GameSparcs: Enhancing development efficiency and offering smooth gaming experiences with containerized infrastructure
About GameSparcs
GameSparcs (TWSE: 6542) is a global game platform operation company founded in 2010 that has been diversifying its business over the recent years. Besides mobile game distribution, GameSparcs also develops online social game platforms and licenses LAN-based gaming systems. By integrating enterprise resources, diversifying its business and expanding to overseas markets, GameSparcs aims at enhancing its business competitiveness.
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Contact usBy using the containerized cloud infrastructure of Google Cloud to deploy its games and develop new products, GameSparcs can ensure smooth gaming services while enhancing its DevOps team's efficiency.
Google Cloud results
- Enable high software portability across different operating environments with GKE
- Support one time faster feature deployment compared to VMs with container instances in GKE
- Accelerate game loading speed by two times with Cloud Load Balancing
Supports smooth gaming experiences during traffic surges
Online games are a major source of entertainment for many people, with seemingly endless games available on the market. Facing fierce competition, game developers need to ensure excellent gaming experiences while constantly releasing new products to attract and retain users.
Following the market trend, GameSparcs has been diversifying its business over the recent years. Starting as a game publisher in Taiwan by localizing popular mobile games from China, Japan, and Korea, the company has gradually expanded its portfolio to social game platform and LAN-based gaming system development. To offer better gaming experiences, GameSparcs is constantly developing new products, with at least one new game added to its game platforms every month. Currently, the game developer offers premium gaming experiences to all types of gamers across Europe, America, and Asia through three online social game platforms, including Bravo Casino, a popular interactive social game platform; Ace Club, which features diverse gameplay; and Jackpot Island, which is designed for the European and American markets.
"We want to provide diverse gaming experiences that meet users' needs and enhance our competitiveness," says Howard Liao, Information Technology Director at GameSparcs. "Besides universally popular casino games like poker, slot machines, and fishing, we've also developed games adapted to different cultural contexts, so as to cater to gamers' wide-ranging preferences."
To reduce operational workloads and allow its DevOps team to focus on software development, GameSparcs decided to adopt a public cloud platform that supports automated scalability and simple infrastructure management when developing its own games. The company eventually chose Google Cloud as it has a large number of data centers and network nodes around the world, offering speedy, reliable and low-latency connectivity that can enable quality gaming experiences, on top of meeting GameSparcs' requirements for cloud infrastructure.
"We're constantly developing and releasing new products, so it's important for us to run our games in a cloud environment that enables quick development and high development operational efficiency. Google Cloud not only ticks this box but also supports low latency with its extensive global network."
—Howard Liao, Information Technology Director, GameSparcsEnhancing DevOps efficiency while ensuring service stability with GKE
GameSparcs has been using container instances in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to run its three social game platforms since their launch. Howard Liao points out that the containerized architecture has greatly simplifed the team's DevOps tasks by clearly separating the development and operational workloads, and enabling high software portability. This means that GameSparcs' games can be easily deployed in different types of host environments without any adjustments. The operation of each game can also be monitored separately on the GKE dashboard, making it easier for the team to manage its services and troubleshoot. Overall, GameSparcs has not only realized highly efficient operations, but also significantly enhanced effectiveness. Compared to traditional operations methods, the effectiveness of GameSparcs' operations using GKE is 40% higher, which supports smoother gaming experiences. At the same time, it has optimized its labor costs by reducing the staff needed for the deployment by 30%, enabling support for the operations of hundreds of games.
The autoscaling feature of GKE has also enabled GameSparcs to effortlessly offer high availability. The traffic of its social game platforms usually fluctuates instantly when the company runs a marketing campaign. By automatically adjusting the number of its container instances to meet the current needs, GKE has made it possible for GameSparcs to use the necessary resources without any manual intervention. According to the team's comparison test before adopting GKE, it would have required two to three days of work to manually scale on virtual machines (VMs) at the same level.
"We adopt containerized architecture for all our games to enhance our DevOps efficiency. By deploying container instances in GKE, we’re able to fully enjoy the benefits of containerization, realize high and instant scalability with minimum effort, and establish more comprehensive container management strategies. Users of our game platforms have never experienced any disruptions due to instant traffic increase."
—Howard Liao, Information Technology Director, GameSparcsSupporting high service availability and low network latency with Cloud Load Balancing
To further secure the availability of its gaming services, GameSparcs employs Cloud Load Balancing to connect end users to the instances that host its games in GKE. By grouping instances to traffic, Cloud Load Balancing helps prevent a full-scale downtime when one instance is out of service. As a result, its games have experienced zero outages since the adoption of Cloud Load Balancing.
Since Cloud Load Balancing can connect gamers to its game servers from the nearest network node, the extensive global network of Google Cloud has enabled GameSparcs to realize faster game loading speed for gamers around the world. Liao notes the company’s comparison test shows that the content loading speed through Google Cloud is at least two times faster than other cloud platforms.
"Service availability and connectivity consist a big part of the gaming experiences that we offer, because casino games are highly interactive. With Cloud Load Balancing supporting high availability and speedy connectivity, our users can fully enjoy the excitement of our games," he adds.
Optimizing infrastructure management and delivering more engaging gaming experiences with AI
Following this, GameSparcs will transform the architecture of its games into service meshes in GKE to further simplify management and enhance portability, while leveraging BigQuery to store users' history records to process data queries quickly. The team also plans to use the generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology of Google to turn written game guides into video presentations with virtual humans, increasing its games' interactivity.
"By providing a powerful cloud infrastructure and tools that are easy-to-use, diverse, widely applicable, highly efficient, stable and secure, as well as easy to scale and redevelop, Google Cloud has enabled us to offer excellent gaming experiences and release new products frequently with higher DevOps efficiency. We’ll continue optimizing our operations and developing innovative features to upgrade our services."
—Howard Liao, Information Technology Director, GameSparcsTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About GameSparcs
GameSparcs (TWSE: 6542) is a global game platform operation company founded in 2010 that has been diversifying its business over the recent years. Besides mobile game distribution, GameSparcs also develops online social game platforms and licenses LAN-based gaming systems. By integrating enterprise resources, diversifying its business and expanding to overseas markets, GameSparcs aims at enhancing its business competitiveness.