What our customers say – Case Studies

Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Storm Ground

While strategy games don’t need the same immediate feedback as a first-person shooter, they can have a lot more computing behind the scenes. We’ve all played games where – as the turns go on – the game runs slower and slower. Each turn taking longer and longer. This is simply because there’s too much to calculate behind the scenes. And it’s even worse if the players host the game themselves – sometimes on budget computers. Storm Ground needed solid, reliable computers that could scale with the game.

We give each game room to grow. We host the sessions on servers with huge capacity reserves. As the skirmish builds up, with more and more units needing calculations, we automatically allocate more and more computing power. So the players get back into the action as fast as possible.

Pacer

In racing games, every second counts. It’s important that nobody can sneak ahead, just because they’ve got a slightly faster connection. If the server is off, then the whole race is going to be ruined. Whether that’s for the photo-finish or whether a shot lands.

Our platform can work with Pacer’s matchmaker to make sure that the matches are fair, and then orchestrate those matches so that we host them in the most fair location possible. We balance their latency needs and spin up the session on a server that’s as close to all the players as we can. And, by using servers with large capacity, we can do the heavy lifting so the player’s computer doesn’t have to.

Slapshot: Rebound

As with all sports, it’s important that every player is synchronized. Just like a first-person shooter, the players need to know exactly where they are. And every player needs a consistent latency. (Otherwise, the puck might end up in different places for different players.)

We choose locations based on low jitter. We not only make sure that the session is automatically hosted in a location that suits every player, but also change server locations and providers if there are any lag issues. So there’s zero interruption to the match itself.

Block n Load

First-person shooters need low-latency connections to make sure that every bullet is registered and that players can see one another, without snapping around the map. But there was an extra difficulty here: the players could change the map itself and build and destroy bases. That’s a lot of underlying physics (and a lot more data to send). A single mistake and a player could walk through a wall someone else had built.

For the matches themselves, we needed to make sure that players had low-latency connections. Otherwise, the players wouldn’t be able to hit one another. So our orchestration finds servers that are perfect for the match at hand. But we make sure to allocate enough capacity to memorize – and then synchronize – all the bases and defenses that players are putting down. And we do it all without significantly raising the cost for the studio.