Elevate Streaming Media with EdgeWorkers and Macrometa Stream Workers

The world of gaming and esports generates $200 billion annually, making this industry the largest in all of media entertainment. 

To account for gaming’s enormous popularity, game developers are investing heavily in building new features and functions that attract and retain more players. The key to creating highly responsive, immersive gaming experiences? Optimizing performance and security through faster networks that deliver and process data in real time.

As developers strive for better gaming performance, over-the-top (OTT) technologies like live streaming have become increasingly important. Today, the video streaming industry is right behind gaming in popularity, with $60 billion generated annually — and both media segments have a compound annual growth rate well over 25%. Geodistribution and real-time data processing and serving are key live-streaming techniques that can enrich modern online experiences for gaming and video streaming. 

Read on to discover some of the ways that Akamai EdgeWorkers and our recent integration with Stream Workers — Macrometa’s Complex Event Processing technology for gaming and OTT/streaming media — can elevate players’ gaming experiences.

Gaming and media on the edge

There’s no such thing as a regional game anymore. Games are now global by nature, reaching a diverse player base across console, PC, cloud, and mobile. On all these platforms, one thing is true: Ultra-low latency play is absolutely essential for positive user experiences. 

But gaming generates enormous amounts of data that requires time-intensive live processing and analysis. And there’s more than just latency at stake. Time to market is another major factor game developers must consider to become a global success. In this high-stakes industry, everything demands speed, from core development to everyday operations.

Macrometa and Akamai inspire gaming innovation

Multiplayer gaming and esports are destined to become primary forms of entertainment, education, and even social networking for the millennials and Gen Z. Video games are still a nascent industry in the grand scheme of things, yet have already eclipsed the film industry in annual revenues. 

The partnership between Macrometa and Akamai will only accelerate innovation in worldwide multiplayer gaming and esports.  

Macrometa allows game developers to bring game services closer to clients, devices, and players by relocating game servers and serving powerful features from the edge: multiplayer lobbies, skill-based matchmaking, real-time leaderboards, anti-cheat systems, and more. 

Equitable, dynamic, and immersive gameplay 

Macrometa levels the playing field by giving players more equitable, dynamic, and immersive gameplay experiences. But even more exciting is the ability to break AI away from restrictive game architecture and place it on the edge on more powerful data and computing services. 

Optimal and skill-based matchmaking experiences

For more on how Macrometa and Akamai facilitate better gameplay, think about how players get matched in lobbies. An optimal matching experience accounts for all users’ situations, such as hardware, network connectivity, distance to the server, proximity to others, and, most important, player skill levels. Matching players equitably ultimately shapes more enjoyable gaming experiences. 

Macrometa paves the way for better gaming experiences through multidimensional analysis and skill-based matchmaking. Hosting game services on the edge helps eliminate the need for game and server communications to travel lengthy distances, so players get snappier gameplay free of lag and jitter.  

With real-time data on round-trip times and frame rates, level playing field algorithms can dynamically adapt to player hardware and network device differences. When matchmaking, lobbies can use historical performance data along with real-time data about the players’ current hardware and connectivity. 

As users play, Stream Workers automatically processes game events to determine granular player metrics (like who’s better with a laser cannon or who excels with the proton blaster in close combat) and produce detailed leaderboards. Meanwhile, anti-cheat systems work in real time to detect bad behavior and penalize offenders without disrupting the game for others.

Sending data from the game engine to the edge

Macrometa has developed a Unity data capture plug-in that game developers can use to send data from the Unity game engine directly to the edge for processing. This plug-in replaces the inner netcode layer so all interclient communication can happen over a pub/sub protocol instead of a low-level, datagram-type connectionless protocol. 

By using pub/sub rather than UDP or another variant, clients can emit events for everything in the game — such as player movement, doors or traps opening or closing, and items spawning — and the back end can become a set of modern microservices that are subscribing to and processing these events.  

Watch a demo

Akamai and Macrometa have developed a multiplayer game built in Unity that showcases these capabilities. Watch a demonstration to see how Unity integration can help you provide compelling game services from the edge on Akamai. Then, access the game’s source code to deepen your understanding.

OTT and video streaming at the edge

Video streaming platforms like Disney+, Hulu, and Netflix are able to leverage the edge for sophisticated, dynamic video stream delivery. However, there’s a substantial cost incurred when running back-end services far away from users and devices on the cloud. 

Watch a demo

Macrometa enables back-end services such as authentication, catalog customization, and interactive services including search, recommendations, and back-end APIs that make front-end applications more reliable — thereby offering a better digital experience for end users, regardless of region. Check out this Watch Party video to learn more.

Interactive capabilities

This app framework creates a video streaming backend that provides interactive capabilities from the 5G edge, such as:

• Compelling user experiences on 5G-connected mobile and smart TVs 

• Instant, responsive user interfaces without buffer worms or freezes

• Sentiment tracking and real-time analytics

• Targeted advertising and recommendations

• Advanced dynamic content discovery by region and behaviors

High-octane gameplay starts with EdgeWorkers and Stream Workers

Multiplayer and mobile gaming has ballooned with the rise of streaming platforms and second-screen experiences. Video streaming and OTT are largely dependent on the ability of CDNs and ISPs to deliver relevant, personalized, low-latency content across a wide spectrum of network performance readings. 

With EdgeWorkers and Stream Workers, you can quickly and consistently deliver real-time content to users — all the way to the last mile.