Operational Efficiency in the Gaming Industry
As a result of the pandemic, video games are now a larger industry than movies and North American sports combined. Clearly, a new age has reached video game businesses - one of increased innovation and expanding success, yet one of rising risk, escalating content costs and new disruptive business models. Read on to find out how gaming companies deal with this new future, relying on Google Cloud for their operational efficiency.
King, a leading interactive entertainment company in the mobile gaming world, uses Google Cloud for its operational efficiency. Since partnering with Google Cloud, King has built a reliable, scalable data warehousing and analytics platform that reduces overhead management. BigQuery forms the core of the new data warehouse, with its facility for scaling and easy-to-use features. Its groundbreaking features ensure the warehousing team can experiment with new data structures to improve performance in efficiency.
Jacques Erasmus CIO, KingOur infrastructure needs to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections per second, as well as our data warehouse, and we saw that Google has the capability to handle our needs. At the same time, we were very excited by its focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence.
In addition to the data warehousing platform, King has been experimenting with the Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine. Using machine learning, King is attempting to solve the challenging problem of determining the appropriate level of difficulty for a game without having to manually playtest it over a long period of time. The team used Cloud Deployment Manager to deploy Google Kubernetes Engine workloads to create hundreds of virtual players trained with machine learning models. The resulting data is then piped back to King’s data analytics modules with Google’s Cloud Pub/Sub. This creates a feedback loop that lets King rapidly optimize the design of its games based on a foundation of data.
Alex Nodet AI Engineer, KingOur scaling capabilities were not dynamic enough - Google Kubernetes Engine solved that issue. It's also a great complement to Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine when developing AI applications. We have been able to turn our prototype into a production-scale support tool that people want to use
The gaming industry has seen incredible growth during the pandemic. The gaming industry is not the only industry that has seen increased innovation and new disruptive business models. By seizing new technological opportunities ahead, leading companies can take advantage of the disruption to out-match their competition in operational efficiency. Are you up for the challenge?