Addressing the complicated costs of video game downtime

Addressing the complicated costs of video game downtime

By Rob Newell

The global video game industry is experiencing huge growth and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.4% from 2023 to 2030. But with this growth comes fierce competition. Attracting new players costs millions in user acquisition, game development and cloud infrastructure overheads, and as the industry becomes more expensive to play in, revenue and cost optimisation become a matter of survival. The financial impact to businesses across all industries due to outages, lag or a generally poor user experience can be massive. According to New Relic’s Observability Forecast 2023, the annual median cost of downtime for organisations in India is $62.79 million.

Addressing the visibility challenge

The tech architecture in the video game industry tends to be highly distributed, meaning that engineering teams may mix and match different architectural patterns including microservices, cloud-based services, or serverless functions. On the other hand, game designers create game levels, the art team is charged with visual effects and animations and the audio department creates the audio. With so many moving parts, removing siloes and creating a stable user experience on consoles, mobile devices and PCs can be quite a daunting task. This is perhaps why 49% of game development mid-sized studios face challenges in customer retention.

One of the primary reasons why UX issues are so challenging for gaming companies is the lack of visibility into highly distributed environments. Any disruptions can have a huge bearing on player experience. Ensuring the UX is always on point requires visibility into how the player experience is affected by all components.

Some gaming companies resort to developing their monitoring systems of metrics, logs, and alerting capabilities, but much like most in-house technologies, scaling can be a massive problem, impeding innovation and future game development processes because of siloed data. Teams will have numerous tools running without a clear picture of what’s going wrong, where it’s going wrong, why such an issue occurred and how to fix it.

Addressing these issues requires an all-in-one observability platform, which can help gaming companies connect the dots on player experience across multiple environments; arming teams with full visibility into microservices and the ‘unknown unknowns’.

Observability platforms also reduce alert fatigue. Often, a lot of manual curation is required to ensure alerts received are actionable and meaningful. If done incorrectly, teams will have no visibility and suffer from the fatigue of checking multiple alerts. With the right observability platform, teams can create baseline alerts to establish a meaningful balance and help uncover what’s important, based on historical performance.

Crafting exceptional user experiences

In many video games, user load can be impacted – especially when new games or features are introduced. Teams often have to monitor service latency to manage fluctuating user demand during these times. DevOps teams and site reliability engineers must collect logs at a massive scale, and analyse the performance of services, infrastructure and individual host utilisation metrics.

Observability platforms can help to solve this problem through automation and speed up the troubleshooting process before gamers face increased service latency that can damage their gaming experience. Observability solutions also aid engineers in the uptime of database performance, while ensuring the the efficiency of large builds deployed daily. More importantly, observability tools provide actionable insights into the overall engagement of all users. This helps companies roll out new features or games depending on overall engagement.

Observability gives gaming companies deeper insights into their systems. With it, they can access valuable insights, even as new functionalities are added, and roll out updates as traffic increases. In a highly competitive market, observability creates a competitive advantage for gaming companies, which can increase customer retention and user acquisition by releasing exceptional experiences.

The author is the VP of customer adoption- APJ at New Relic

Follow us onTwitter,Instagram,LinkedIn,Facebook