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ROB MARTIN: Hello, everyone.
I'm Rob Martin, chief architect for gaming at Google Cloud.
Welcome to the gaming industry insight session Next OnAir.
It's great to speak with you today
about how we're helping game developers during this time.
Gaming is the world's largest form of entertainment,
with roughly 2.7 billion people playing in 2020
and projected to grow to 3.2 billion players
by 2023 across all platforms.
The impact of COVID-19 has seemingly
accelerated this trend, as more people have turned
to online games as an interactive way of staying
connected with friends and family.
Video game sales saw a 35% increase in March of this year
compared to 2019.
And many game companies are turning
to cloud to keep up with additional player demand.
But there is a downside.
Game developers who are used to working collaboratively
in person are also seeing a slowdown in game development
and production, with many game releases temporarily on hold.
Although we're all adapting to a new normal in different ways,
game developers are still faced with familiar challenges
to meet player expectations.
First, ensuring that players around the world
can enjoy low latency, immersive gameplay experiences.
Second, understanding the unique ways
that each player interacts with his or her game
and tailoring experiences accordingly.
Third, the need to continue producing
cutting edge cross-platform content to keep players
engaged.
Our goal is to help simplify infrastructure complexity
so game developers can focus on building great games.
We provide open source solutions and tools
to give control to bring your game to life on your own terms.
At Google Cloud, we're helping in three key areas.
We help you build better games, faster.
We can scale your game to match global player demand.
And we provide you with all the data, analytics,
and insights you need to optimize the player experience.
Let's take a look at each one.
First, building better games.
Many game developers need to build complex services
like matchmaking from scratch, or they're
forced to rely on off-the-shelf solutions that
don't fit the unique needs of their particular game.
Our approach is different.
It's to leverage our expertise in Kubernetes
to build open source games services
that provide the flexibility to customize
without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.
We're working in partnership with the open source community
and industry leaders like Unity and Ubisoft
to build solutions that scale.
Let's take a closer look.
Matchmaking, or bringing groups of players together,
has always been a challenge for developers.
As games become larger, matchmaking
becomes even more complex and requires greater scale.
Open Match, co-founded with Unity,
is a matchmaking framework that allows developers to bring
their own custom match logic.
Kubernetes enables much greater scale.
You bring the logic, we bring the scale.
Open Match is now 1.0 and ready for production workloads.
I encourage you to visit our dev site
to learn more about how you can integrate it
into your next big game.
Game servers are one of the most important components
for delivering exciting, real-time gaming
experiences to your players.
That's why we co-founded Agones with Unity.
Agones is a batteries-included, open source game server hosting
and scaling project built on top of Kubernetes.
It's customizable for your game's needs.
By containerizing game server workloads,
Agones provides a new modern paradigm
for deploying production fleets of dedicated game servers.
Next, let's talk about scaling your game
to truly global audiences.
Since Agones is based on Kubernetes,
it can run anywhere you need it--
on bare metal, on multiple clouds,
including our own reliable global infrastructure.
Our powerful compute offerings, such as compute optimized VMs,
are spread across 24 global regions including
gaming hubs such as Tokyo, Osaka, and Seoul.
We're also planning to open nine more regions across the world
in the near future.
This is the same technical infrastructure
that makes low latency experiences on Stadia possible,
so your players are close together no matter
where they are in the world.
Apex Legends is a great example of a global game that
leveraged our core infrastructure
and reached millions of players in a record amount of time
during its launch with support from our game server
hosting partner MultiPlay, which has a hybrid scaling platform
backed by Google Cloud.
Our private fiber optic network ties our regions together.
We have two tiers of network offerings
and recommend our premium network tier for games.
That's because it keeps traffic on Google's private network
as long as possible.
Traffic exits to the public internet at a location close
to the player, all to provide a smooth gameplay experience.
To reach your global player base,
you need a globally distributed fleet of game servers.
But with scale comes complexity.
While Agones is great for running regional games,
we want to make it simple for developers
to run games at a truly global scale.
Google Cloud Game Servers, now in beta,
is a control plane that sits on top of Agones.
It powers globally distributed, multi-cluster game server
workloads.
It also provides a high degree of flexibility and control,
since you still have access to your underlying Kubernetes
clusters.
We've built powerful management features
that provide visibility and simplicity in operating
and scaling Game Servers for your global player base.
Developers running Agones in production
can simply opt in to the Game Server managed service
by registering Agones clusters with the Game Servers API.
We know that avoiding being locked
in to a specific provider is important to developers.
Game Servers supports Google Kubernetes engine workloads
today, and we're working on multiprovider support
for later this year.
This will allow you to manage game servers
on bare metal or multiple clouds, all
from a single control plane.
But scaling your game server fleet
is only part of ensuring a great global game.
Many services such as leaderboards, player profiles,
and so on rely on databases in order to scale.
While we have a wide array of database options,
for most gaming use cases, we recommend Cloud Spanner.
