Leveraging Google Cloud to create readily scalable online games

Presented by Google Cloud

As the popularity of global multiplayer games continues to rise, game companies often face a difficult trade off on how to spend their developer resources - build the next great game, or manage backend infrastructure? Google Cloud is leveraging its expertise in kubernetes, and working with gaming leaders in the open source community to build gaming solutions such as matchmaking and game server scaling.

Those solutions, and how game developers can use them to free their teams from the burden of managing infrastructure without sacrificing control and flexibility, are at the core of Google Cloud's upcoming webinar on June 30.

In the lead up to that live webinar, here's a brief Q&A with the Google Cloud team to introduce what Google Cloud can offer game developers, and how devs can use those tools to free up their own development resources. 

And, for a more in depth chat with Google Cloud for Games' chief architect Rob Martin, be sure to register here and join us for that free webinar, Building Multiplayer Games with Open Source and Google Cloud, on Tuesday, June 30.

First thing’s first: What is Google Cloud, and how is it used in game development?

Google Cloud is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail and YouTube. For game developers, we offer compute and networking services, database, analytics and ML capabilities, and specific open source solutions that minimizes the time and resources needed to manage your game’s underlying infrastructure so developers can focus on building great games.

From two-player online co-op sessions to full-scale MMO worlds, different games have vastly different needs when it comes to supporting online play; how does a platform like Google Cloud adapt to meet those needs?

No matter what type of game you are building, you can utilize Google Cloud to help you succeed. MMO or Battle Royale games tend to be very compute intensive, and require additional capacity and reach that can be provided by the cloud to help keep games running smoothly globally. Other games might rely more heavily on a robust analytics pipeline to make constant changes to their games in order to optimize the player experience. As another example, developers can use our pre-trained machine learning APIs to solve a variety of issues. Developers can use our Translation API to translate in game chats, or our Natural Language Processing API to analyze the sentiment of those chats. It really depends on what the game developer is trying to accomplish, but Google Cloud provides a solid foundation for any type of game.

Is there any sort of common misconception you’ve heard from the game development community about how Google Cloud can be used for game development, for example - “my studio/game is small, that’s for larger companies” or misconceptions along those lines?

The cloud is for everyone! One of the advantages of Google Cloud is global scale on demand - small studios and games especially can leverage the cloud to avoid what we call “success failures” - when your game unexpectedly has more player demand than your infrastructure can handle. This flexibility gives smaller studios the opportunity to reach their players wherever they might be, without the upfront cost of investing heavily in infrastructure.

Our goal at Google Cloud is to make this process as seamless as possible for developers, so they don’t have to worry about scaling their game, and can focus on delighting players.

Not to give too much away but Google’s upcoming webinar explores how multiplayer games can be built using open source tools like Kubernetes alongside Google Cloud. Can you share why this is a topic game developers should pay particular attention to?

Because each game is unique, we believe that developers need the ability to customize specific services, like matchmaking, to suit the needs of their game. In many instances, game developers either spend valuable time and resources building and scaling these services, or they rely on off the shelf solutions that are inflexible and don’t suit the needs of the game. Our open source approach allows us to split the difference for game developers - we build foundational elements of games services that handle issues like scalability, but allow developers enough flexibility to customize the service for their specific needs.

Join this free webinar on Tuesday, June 30 at 12:00 PM EST to learn more about how you can utilize these solutions that free you from the burden of managing infrastructure while providing you with the control and flexibility you need to customize game services to match your needs.