The gaming industry has exploded since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people turned to social and casual gaming to entertain themselves at home and interest is expected to continue to rise. According to PwC, the global gaming industry is forecast to increase revenue from $214 billion in 2021 to $321 billion by 2026. With a booming and competitive market, gaming companies must deliver a seamless experience to their end users. A recent survey found that 47% of gamers demanded fast performance, citing it as the most important aspect of gameplay. If users encounter poor performance such as glitchy graphics, crashes or freezes, long load times and in-game purchasing errors, they’ll move on—damaging the company’s brand and revenue. Companies need to have the right technology in place before things go wrong. Here are five strategies game developers must focus on to provide the best gaming experience for end users.
1. Developers Should Increase Processing Speeds
Gaming is a demanding application for developers. Instant response time—delivering processing speeds measured in milliseconds—is required for any gaming experience, even when there are substantial usage spikes. It can be a challenge as developers have to account for vast numbers of reads and writes against massive data volumes from millions of simultaneous players interacting in real time and sophisticated fraud detection rules.
2. Personalize the User Experience
Personalization helps a game attract a broader audience by offering in-game features that match their preferences. It is an essential way for game developers to retain and monetize their users. With so many different games available for users to play, engaging them for a long time will determine a game’s success. To offer this type of personalized experience, developers need to integrate data silos from different sources, where they continuously update all available historical data from their system of record with data streaming in from the digital edge.
3. Scale Systems Horizontally
Gaming applications need to store, access and retrieve enormous amounts of data, such as player profile information, game performance, statistics and rankings and session information, for millions of users. Developers need to be assured their system can scale out easily and quickly to handle any load at any time, without the need for coding or other manual processes. Relational databases aren’t the best fit for gaming as they are built to scale vertically. On the other hand, modern data platforms scale horizontally across servers, clusters, and data centers to ensure consistent and predictable performance.
4. Prevent Gaming Fraud
As companies seek ways to monetize gaming through microtransactions, where they offer in-game purchases for additional features, the threat of malicious activity increases. According to TransUnion’s 2022 Global Digital Fraud Report, the U.S. gaming industry had the largest percentage of annual fraud growth last year, increasing 60.3% from the previous year. With more players and financial transactions, companies must take their fraud prevention activities to the next level to ensure smooth and secure transactions. Developers need to continuously update the rules engines for their fraud detection systems. They can do this by processing huge amounts of streaming and historical data that they can feed into machine learning algorithms.
5. Implement AI/ML Gaming Systems
Gaming companies should turn to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems to improve the gaming experience for their players. The technology can power interesting enhancements to games. For example, it can be used to turn speech into text to document and report bad behavior or to support an in-game assistant that helps players based on their habits, preferences, and abilities. To provide these experiences, developers need to feed their AI/ML systems an unending amount of data to deliver better results.
The stakes for gaming companies have never been higher. With the gaming market expected to reach three billion global users by 2023, companies must provide the best gaming experience to gain players and protect their reputations. Players demand flexibility, speed and reliable performance. That means delivering smooth gameplay with no hiccups.
