COVID-19 outbreak has accelerated the growth of the online gaming industry. In the first half of 2020, the Chinese online gaming market’s sales revenue reached more than US$20 billion, increased by 22.34%. While the online gaming industry is competing vigorously, any company that wants to seize a sweet spot in the attention economy must accelerate its games to become more premium and exquisite. Online games nowadays are constantly being renovated and iterated. The design and development must be new and innovative, and the game experience must be seamless and stable.
In the in-depth communication and cooperation with gaming companies, BaishanCloud (Baishan) found that companies generally face the following challenges in ensuring gaming experience:
- How to improve the download experience for mobile and online game installation packages on their devices? How to deal with traffic surges during promotions, package and patches updates, or game launches? How can web games prevent lagging, login difficulties, and frequent disconnections caused by the heavy load at the origin?
- Online games have a mixture of static and dynamic content. How to ensure real-time and seamless experiences for players?
- Social media has become an indispensable part of online games. How to provide players an interactive communication experience?
- Credential stuffing, DDoS attacks, and 3rd party plug-ins are commonly observed in online games. How to better ensure fairness and security?
- It is a trend for gaming companies to expand overseas. How to quickly adapt to the network environment in different countries during global expansion?
Leveraging its globally distributed edge network and technical capabilities, Baishan created a specialized and comprehensive solution to resolve the challenges above. Many gaming companies in China have adapted Baishan’s gaming solution. Among them, the Giant Network, an online game developer and operator that focuses on massively multiplayer online role-playing games like Lego Star Wars, Elsword, and Glorious Mission, also started using Baishan’s gaming solution including content distribution and edge security services since 2017 to provide the best gaming experience to players worldwide.
BaishanCloud – Gaming Industry Solution
Globally distributed network with load balancing and multi-client support
With edge PoPs deployed worldwide, Baishan pushes installation packages, patches, and other gaming resources to the PoPs closest to the user and intelligently balances the loads based on user location, network latency, and capacity. It provides scalability for gaming companies under scenarios with high concurrent requests such as game launches, promotions, or updates.
Whole application acceleration
Online gaming applications are composed of a mixture of highly-interactive and personalized dynamic content and a large amount of rich media static content. Baishan utilizes intelligent routing, link optimization, and API acceleration to reduce the end-to-end latency to less than 200ms. It solves problems like network congestion at the origin, content interaction failure, dynamic transaction delays, slow account balance reload, etc. This helps create a high-quality user experience for players on any device anywhere across the network.
Support multi-scene interactions to create a virtual face-to-face experience
Most games nowadays, especially the popular ones, involve interaction and coordination between players. Players hope to experience the plot’s ups and downs and share their experience instantly with their teammates. It is essential for gaming companies to re-create the “face-to-face” experience virtually. Baishan leverages its light-weight SDK and UDP-based ultra-low-latency streaming technology to provide high-resolution video and audio and reduces the end-to-end delay to less than 150ms. Additionally, the team mode feature compressed the latency even more to less than 100ms, which allows the players to interact with each other in real-time. Baishan also offers a real-time interactive live streaming service to support live streaming game broadcasting. The high-availability and concurrency setup allows broadcasters to interact with audiences seamlessly while playing the game.
End-to-end security protection
Baishan’s Edge Security product uses big data analysis technology and AI algorithms to continuously analyze user behavior and provide in-depth threat detection for enterprises and gaming companies. This helps build a complete defense system for their end clients. When serving the Giant Network, Baishan identifies and intercepts over 9 million credential stuffing and scan attacks against the login system every day and protects the origin from over 100,000 unknown attacks. The end-to-end security protection reduces the Giant Network’s own security alerting by 80%, allows their security staff to focus on new innovations.
Global resources and 24/7 technical support
Baishan has a globally distributed edge network covering 6 continents with direct connectivity with over 100 ISPs overseas to provide gaming companies with stable performance and service quality in the global market. Baishan also reserves terabit- per- second capacity for unpredictable traffic surges. To further guarantee its service and assist gaming companies’ rapid expansion, Baishan has a team of senior technical experts to provide 24/7 on-demand support and troubleshooting.
By offloading the content delivery to Baishan, Giant Network is able to focus on developing and innovating their services and applications while improving their operational efficiency to provide a better player experience and become more competitive in the market.
In addition to the gaming industry, Baishan has been providing secured and reliable content delivery services to enterprises in other industries such as technology, government, e-commerce, finance, medical, and more.
BaishanCloud is a leading global data service provider specialized in cross-border content delivery and edge security in China and Asia. To get more articles on trendy topics related to cloud delivery, streaming best practices, edge security, cloud technology in China and Asia, please visit www.baishancloud.com and subscribe to the BaishanCloud newsletter.
