Session: No More BS: Demystifying Game Hosting Beyond Marketing Speak - Lucas Tak, i3D.net

[Music] uh up next uh we have a session which is one of my favorite session titles no more BS uh demystifying game hosting Beyond marketing speak so please welcome to the stage Lucas Tac from i3d please Round of Applause hello everybody wow it's uh truly an honor to be here um you guys thinking why ises he have a ball believe me it will come in handy later um reason why I'm here I am a firm believer in using the right people for the right job and working now

in the games industry oh wait a second do I have a like a like a thing like a oh this is it okay thank you got it so I'm a firm believer in using the right persons for the right job and to be honest as a BISD um and working with a marketing department you get taught know you know put your company in the best daylight I would say but there's a butt so um I'm going to take you through what I think you should be aware of in terms of making sure you have a success story for your multiplayer game and of course there is a lot of things I won't cover but there are some things I can cover um I'm going to take you through it let's take a look so who am I Lucas business development manager now at i3d.net uh we specialize for more than 23 years already in game

hosting of multiplayer games and low latency sensitive applications um Discord for example is a very big customer of us everybody has heard of Discord nobody's heard of i3d.net weird story right there doesn't matter um but more importantly who in the audience is currently working on multiplayer games raise your hands sorry the the lights are very bright okay see one hand one hand what okay great um would you would you incline what kind of project are you currently working on yes yes excuse me cool but but it's a multiplayer game right you have one host

all right any challenges currently in the project but you're working with the multiplay game um well I'm I'm going to ask the audience then are are there currently any challenges you are running into when it comes to hosting and and and and and launching the multiplayer games no well after after working all these years with um with game Studios uh there is one guy actually and and and there was I think two weeks ago uh we we were having this call uh because long story short He is building this multiplayer game and he summarized the the the essence of my talk and then and the the lesson I want to teach you right here um it's slotty as I can call him he is the guy behind Call of Duty 2 Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 of course a aex and Titanfall one and two

he shipped these games single-handedly sometimes he he he mentioned like every time I touch a multiplayer game it t into gold and I cannot blame him because he actually moved mountains and I'm talking about tens of millions of concurrent users per game and I can count seven already and he said to me game quality is my number one priority after that it's costs right I think this should be always your number one priority and game quality assurance um from a hosting hosting perspective of course um it's easily easily set you know you you can pay everybody in order to get a good game but you also want to control your cost in order to be successful as well so let's break it down then from a game hosting perspective I think there are three major points you should take in account when it comes to

hosting your games first and foremost Global presence data traffic lag as Robert already said um we we we we are bound to physics right we we can only travel with the speed of light and this is why we can have video chats across the Atlantic this is why we still can can talk because the speed of light is quite fast but game wise we are still bound to like uh 2third of the speed of light meaning that if you host a game in the US and you want to um also cater to the players in Europe or in Asia you're going to have a bad time because you need to be where your players are you need to host locally close to your player base um having enough service is a secondary so so so so being everywhere is great but now okay what what's the skill then and thirdly having servers in a data center is nothing more than chunks of metal in

the fridge right if you don't connect the server it doesn't do anything so low latency networking making sure you have the shortest routes um is key to your success as well uh example Global presence this is uh a company I just kidding no this is i3d.net backbone um we have been building this low latency network over like I said uh 23 years now um it takes time it takes a long time to establish this kind of connectivity all across the world and foremost connect with the local isps the eyeball networks where your audience The Gamers buy their internet from make sure they're connected uh server capacity so having a lot of locations is great but you need to be able to scale thank you Amazon thank you Google uh and here it is low latency networking um here we go so this is

super boring and I thought of a game in order to make it come alive right just bought this ball um we're going to do a little game so the the the middle is is is the most crowded at the moment uh all the way in the back are you able to throw a ball really hard back I'm talking to you Mr great beard or yes yes okay so we have a volunteer um I'm going to give you the ball and pass it it along it can only travel one hop meaning one row of people at a time please pass it along you got to throw it all the way it needs to be one person pop pop pop yeah pass it along all the way it it reaches exactly now we're talking good trust me yes exactly one one that's it that's it see okay come on throw it

