The Gaming Industry is growing day by day. Today, there are 2.95 billion gamers and will soon be 3 billion before we approach 2023. 9% of gamers are building careers in gaming and the global gaming market is set to reach $256.97 billion by 2025.
A new chapter has now been added to the world of gaming thanks to the cloud. Cloud computing has revolutionized video streaming services and led to the foundation of giant corporations such as Google. A prime example of a platform that grew on the cloud, YouTube has scaled massively in the last decade to provide an even better video streaming experience.
Cloud gaming is cheaper than buying or renting games. The term “free cloud gaming” is searched globally thousands of times per month on Google. Cloud gaming’s main draw is that you can gain access to high-end PCs for a fraction of the price of buying one.
In 2019, Google launched Google Stadia, a cloud gaming service. It doesn’t require any external computer hardware as you only need a Smartphone or PC that has Google Chrome with an internet connection. Stadia is capable of streaming video games up to 4K resolution at 60 FPS with support for high dynamic range, to players via the company’s numerous data centers across the globe. Google Stadia also makes gaming on smart televisions possible.
All types of online games require storing immense amounts of data, such as player achievements and stats, leaderboards, game data and much more. The amount of data can grow both linearly or exponentially as more players join the game; thus the most important requirement for a game’s database is the ability to scale while providing high availability.
Gaming workloads typically require NoSQL and relational databases to achieve scalability while maintaining strict consistency on gaming data selectively. On Google Cloud, Firestore and Bigtable options can be considered for NoSQL depending on the unique requirements of the game such as mobile first or cross platform support requirements. When it comes to relational databases, nothing matches Spanner in terms of offering both scalability and global consistency via the interface that we’re all familiar with, SQL.
A prime example of this is Niantic Labs, which built a globally scalable game for millions of users on Google Cloud. They shared their experience scaling with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Spanner, and described how their data science team works with BigQuery, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub for their data analytics.
Learn more about Spanner’s advantages by completing the Cloud Spanner: Create a Gaming Leaderboard with C# Lab.
Use Code: 1q-gaming-22 for free credits.
