Game company boosts multiplayer performance with Google Cloud Platform
Founded in 2009, Game Insight is based in Vilnius, Lithuania and operates development studios across the world. With over 300 million players, it is one of the world’s largest game companies and a leading innovator in mobile and social games. Its hit offerings include village building game The Tribez and team-based first-person shooter Guns of Boom, which attracted 50 million players within its first year of launching in 2017.
To support its millions of players worldwide in group matches, while maintaining an optimal experience during peak times, Game Insight required a low-latency network that supported fast data exchange. In order to achieve this and to find a cloud provider with a personal approach and tailored support, the company migrated its infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Game Insight also sought a maximally simple security scheme to support data transfer between regions and a predictable pricing structure. Another aspect of GCP that appealed to Game Insight was the client-focused nature of its migration service.
Game Insight’s migration started with its flagship Guns of Boom. Alex Shirov, Game Insight CTO, commented: "We had a really interesting situation, because Guns of Boom was already up and running with millions of players, so our goal was to migrate without any downtime”. In order to do this, Game Insight monitored performance between regions through metrics including ping tests and migrated a less active game as a trial run.
Once it was happy, Game Insight began to gradually move its Guns of Boom players over, leaving its central node until last. The process of moving its central data took a week and the migration was completed with zero downtime. Its servers are now hosted on Compute Engine VMs using Cloud Storage and Persistent Disk for data storage and Firebase services for mobile apps. It uses Virtual Private Cloud for networking between regions hosting nodes.
Since migrating, Guns of Boom has seen a latency improvement of between 5 and 10 per cent, enabling smoother gameplay, quicker updates and a better gaming experience. Meanwhile, the discounts on Google Compute Engine have seen the company make savings on between 15 and 20 per cent. In light of these benefits, Game Insight is exploring Google Kubernetes Engine and expanding its machine learning beyond Firebase Predictions with Cloud Machine Learning Engine.