oh that's a good throw but you Prov my point great sir so what was more fast giving it along or throwing it right back and this is how internet works the internet is the network of networks they don't talk to each other unless we tell them to unless we pay them to so having a direct connection having a direct line for example from Johannesburg back to France it is backbone connectivity it's router to router it doesn't have to go through Nigeria to Dubai to to I don't know Milan if you tell them send it over right me is more fast so that's not a given low latency comes from passing it along okay um energize thank you thank you audience appreciate it uh Fields of Gold also very important how to control your costs because because having great

things like everything I I said is great A lot of servers everywhere it's going to drain your business so we have two different types of compute because this is one of your main CS you can go into the clouds or you can go with the bare metal providers like hetner service.com um your name right so compute is one of your costs clouds is very flexible but keep in mind why is it more expensive to be flexible you are also paying for the moments they are off that's why your hourly rate is high because the rest of the day you those servers are still there right so where when when you use them for example eight hours you pay maybe exactly the same for a month right but you pay for when it's home so flexible highly cost more robust lower cost cost effective everybody knows head SAR I think um

moving forward bandwidth connectivity like I said hopping hopping hopping imagine adding a dollar to every row right here adding a dollar you know why you want to make a buck you want to make a buck you want to make a buck the the the action of passing your your data traffic along it takes it takes energy right somebody build that Network why shouldn't they get paid so having that direct connectivity I don't know uh known as bearing agreements um bearing agreements is like um you go over my routes I can go over your routes you know let's call it even so you callor the middleman you do directly business with the isps so it reduces cost um like I said it's a network of networks and everybody wants to you know earn its keep so B is a very important thing um moving forward Life Services thank you thank you Robert

right um greatly as um multiplayer games are you want to keep them alive you want to scale them and when you have a successful multiplayer game things like a great engine are the start thank you Photon um things of an orchestrator how can we skill like a Thora is very important but then you have your community you want to have an anti toxicity so modulate is very important uh also skill your back and um actually I've added the green logo right here Meta Meta play um great guys if you run into M say hi for me um they make a technology that skills your backand because putting surface is one thing but if you don't skill the brain so you you can have thousand arms but if you cannot move them what's the point of thousand arms right you want to have also a brain that can Co can um can process a thousand arms I think I

think that's a good analogy just made it up sometimes uh okay so um back to the equation if you want good game quality and you can control your costs you have a win and the balance is key and the balance in my opinion is a hybrid hosting strategy and this is the good thing it used to be a world where we um only can choose one or the other no more that's why I'm here no more there are now Integrations companies are are working more and more together and it happens now that we have uh you can benefit from both worlds uh great example is the AWS game lift integration with it.net um technical boring stuff not not going not going over it but it's a great example um this is my own model so yeah don't don't don't don't um don't pay me on it but I I think it's quite I

think it's quite um quite accurate point being this this is the best option hybrid hosting Best of Both Worlds everywhere you are putting not all of your eggs in one basket and what's what's better than having a g great quality game while also keeping the money that you rightfully earned right uh my advice make game quality your priority One also keep control of your costs and put the right people in the right job uh nowadays we have a lot of companies that are very good at what they do if you're going to ask me um I want a thousand servers tomorrow I cannot help you but if you want to have a good connection to some servers tomorrow I can help you if you want to have a th servers great then we have Google and aw and Azure that can

help one bring one big uh piece to the pile so host your game in a hybrid strategy thank you that's that's the end of my TED Talk appreciate it are there any questions thank you uh thank you very much I think I think we don't have time for or do we have time for a question we have time for one question one question then if anyone would like to uh any burning questions this otherwise we can we we we can just scut it out and then after the show it's also F uh yeah yeah like you say I'm sure you're very happy to speak just after the talk if anyone wants to to grab Lucas outside then then please do but thank you so much for your talk yeah thank you for having me apprciate much [Music] he

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