Flentas’ Mandar Navare On Role Of Cloud In Online Gaming

The expeditious rise of cloud or console-less gaming has added momentum to the already growing gaming sector of the country. Having this in mind, the cloud gaming service company – Flentas Technologies has created a niche in the gaming industry after helping multiple studios to scale their backend on the cloud.

Mandar Navare, CEO, Flentas Technologies spoke to Gaming World on the rise of cloud technology in the gaming industry and how it is shaping up in India.

Excerpts:

Q) Please tell our readers more about Flentas and cloud technology in the gaming industry. Also, with so many multiplayer online games lined up which we see young and old engaging today, wherein the industry heading and what will be the role of a cloud consulting company like yours. 

Flentas is a four-year-old company focused on cloud consulting and management. We are leading the most complex technology projects in various industries and we have created a niche in the gaming industry after helping multiple studios to scale their backend on the cloud. We leverage the innovative capabilities of the cloud to help customers build new revenue streams, increase efficiency, and deliver incredible experiences. We take the utmost pride in fulfilling this requirement for a few of our leading clients in the online gaming space.

The innovations done in the field of cloud technology have added to the growth of gaming industry. It won’t be wrong to say that cloud technology has solved many of the challenges faced by both gamers and game developing companies.

All multiplayer online games need a strong backend system to manage traffic and to provide a consistent experience to their gamers. The cloud technology allows the game companies to provide intact experience with spending more. The use of cloud-based tech is a cheaper option for gaming companies as they only have to pay for bandwidth actually used by their traffic. 

Q) Online gaming especially multiplayer games have been around for nearly a decade now, but it hasn’t caught on until recently. So online gaming is reaching a new level in India, could you talk about the technological ecosystem of such games? 

We have helped multiple gaming studios with their scaling requirements. In case a multiplayer game ends up having an unpredictable spike, the application must be ready to manage huge spikes or heavy traffic. Any game will rely heavily on the backend to make sure they accommodate as many users as they can because it’s not easy to gather traffic. It is not easy to retain that many gamers. Hence, the need to have a solid backend becomes inevitable for any gaming studio. 

As long as the backend is concerned, traditionally a lot of players who provide backend as a service, it’s much easier to develop your game and use any backend platform and publish that game. This approach is usually taken by a smaller studio or an indie developer. This is because smaller studios do not have much time or money to invest in creating their own backend. But, once you start getting traction through your game, say 1000’s or 2000’s of Daily Active Users (DAU), things start looking different and the overall experience is very much important. 

That is where the cloud comes into the picture or the need to develop your backend or the need to look at the larger picture becomes more inevitable. Since Cloud has 'pay as you go' model, you can start really small. If your game is successful, you will have a good amount of traffic, and to sustain that traffic you have to make sure that you manage the entire solution on your own or you can outsource it to companies like us. 

Q) Even if the online gaming providers were doing well what did they lack in terms of new technological advances to be used to scale to a massive user-base? With few giants in the backend technologies and platforms, where does Flentas see itself placed in the near future?

As I said earlier, gaming studios and multiplayer games need scale. If you compare it with any other industry, they are much more successful in handling scale. Let’s go a decade back, predominantly people were focused on console and PC gaming. But, with recent developments internet is becoming much cheaper, and online gaming has become the next big thing for large countries like India. Any gaming studio can start developing a mobile app or a game. But, once you are successful with a good number of users, you need to have a solid backend. Once you have it, to manage that it is tricky. Using off-the-shelf services is heavy on the pocket and it becomes really difficult to manage over time. 

With the growing expectation level of gamers, online gaming companies always look for cost-effective, advanced tech-based backend solutions to provide new features and a seamless gaming experience. Flentas is an AWS Cloud solutions partner and supports gaming studios of all kinds to develop and manage a powerful backend on the cloud without any hassles.

Q) Please share with us the kind of opportunities present in the gaming industry and could you contrast them with the challenges it is facing simultaneously. Also, where is online gaming positioned in the gaming sector right now?  

The online gaming industry is one of the highest growing sectors after the pandemic and can create a huge impact on the overall entertainment industry. People have started spending more time playing online games as compared to streaming videos. As per industry reports, India is one of the top five mobile gaming markets in the world and is expected to add 40 million online gamers during 2020−22.

As the gaming studios has seen a huge surge in the traffic, they need for robust backend technologies to create better experiences for the gamers. More gaming studios have started looking outside to outsource the development and management of the gaming backend.

Q) What’s new at your end in terms of innovations and services for your potential and current Gaming Customer?

We helped a game to make sure they manage the kind of scale which they achieved in the recent pandemic. They had around 1.5 million concurrent users. The backend architecture was robust enough to handle that kind of scale. So, what we did is re-architected the entire backend gradually, in bits and pieces, avoiding even the tiniest of error which could hamper the gamer’s experience, and provided an end-to-end solution. 

We worked with the gaming studio’s development team to understand and help them with the testing of the backend with our innovative methods. Our technical team went above and beyond to understand the main points and made it possible to manage such a scale. In the future, we will see this kind of scale happening globally with multiple games and we are very confident on what we can take on, especially in the gaming industry.