Spanner provides a no-ops, horizontally scalable global
database that eliminates the need for your database
administrators to manage multiple shards.
A single deployment of Spanner can
scale to support the world's largest games.
Once your game is up and running,
you need to optimize player engagement and monetization.
A hit game can produce billions of events per day.
Embedded within those data points
are insights that can transform your game
into a sustainable, long term success.
BigQuery is the cornerstone of Google Cloud's complete smart
analytics platform.
It's a scalable, serverless data warehouse
that can help you capture, store, process,
and analyze massive amounts of data seamlessly.
BigQuery comes with machine learning capabilities
built in so your analysts can access the data they need
in real time and build ML models directly inside BigQuery
with familiar SQL.
BigQuery ML has expanded functionality
to address game-specific needs, such as k-means clustering
to build player segmentations and matrix
factorization to build advertising and product
recommendations.
Finally, Looker provides an analytics platform
that unlocks those valuable insights from your player data
for the entire organization.
By using BigQuery and Looker together,
you can manage and govern your player data and insights
in a secure, unified, and integrated platform.
King is using this analytics platform
to analyze billions of events per day from their hit games
like Candy Crush.
This data is used for a variety of purposes,
including training ML player models
that can simulate play testing.
This reduces the time it takes to test individual levels
from days to just a few hours.
We recently expanded our relationship with King
by announcing a strategic partnership
with Activision Blizzard.
To tell us a bit more about how Activision Blizzard is
utilizing Google Cloud, I recently
spoke with the CIO of Activision Blizzard King, Jacques Erasmus.
Let's take a look.
Hi, Jacques.
We're incredibly excited to work with Activision Blizzard King.
And thank you for joining us today.
JACQUES ERASMUS: Thank you.
It's great to be here.
ROB MARTIN: Earlier this year, we
announced a strategic relationship between Google
and Activision Blizzard.
Can you tell us a little bit more about how that came about
and how this partnership helps Activision Blizzard achieve
its goals?
JACQUES ERASMUS: We've been looking
for a partner for our cloud infrastructure for many months.
And Google has been a key partner to the gaming ecosystem
not only in cloud, but also with Google Play
on our mobile side and YouTube.
So if I think about the key areas
that we really are extremely excited about when
we think about GCP, the first one
is the global infrastructure, and the scale,
and the latency that we get from using Google's premium
networking.
And then also all the AI capabilities,
the continued investment in tensor processing units,
machine learning, et cetera, and really bringing
all those capabilities into our games
is going to move the needle for us massively.
And then when I think about we have many data
centers across the globe, and how
do we get the best of both worlds where
we can have Anthos in our data centers
and leveraging Kubernetes across on-prem and cloud?
Those are things that all our engineers are really
excited about.
But then if we look at the philosophy of how
Google's cloud platform has been built
with the approach to using open source
and really being a developer that's
creating very friendly open source solutions
and really contributing to the community,
that means a lot to us.
And we're very excited to be in a partnership with Google
on this.
And then lastly, I think on the gaming expertise
and, you know, Rob, working with you
and your team for the last eight months
so far has been extremely exciting.
And we can see the dedicated focus
that we get from working with a team of people that are solely
focused on the gaming industry and bringing best of breed
to games.
ROB MARTIN: That's fantastic.
Thank you for that feedback.
And our team has really enjoyed the depth of gaming experience
that we've experienced collaborating with your teams
at Activision Blizzard.
So shifting gears a little bit, with the pandemic affecting
people across the world, gaming has
seen an influx of additional players
from people seeking to connect with each other.
How has this affected Activision Blizzard's existing games,
but more importantly, how are your teams and game developers
being affected by this?
JACQUES ERASMUS: Well, we've seen
huge levels of engagement across all titles
be it PC, console, or mobile.
And if we look at "War Zone," for example,
that's been launched as a free to play "Call of Duty,"
we had 50 million unique players one month after launch.
And to be able to support that level of scale,
we turned to Google to help us really rapidly spin up
more capacity in all different locations globally.
And that's really helped us with the launch.
ROB MARTIN: So Jacques, we've just
started our journey together.
What are some exciting areas where
you're looking forward to working together
on in the future?
JACQUES ERASMUS: Look, I think from a quality assurance
perspective, I love the idea of using AI and machine learning
to help that process.
That's going to be very exciting as we move into the future.
And then also having a single customer view of our data,
be it a player that's playing a game on mobile, or console,
or PC, and having that full 360 view
understanding of the player in helping us to promote
to that player, but also really helping
us drive more engagement with the players,
is going to be key.
And that's going to be one of the big initiatives
that we're going to be using data for going forward.
ROB MARTIN: Thank you, Jacques.
We're looking forward to working together
with all of those exciting initiatives
with your team across Activision Blizzard King
and also a wide range of publishers, studios,
and developers to scale out these innovations
across the gaming industry.
So for more information on how Google Cloud can
help your game, please visit the Next OnAir site
and check out our gaming sessions
packages and further breakouts.
Thank you.