Casinos Bet Big on the Cloud

There are significant uncertainties in launching a new game as compared to creating a business or a personal use software product. To begin with, in the non gaming applications, you are fairly clear about the demand for your product and its features and therefore there is lesser overall risk. Of course you still have to do a great job and market your software well, but at least you know what works in the market. Cutting edge game producers, when writing a new game, are never so certain. Will the game go viral and recoup every investment a hundred times over or will it not? You will never really know till at least the beta is released and enough hard core gamers have had a chance to play the game against each other. Games have also become more complex, network oriented and multiplayer. This means that the gaming company has to make significant investment in back end hardware to support the game. As the as the last section of this article will show, even casinos are betting big on cloud based games to attract clients. Fortunately, using the cloud to develop and host the game offers a very practical method of reducing developmental risk. This benefits the gaming industry by making it more affordable to produce new games and offer them to users. It also benefits players by bringing down costs, making massive multiplayer games possible and improving the overall experience. Here’s looking at some specifics – Reducing Development Cost You can rent access to a cloud service for very little cost and without making any long term commitments. The advantage is that you get access to the very best computing resources without making any kind of fixed investment in servers, databases and processing power. These low costs allow you to experiment without worry. Since you are not incurring large costs in hiring of hardware, approvals to experiment are far easier to obtain. Who can argue with starting with a $35 payment as against shelling out thousands of dollars to buy servers and operating systems? Games are no longer confined to a single operating system or a single hardware platform. No one in his right mind would restrict himself so severely.  Therefore you need to provide your development team a number of different target operating systems in varying hardware configurations to test their output and make sure that a consistent user experience is obtained. Previously, serious gaming companies would maintain servers running different OS and test their games out on them. Naturally this led to higher cost. If you had limited computing resources, you ended up installing and uninstalling multiple operating systems. I can tell you that this could be pretty frustrating. Using cloud computing, you can hire multiple instances and run different OS across them. Testing has now become easy and you can integrate it tightly into your development process. Saves time and money and keeps your developers smiling. Testing is extended to real users as well at the lowest cost possible using cloud services. You just need to make a small and controlled expenditure to deploy your game fully. There is no need to scrimp on costs because the costs are so low. The production version can be deployed rapidly and scaled up in near real time as traffic picks up. This ensures that costs only increase as revenue picks up and you do not eat into company resources upfront. Quality Issues For some time there was a genuine concern about quality. Would cloud based games be able to deliver the same video experience that a top of the line graphics card be able to provide on a local host?  This worry has been laid to rest with the coming of age of extremely powerful graphics processing capability in the cloud. As a result, you can shift the processing to the cloud rather than rely on the user end device. This ensures that all your users, regardless of the end user device they use, will get the same video experience. On the cloud you can hire increasingly powerful processors to ensure that your users get an amazing experience and the “wow!” factor. From Individual Players to Casinos Many casinos are shifting to using cloud computing for their games. Imagine the benefits –there are no coins to manage, instant credit of accounts and much easier handling of cash. All of this with a user experience that is secure and amazing with frequently upgraded games and with previews provided to clients even before they set foot into the casino. Cloud computing has changed the gaming industry beyond recognition. Everything now looks real and possible in the virtual world.

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Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.   About the Guest Author: Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.