immersive worlds with the evolution of AR, VR, AI and the metaverse, gamers’ expectations will keep on rising.
Edgegap’s on-demand, fully managed orchestration platform provides not just unparalleled latency performance, but also instant deployment and automated scalability for multiplayer games, tailored to meet the needs of studios and publishers. The automation and rapid-scaling orchestration enables efficient traffic management across Edgegap’s expansive distributed cloud network, spanning more than 550 locations worldwide.
There will come a time when latency that impacts gameplay performance will be seen as unacceptable. The days of centralised servers are numbered, and it’s encouraging to see the tech industry seize this opportunity to lead, to innovate and to transform. And that’s a win for everyone.
About the Author
Aaron Partouche is Innovation Director, Colt Technology Services. Colt Technology Services is a global digital infrastructure company which creates extraordinary connections to help businesses succeed. Powered by amazing people and like-minded partners, Colt is driven by its purpose: to put the power of the digital universe in the hands of its customers wherever, whenever and however they want.
