Leading gaming company keeps players engaged

I am Glen Miner and I work at Digital Extremes, one of the world's top development studios in the interactive entertainment industry.

I have been with the company for more than 20 years, and I continue to wear many hats. Sometimes I'm just the player, enjoying the game so I can advocate for fixes or improvements. Other times I am fighting fires, performing tasks similar to those of a site reliability engineer. Officially, I am a technical director.

Our customers share our passion for games. It makes for an intense environment in which hundreds of thousands of users enjoy playing our games, but become vocal about their frustrations when latency or downtime keeps them from having a top-notch experience. With thousands of other games available to them, it is critical that we keep users happily engaged with ours.

When evaluating a cloud provider, the most important aspects go without saying: it must not crash; it must be stable; it must work. Those are foundational, but they are not all. A cloud provider may be able to give us high-capacity horizontal scaling, but may lack the proximity, acceleration, and protection that we need.

An extra 150 milliseconds of latency might not be the end of the world to some companies, but if we ask our customers what a 150-millisecond ping feels like, they may scream in frustration. So, in addition to seeking a stronger security posture, we needed a provider with a vastly distributed global footprint to reach our end users around the world.

By virtue of the nature of our business and the makeup of our customer base, we needed to have servers all around the world. Those servers needed data centers that seamlessly connected to one another. Akamai has a well-established network made up of multiple layers — from the core to the edge. Akamai’s physical footprint helped us position ourselves closer to our global community of gamers and, when paired with the technical capabilities built into the platform, delivered better, faster, more personalized experiences. 

Many cloud providers offer comparable features. The extent, performance, and cost of those features is where most of the differentiation lies. To start, Akamai offers lower transit costs. This is a huge benefit for us since our games require a heavy amount of egress traffic. When it comes to budgeting, we used to be challenged by the fact that some of our services are busy while others are not. Some run at consistent rates, while others are much more unpredictable. With Akamai’s simple pricing structure, we have aggregated all our services into one bandwidth tier, rather than having to budget for each service individually — and we have never surpassed that level, which means no broken budgets. This has been a huge relief for us, not only from a cost perspective, but operationally as well.

The scalability offered by Akamai’s virtual machines has been impressive. Akamai is an established network provider, trusted by many of the world’s leading brands, and they have great backbone networks. For us, it is imperative that the links among our clusters be reliable. With Akamai, the connections among our servers, which are spread all around the world, have been rock solid.

The benefits of choosing Akamai extend beyond their cloud computing capabilities. On the security side, the Akamai team has dealt with a lot of problems on our behalf without us even noticing. We've had distributed denial-of-service attacks that we didn't even realize had happened until Akamai let us know, because the attacks were dealt with immediately and transparently. Akamai is able to provide protection and services that we need in real time, meaning I wake up to far fewer frustrated players. There's no reason to go anywhere else.

Talk to an Akamai cloud expert to learn more, and you’ll receive cloud credits to try the platform at no cost to you.