During GDC 2015 we’ve had a chance to chat with Greg Mendeleev, channel manager from Akamai. This huge company helps
During GDC 2015 we’ve had a chance to chat with Greg Mendeleev, channel manager from Akamai. This huge company helps games with content delivery solutions, providing fast and reliable ways to share the games’ updates and downloads with end users. Akamai has a number of advantages that were highlighted in our short talk.
What services does Akamai provide?
greg-akamai-80lv
Akamai is the global leader in content delivery network (CDN) services.For game companies we deliver builds, updates and basically anything else you have on the game that has to go from the gaming servers to the end users. We have a huge overlaying platform that makes the delivery muchmuch fasterthan using public Internet. Why it matters? Because developers always care about the user experience. The faster and the more reliable his experience is the more he is likely to stay in the game, the bigger will be the revenue and all your business metrics will basically improve.
akamai-80lv
Do you work only with online games?
We work with any games, as long as they have something that goes online. It could be client-based products, online games, F2P-games. Anything. Even in PC-games you have to download something. Content delivery is especially important for online games. During multiplayer network conditions are not always optimal. And we help to improve that. Everything we help the game with improves the user experience and helps the game to keep players happy.
What kind of infrastructure do you have?
Akamai is the largest cloud in the world. We have more than 170 000 servers worldwide and 2700 points of presence (POP). This helps us to increase the delivery speed immensely. We deliver the content from the closest POP to the end user. For 90% of the internet population Akamai is just a single network hop away. We literally sit in more than 1300 networks.
How do we hook up to Akamai services? Do we need to make changes in the code?
Working with Akamai is incredibly easy. The gaming company doesn’t have to change code. Our work is done between the servers and the public internet. A simple change in the DNS settings is enough to make the whole game work faster online. With Akamai content delivery for small and big games alike is much faster, more reliable (we improve download success rate). We have a lot of other complementary services, that, for example, could accelerate the real-time session.We also have several security solutions and provide our own web application firewall (WAF), that will help the developers to keep their assetssecure and defended from possible troubles.